Thanks, that was a much more nuanced take that I have a much easier time agreeing with :)

I think the population problem has some in common with food distribution: There's enough food in the world, it's just distributed in such a way that some places have obesity as a societal-level issue, while other places people are dying of malnourishment.

Similarly, the global population is increasing, however it's increasing far more rapidly that sustainable in some places, while declining more rapidly than sustainable in others.

There's only so much you can do by redistributing wealth in a better way (which I think we should, regardless). It doesn't help to tax the rich if there isn't any manpower you can buy with that tax income to actually do the work that needs doing. I think that's the scary part about a rapid population decline: We're heading towards a situation (in some places) where the ratio of capable workers to people needing care approaches 2:1, which means a far larger fraction of the population will need to spend their entire working career as direct care providers than is currently the case. You can't really alleviate a manpower shortage with just money.

This is mostly a joke, but I do foresee a time when a very authoritarian government just kills a bunch of old people.

For example, during the One Child Policy the Chinese government did hundreds of thousands of forced abortions.

Elon Musk could end world hunger. Full stop. He wouldn’t even notice the dip in his finances. (He offered once, claiming if someone gave him a concrete number, he would pay it, and a nonprofit took him up on it. Surprise, surprise, the whiny little snit backed out.)

They totally could fix the problem. But to those rich shitheads, it’s not a problem. It’s a feature.

Sort of depend on perspective, hunger only exists because there's no political will to remove it.

We produce more food globally than we consume, and we can multiply it several times with the same cost of space by swapping more meat for vegan crops.

We have plenty of space for everyone to have shelter, the problem is largely due to the issue that most people want to live in a metropolitan area. So the price for living in a highly sought out location increases to unmanageable levels.

A key factor is the big difference between the kinds of jobs you can get in a more rural location compared to the bigger urban centers. Everyone are forced to move to urban locations to study, causing most people to form their first adult social and professional circles around whichever urban location they studied at.

There's a lot of minor things that needs to be done, what exactly differs by country. But making the rural regions more accessible to live in should be considered across most countries. One simple first step, would be to make remote capable jobs offer their workers to do it all remotely. Government office workers, could quite easily spearhead such an initiative; I bet some people would move closer to nature, if they could hold onto their bread

We can make more money.

That's "prevention" you're talking about, not "treatment", generally considered better, but still.

Yeah. But people won't change willingly. A lot of the suburbs around my city are pretty rich areas. I don't expect those people to willingly move to the denser inner city anytime soon. More likely they'll petition city hall to keep their subdivisions running until the city goes bankrupt from the financial burden of supporting a subdivision that does not bring in enough property taxes to support itself

We should be in a situation where people need to take in like 5 non-relative old people into their homes and provide them constant care (which they cannot do if they are at work). It's not sustainable no matter your economic system.

That's an interesting point but I'm not sure if the numbers really add up. As I understand it, the number of dependents will be greater from population decline (primarily due to an aging population) than it was during the baby boom

What matters even more is total productivity per citizen. It does not matter if a house is built by 20 builders with shovels or 5 builders with excavators. What matters is the house being built. And productivity per worker has massively risen and is, in my opinion, going to rise further.

Poorly is my understanding

Username checks out... I am not particularly happy about many of the things china does, and I don't think "but they are not the US" is an excuse for authoritarianism and imperialism, they got a way better culture of how to deal with old people than the west, both in traditions and in institutions.

Another great vid: https://youtu.be/RnCCY2YtVX0

Population decline is a global phenomenon. You can't offset this loss with immigration when the countries people are coming from are also experiencing a population decline. We (in the West) are currently using immigration to offset this loss now, but when the population decline really starts hitting other parts of the globe (as it is projected to do within the next few decades) then that will no longer be a solution.