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Japan ‘on verge of no longer functioning’ after birth rate plummets to record new low
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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The biggest issue that no one ever wants to talk about is ....
... it's isn't about the QUANTITY of life
.... it's about the QUALITY of life.
If people are able to have a comfortable, stable and prosperous life, with plenty of their own free time to enjoy without worrying about losing everything then they'll make time and an effort to have a family and children.
If all our wealthy overlords ever want to do is squeeze every penny out of us all the time, then people will be less likely to want to have children.
It also strongly correlates to women's rights and access to education. The more educated women are, the less likely they are to have a lot of kids.
https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/health/female-education-and-childbearing-closer-look-data
It's why you see a renewed attack on women in some developed countries, especially in the US.
Here's what happened in America.
In the 1960s the "Women's Lib" movement started. They got a lot of press coverage because it was a good stroy, but didn't actually change things a lot.
In 1973 the Oil Embargo hit and suddenly one job wasn't enough for the family to survive. Lots of wives had to go out and look for work to keep paying the bills.
The Right has been lying that women getting jobs is what destroyed the one income family.
Tying the mortgage repayment rate to the median salary of a single individual would go some way towards fixing things then, but that would mean putting price caps on houses which would devalue the currency and also need anti-cartel laws (eg. Laws mandating a maximum amount of homes one can own, as cartels might see artificially low prices as an opportunity to buy up more houses).
Artificially constraining parts of banking and all of residential real estate is likely to have other unforeseen effects on the economy, but may still be worth it.
Another alternative is starting a state bank in which citizens can be part of a rent-to-own mortgage, with minimum but achievable life time repayments. If they don't meet those minimum payments, the house is sold and the profit from the sale is portioned out between the state bank and the mortgage payer in proportion to how much % they paid off.
That's a win win, as theyre probably getting a big cash payment when struggling, and the state bank then gets to relist the home.
Frankly, I LOVE the idea of cartel laws for ownership of residences.
Sounds like you figured it out, since the debasement of the gold standard we locked away an inelastic good behind a mountain of debt, where prices rose to whatever interest rates would allow, providing a massive first mover advantage to those born prior. Then we wonder why nobody has kids.
If housing didn't continue to rise how many boomers would hold it as an investment instead of downsizing and buying an appreciating asset?
This is also why Bitcoin will keep going up and everyone should own at least a little, it leverages the cantillon effect as central banks get looser and looser due to aging demographics and shrinking aggregate demand.
The more appropriate fix would be no land ownership by people or countries that don't reside in the US, a banishment of investment companies from purchasing houses, and a hard cap of like 5 properties for any individual or company that can be owned as rental properties.
Far too many people/corporations are being landlords as a big business.
We might even expand it to all private ownership, maybe…
I like your ideas, but where do they live once they get foreclosed on by the State?
They use their profits from the house sale (which may be substantial depending on how long they've been there + market inflation), to rent somewhere.
That nest egg (which they've been paying into all this time) would give them breathing room and time to recover and get back on their feet to try again at a more stable point in thier lives.
It's a win win because the mortgage payer gets a lump sum, and space to reassess what went wrong. The state bank gets the unpaid percentage of the home's sale price, and then to sell the house again (under a new rent to buy mortgage arrangement).
P.S Part of how this works financially is that most of the money in an economy is created by loans issued from banks, those banks then buy Government Bonds periodically... A state bank would be another entity doing much the same thing, just with a specific purpose in mind.
Bring it on. Maximum 5 “homes” allowed per person, 7 for any family unit, children under 25 ineligible for ownership except as a post-death inheritance.
Anything above those limits is landlording-as-a-business, and combined with laws that make ANY business ownership of residential properly illegal, would force landlords to actually work for a living by getting day jobs.
Plus, have an extended “speculation tax” that hits any place being sold with a 100% tax on the first 2 years of owner-occupancy, with a straight-line decline to 0% in the eighth year. Any home being sold where the owner has never lived in it for a minimum of 2 years? 100% tax on the sale of the house straight out of the gate, with all proceeds going to a fund for first-time home owners. Exemptions, of course, for military deployment or death or a few other issues that cannot be leveraged for fraud.
How do you put price caps on houses? They vary so much in price depending on location. A shack in San Francisco costs the same as a mansion in the middle of nowhere.
No this kind of centralized approach is doomed to fail. We’re much better off with Georgism with a land value tax and the total repeal of zoning laws. People should be able to build what they want, where they want, and the land value tax captures the increases in property values as a result. When a neighbourhood becomes too expensive to afford for single family households it gets converted into apartments.
All of our housing problems come from meddlesome local politicians, their NIMBY supporters, awful zoning laws and easements, and a terrible property tax system which disincentivizes development. A very simple land value tax system along with the total removal of local politicians’ power over housing development solves all of these issues.
You think the gubberment is the problem, think we can know when house prices are too much for families to afford, but can't possibly know the same to figure out appropriate price caps, think we can't have centralized federal laws, that "people should be able to build what they want, where they want when they want"... and that developers should be given family homes when they become too expensive so they can "replace them with apartments".
Look bud, we've seen these pro-Capialist libertarian "free" market solution already. Lots of what you've said has gotten America where it is today: to an unlivable oligarchy.
People want something different. I'm fine with Georgism, but the rest of what you've written is clearly thinly veiled Libertarian and Free Market economics.
You're just reproducing the ideology that benefits people like Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk - putting the wealthy in power.
I'd prefer a highly regulated, legally transparent, auditable, government system in power. Not people rich enough to build apartment blocks whenever and where ever they want.
Your ideas are incorrect and we're seeing that in realtime.
Libertarians like you are LYING when they say centralized systems are doomed they're too inefficienct the most obvious way to disprove that idea is to look at the world wars, what happens to industry during world wars? It gets NATIONALISED. Centralized under government power, we do this in war time because it's highly efficient - despite the free market propaganda you've swallowed whole.
Where as Libertarian become traitors and mercenaries in war time. You may not realize it, but you're arguing for the wrong team (are we the baddies? Yes, you are), the team that lets Nazi in, and if they have enough money, sits them in the position of advisors and department heads right next to the president.
We want democracy, rights, the freedom of a garanteed place to live... By putting that in the hands of people with "no price caps on building anything anywhere" you're looking to destroy that freedom. You're taking security from the poor and exchanging it for freedoms exclusively for the rich who can afford it, developer cartels, and corporations.
So you're just reproducing the system we're already in... That's not a solution. That's just reproducing the problem.
These people worship their god almost identically to the way religious brain-rot peasants of the dark ages did, it's just their god is "The Markets," thinking it bears mircales through human sacrifice and suffering, except for the Divine bloodlines of their billionaire Kings and Queens their suffering is spared because "Where would society be without ~~Kings~~ billionaires." They think they're so smart and ahead of the game, they think their bank account proves it, when really they're dumber and less significant than a medieval peasant. Centrist free-market libertarians are a horrible, gutless bunch of egotistical twerps out there.
I’ll be sure to build a toxic waste dump right beside your house.
Sure, if you can pass the environmental requirements. And of course if any of the toxic waste leaks onto my property I’m gonna sue you for everything you’ve got.
It’s not city hall zoning laws stopping you from building toxic waste dumps. When I said people should be able to build what they want, I was talking about mixed density housing and mixed use / light commercial.
There are some good people here on Lemmy but my god are there an awful lot of obtuse, blockheaded teenagers! Get a clue!
Good news! Trump is not only rolling back environmental regulations, but dismantling them entirely. Which means pretty soon, you will have no legal recourse whatsoever to any toxic waste that leaches onto your property.
And yes, my business would very much be a “light commercial” business.
Which is the plot to Idiocracy and why the movie is no longer a fantasy and it is now a prophecy.
I love that movie, except for the premise which is actually based on eugenics.
Yeah, the idea that intelligence can only be inherited is the major flaw to it.
It doesn't have to ONLY be inherited for the effect to be present, it's about 75% inherited, which is quite enough for a scifi premise to stand up better than most scifi plots.
I wouldn't say that it's entirely eugenics. Most of the point they were making is environmental factors like having uneducated parents that don't enrich the child's life or being too poor for education because the parents were too poor because they had 10 kids. It's where we are headed because they are trying to actively destroy our education system and force people into unwanted births.
First, the comparison and core of the intro is about reproduction. Second, welcome to the Internet, where not everyone is from the USA.
But the movie was based in USA
I think it is a wonderful movie exactly because it is applicable everywhere. Berlusconi was already walking that path in the early 2000s in Italy.
You mean eugenics, but it shouldn't be an ideological position, reality in this case is that intelligence is actually very inheritable, around three quarters is a summary of decades of research.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
Yea sorry, I accidentally anglicized.
Skimming over the link, I can see that a clear explanation is still lacking and that environmental theory is showing results.
Believing it is mostly genetic reinforces the claims of the class who has access to better education to maintain those accesses and resources.
Intelligence is inherited, but evenly distributed over the population/across (so called) ethnic groups You're skimming over a wikipedia article, but the guy you're replying to isn't off the mark.
It's either developed countries or the US, you can't have both
... which is a serious threat to said overlords, ironically.