this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2026
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Low birth rates are a crisis for capitalism, not humanity. And if you count brown countries, it's not even happening.
Pension schemes are not a biological imperative.
Just for clarification, if we're talking about sub replacement fertility rates then it would be "brown countries" except for India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Lebanon, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica and Cuba and more. Might be an invalid generalization now.
I think India is at threshold now.
It's past threshold now at 1.9 and falling quickly.
Right now, a crisis for capitalism is a crisis for all of us, because that's where we live.
Maybe addressing the source of the problem is a better strategy than trying to blame the symptoms?
Sure, and maybe it's part of what pushes us to something better, but to act like it won't have effects is not helpful.
Not really anything to do with capitalism. If the ratio of workers to non-workers decreases without a proportionate increase in productivity, a higher proportion of workers' time has to be spent catering to the needs of non-workers. That means less time spent not working and/or less time spent producing unnecessary stuff that improves our lives like chocolate or TV shows.
We grow several times more food than humanity can possibly eat. We don't have a productivity or resource shortage. We have an allocation error.
I don't think this is true. I checked the stats for caloric supply and the highest value worldwide is (unsurprisingly) in North America where about 3,500 calories of food are produced per day. That is less than double what a person needs per day, so "several times" seems unlikely.
But I don't dispute the idea that we produce enough food to feed the world. But I also didn't say we didn't.
Could you comment on what I actually said, which is that an ageing population (or any situation in which there are more non-workers per worker) will result in less production being available for people on average?
This is not just about food; it is also about other necessities (such as healthcare) but also non-essentials like entertainment. The problem of an ageing population is not that we'll starve to death; it's that our quality of life will decrease.
That's not what I said. That site measures the output of the chain. I said we grow more food (ie plants) than humanity can eat. We feed the majority of that food to the livestock we keep that absolutely dwarfs the biomass of all wild animals. That introduces a 90%+ caloric inefficiency. If we just ate the plants, we would have to stop growing so much food, even all our industrial processes don't demand that much. But capitalism demands instead that we keep growing more food than the year before, and so it demands inefficiencies like animal ag. Any scarcity is entirely engineered. It's not an accident, it's by design. It is necessary to maximize investor return.
no, humans consume about 2/3 of global crop calories
No, it's because people like eating meat. You may have noticed that people ate meat centuries ago before capitalism existed, and favoured it over other foods when it was available.
But I understand what you meant about growing multiples of food, now, so that's good.
This isn't just about food, but look at the number of people one farmer could feed 200 years ago (6 or so) vs today (150 or so). We spend a lot of our productive time today doing stuff we didn't have time for just a couple hundred years ago. We've got a long way to fall before we are unable as a species to meet our needs. Proponents of tech advances expect our productivity to increase even if the workforce shrinks. If our standard of living delines on average, either these prognosticators are incorrect or we have a huge allocation issue.
I think it is a problem if we need to have less free time, or work more for the same things that we do in our free time, because a higher proportion of worker time needs to be spent supporting people who are not working. You don't want to go back 200 years even if humanity could survive in such conditions. (And the present population probably could not survive)
Except for population to grow it requires children which also don't work, require more resources than elderly, and at the end of 20 years instead of freeing up resources (by dying like the elderly), continue to consume resources.
At the end of 20 years a child becomes an adult, who will (on average) be a net producer. It's true that children cost more in work put into raising them than older adults take in work to look after them, yet it is a fact of life that one working human is capable of producing more stuff than just that which they themselves needs or makes use of - otherwise it would be impossible to raise children. This should be obvious, and means that the problem of an increasing birth rate, from this perspective, is at most temporary.
But I didn't say we should have high birth rates, I said that the problems of low birth rates are not due to capitalism.
Land isn't unlimited. Physical resources aren't unlimited. For example while a person can manufacture more batteries, with more people on the planet each battery will be more expensive for everyone because each is vying for the same limited resources that are used to make a battery.
I also wouldn't say that low birthrate is caused by capitalism but by over population. No economic system can sustain unlimited growth. When too many are competing for too few resources, there is no time for families.
You are not talking about what I was talking about, my friend.
The problem you describe as "temporary" implies that once your children are grown, they don't have further children that will use more resources.
A worker in a growing population can somehow support 4 children and 2 parents (6 dependents) yet supporting only 2 parents and no children (2 dependents) is a problem?
So no, it's not "temporary". It's a pyramid that eventually grows such that the foundation must crumble from the weight of everyone above.
You are still talking about growth. I am comparing two scenarios: one where the population shrinks (and therefore gets older on average) and one where our doesn't, and remains the same average age. I am not saying we need to grow the population forever, and never have.
I suggest you reread my comments to see where you've misunderstood, but it's up to you.
You think for-profit healthcare, including elder care, pharma care, and long-term care, aren't a huge problem with capitalism written all over it, with every layer maximizing profits and minimizing services, then I urge you to re-assess it.
I can't really connect this comment with what you originally said. Maybe this will help clarify my position: I think countries with public health and social care, just like countries with mainly private health and social care, will have severe problems if they can't arrest the rate at which their populations are ageing. My comment explains in very general terms why I think that is the case.
congrats, you've described capitalism
if we didn't need to make corporate profits, communities could look after each other
You do know that corporate profits are literally where old people get their money, right?
Take the posterchild of capitalism as an example, the US. People over 55 own 52% of all assets, from money to homes to companies. As a group they outweigh the billionaire class about 8 to 1 by wealth (and of course most billionaires are themselves also old). That's how retirement investments work, you live off the backs of young people who work.
Get rid of capitalism, you just get a different way to route young people's productivity to old people. Hell, get rid of currency and it doesn't change. Everyone's producing food and goods, but a large share of it goes to people who are old and no longer work. The larger the share of people not working, the larger the burden on the people not working.
Unless the population is constantly growing, retirement is a burden on young people regardless of economic system.
Nothing I said related to capitalism at all as far as I can see, so you're going to have to connect the dots for me if you want me to understand, sorry.
we already have enough productivity
why do you think we need more?
I think if we decrease productivity, it will cause problems.
but it's not going to decrease. it's just not going to be spent on unnecessary stuff like toiling for corporate profits
Corporate profits ARE old people's retirement. Over 55s own 52% of the entire US economy. Boomers own 8 times more than billionaires. It's similar in all western countries though perhaps not all are as bad. Billionaires are leeches but old people in general are the bigger drain on an aging society.
So productivity as measured today is only going to decrease by the amount corresponding to corporate profits? How do you figure? What is that amount - do you have an estimate?
As the other reply points out, profits are probably not what you care about anyway, because profits often just become the savings of ordinary people. So you want the proportion of profits that go to the already wealthy, plus the salaries of the mega wealthy.
But regardless, that figure is some finite number and you're saying it's more than the productivity we're going to lose due to an ageing population: how do you know? Actual estimates for how much we could free up by getting rid of profits and CEOs are highly uncertain and often negative.
Who gives a shit. I'll be dead.
The tricky part of being in society is that we want systems that work for more than just ourselves: It's not a purely transactional relationship.
Great news! It doesn't affect you either way, so we know your opinion on the matter is completely unbiased. That's excellent.