Analysis: The fertility crisis is here and it will permanently alter the economy | CNN Business
The world isn’t having enough babies and that demographic shock will reshape the largest economies in the next decade.
"A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.
And while net immigration has helped offset demographic problems facing rich countries in the past, the shrinking population is now a global phenomenon. “This is critical because it implies advanced economies may start to struggle to ‘import’ labour from such places either via migration or sourcing goods,” wrote Paravani-Mellinghoff.
This is just mask-off capitalism. They want people to have a lot of babies, and/or large numbers of poor and desperate people migrating into the country, so that they have a constant, reliable source of cheap labor.
Paying workers more is inflationary, but raising the cost of goods because you control the supply chain is "business"
Basically, raising product costs to cover increased labour costs are bad because actual workers are getting that money instead of the wealthy capital class.
I wish people understood boycotting more. Sure 6 companies own everything, but remember when the cost of a barrel of oil went significantly negative because people weren't driving for 2 weeks?
If people collectively decided they didn't want to buy anything but the absolute necessary staples for a few months there would be an absolute catastrophe in the supply chain and they'd be forced to lower prices significantly.
They may not lower prices forever, but modern business is built entirely on supply chain logistics. If people stop buying anything, or buy things exclusively to return them we would see some serious changes
I knew even before I opened the article it’s gonna be about fewer babies = fewer workers. Remember folks, when an article cites the “economy”, it just means the businesses and industries’ profits.
I'd like to put Simona's mind at ease because economics research into the relationship between wages and productivity shows a casual link where higher wages increase productivity. That is, higher wages force firms to invest in technology, equipment and training in order to offset the increased labor cost.
Infinite growth is an absolutely insane bar to set for the economy.
The lowered birthrates are because we're getting ground into dust - my engineering team of twenty millennials has two folks with kids and two folks who openly plan on having kids... we're aging out of the window and it's not that we're trying and failing - most of us just don't want a fucking family. We're too fucking busy already.
Mental health never being addressed, so we're also too tired.
"Burned outs just another word for not taking your bosses shit" - sing it to the tune of Me and Bobby McGee.
I got an hour long seminar at 12, wagie!
We will fix u
Viruses, Pyramid Schemes and Capitalism, oh my!
Remember kids, "the economy" is double-speak for "record breaking profits for the rich".
Personally, I always substitute it with "rich people's yacht money"
Half my life was spent fearing the result of limitless population growth and contemplating the inevitability of war and famine to shock population levels back down to sustainable levels. They warned us about this starting at least as far back as the sixties.
I see organic population collapse as a categorically good thing.
Long-term, possibly. But if the collapse happens too quickly it may cause a lot of issues. A slow steady decline would be best but may be difficult to achieve.
The oligarchy is welcome to not poison people.
That's why I tell hard-right folks that childless homosexuality is the cornerstone of God's plan to save humanity
There are more people in the world than ever before and we have folks writing news stories telling us there's a crisis building and that we need to have more kids?
They're farming us like ranch animals.
Infinite growth requires infinite bodies to feed it.
Unfortunately I don't have infinite fucks to give
I think our planet would be described as a free-range human labour farm, to anyone who was able to view it independently. Well, lots of it not so free-range. Its why they're coming for reproductive freedom. They're doing for the same reason a beef farmer wouldn't give their cows reproductive freedom.
Always were
HEY WORLD LEADERS: make the world a less shitty place, so I don’t feel guilty about bringing a child into it, and I’ll rawdog more often. Do we have a deal?
Sorry, the best I can do...
The problem with capitalism, is eventually you run out of other people's labor
You run out of other people's money. You can squeeze labor to starvation working in a salt mine. However, if most all people lose all their money, capitalism is done, and currently runaway capitalism is doing everything it can to increase that disparity.
Then falling birthrate shouldn't be an issue?
In a world with too many humans already, can you imagine painting a drop in the birth rate as somehow a bad thing?
lol
I don’t really care about its impact on the economy, but I do feel for those who are attempting to have a child to no avail. I can only imagine how soul crushing that process can be.
"Fertility crisis" in the headline doesn't refer to anyone's inability to have children. It refers to the fertility rate, which is just statistics about how many kids are popping out.
Thanks for remembering us Not Rick.
Where do you live where the economy doesn’t affect you?
I don't, those people are selfish. Creating an unwilling life destined to be yet another cog in the machine while the world burns just to satisfy one's own animalistic desire to have some form of genetic spawn. I silently cheer every time "struggling" couples miscarry and are unwittingly forced to do the right thing and not have kids.
The problem is the average age increases, and you'll have more of an elderly population, meaning barely any people actually working while a ton of people are on pensions
That's why I'm living now, not waiting for retirement. I got a good 15 years left, maybe 20 if I push it. Then I'm tapping out. Not a fan of keeping on living just for the sake of breathing.
Then invest in medical research on keeping me young for longer, instead of keeping me old for longer
The solution is obviously to take away womens' reproductive rights. Duh.
Looks like not having kids in protest of how shitty things are is working. Everyone keep it up.
We are all Lysistrata now
Less people means less stress on the environment though.
And more houses, and more job opportunities.
We'll be.....the new people will be fine!
Except the population (at least in my country) is quickly growing anyway because so many refugees come. And there will be far more if climate change continues at this speed.
Edit: this comment isn't directed against immigration (judging by the downvotes you probably interpreted it that way), I'm just stating the way it is rn
In the long term perhaps. But it will probably take too long.
The best way you can help fight climate change is to not have children.
This statement always reminds me of the movie Idiocracy.
Fortunately, intelligence appears to have a wide range of genetic factors. Stupid parents can have quite intelligent children.
The documentary, at this point.
The world needs more babies.
Does it?
Or do we just need to embrace migrants?
“A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.
"Have babies," said the billionaire, "or else who am I going to exploit in the future?"
Or, better yet, do we need to embrace the idea that infinite growth isn’t possible, and adopt economic systems that do not rely on it?
We need the opposite of more babies
It is a basic math problem.. they keep raising housing prices ain't nobody going to have kids when 1500 in rent is due monthly
How is your rent so cheap?
I haven't rented in years, luckily I found something that wasn't dumb expensive and I've slowly been fixing it up
$1500 a month? I wish!
Sounds awesome. Bring it on. Less people is better fuck the infinite growth economy
The problems listed in the article are real. we've built a system:
Both of these are going to fall apart if the population stops growing. The smaller group of working age people won't be enough to support the amount of retirees, and without population growth there's no economic growth.
It's sad that economists correctly see all this coming but then conclude that the only solution is "make more babies." It's short term thinking almost by definition, because in the limit it's rather obvious that at some point we will not have the resources to support any more people. And the closer we get to that limit the less each individual person will have (even worse when wealth is not equally distributed).
Unfortunately I don't see any economist putting forth a plan that accepts population decline and alters the system to account for it. It wouldn't be easy but it seems no one is even trying.
That means the supply of workers in many countries is quickly diminishing.
I thought AI was going to take our jobs.
Of course it is! We are simultaneously facing a labor shortage and mass unemployment. The important thing is to keep being angry and frightened, the specific subject you're angry about at any given time is flexible.
You can have both a labor shortage and mass unemployment. It occurs when workers are skilled for an industry with decreasing or no demand while another industry that requires different skills has increasing demand.
A good example of this is the high demand in the US for so called "Blue Collar" jobs. We have a shortage of trades people (Electricians, Plumbers, HVAC, etc) and far too many Business and Marketing people. There's 100,000 MBA's out there looking for a job and there's 100,000 Plumbing Contractors trying to hire someone.
Right? They must not think AI and automation can replace very many human laborers, otherwise they wouldn't consider declining birth rates to be such a crisis.
Turns out that whole idea of women being the primary bearers of hundred of years of exploited reproductive labor might have had some weight to it, huh.
All that labor being redirected into "L'economie" means that, at base, you'll have less children.
I really have no idea what these sentences mean. I feel like I'm having a stroke. Is it just me?
Women have been responsible for most of the domestic labor throughout history. Over the last 100 years or so, economies have changed so that women were first able to work outside of the home, then expected to work outside the home, and now need to work outside of the home. (E.g., a single-income household can't pay the minimum bills in most places in the US.)
But doing labor outside the home means that labor can't be done inside the home, because time is a finite resource; if you're working 40 hours a week (plus commuting time), that's 40 hours you don't have for raising a family. That makes raising a family significantly more difficult.
The solution is to change the structure of the economy so that it's entirely reasonably possible to raise a family on a single income without living in grinding poverty.
Many Boomers voted their progeny away when they put Reagan in office.
How is this a fertility issue? Are people unable to have children, or just unwilling?
Sperm motility issue rates are rising worldwide and I found out I was one of them this year. Mid 30s, waited to start a family while we went further in our careers. Now that we're ready, we got hit with this, fuck me for being responsible I guess.
I think the consensus is that it's mostly as a result of women having greater reproductive choices, greater access to family planning services, and more women choosing to delay having children or choosing to not have children at all, often so they can instead focus on a career.
Edit: I want to point out that what I'm describing is the consensus, as I understand it, of mainstream experts in the US. However, I believe there is evidence that this consensus opinion is not entirely accurate. If I'm not mistaken, surveys indicate that there are a fair number of people who would like to have children but are not because the right circumstances are not present for them to feel secure enough to have children. Many of the people who are not having children would have them if they felt more financially, romantically, and/or emotionally secure. Therefore, it's possible that it's not so much that people are choosing not to have children as it is that the necessary conditions for making people feel secure enough to have children are not present for a large number of people.
There's no economic reason the nominal GDP of any country or the world in general has to continuously increase. The important metric is per capita production. As long as people get continuously more productive through innovation, standards of living will continue to increase.
At the national level, vying for long term economic power in the world, a higher and younger population is going to be a huge advantage very soon and countries should be trying to get as many immigrants in their borders as they can. But instead they are...going a different direction.
Does anybody think about the fact that every year on average 9-10 million people die every year from starvation and malnutrition related deaths. The vast majority of these numbers are children under 5 years old. The 9-10 million number was pre-covid. There was an uptick due to the supply chain issues. I think I read an article saying the number for 2021 was around 14 million. Again, mostly children.
It's mostly kids in 3rd world Africa, middle east, India, etc.
We over here need to have more kids though. Because profits.
Idk I just think all this is dumb. Fuck capitalism and the system we have. It's all fucked.
Do not worry. When you refuse to live on in absolute poverty with children, your rukers will import those that will. The capitalist machine marches ON
Good, lower OECD birth rates means member countries can open the borders more for immigrants looking for better prospects, better compensation and benefits for jobs in high cost of living areas, and less stupid hiring processes. Every labor shortage is a capital shortage. Also notice how CNN quotes executives and no labor leaders.
Oh no. Not the economy.
What is normal?
Fortunately population numbers are returning to sane levels, and doing so without bloodshed, famine or diseases. What a fortune.
Is this fair?
Is this sane?
The labor market is a market. It is regulated by supply and demand. The good being traded for money is human labor.
If supply goes down (fewer workers being born), prices go up; that means, higher wages.
If supply goes up (more workers being born), prices go down; that means, lower wages.
For years this demographic crisis has been coming (it was taught in schools in my country over 20 years ago!), yet we still harp on about overpopulation.
Population collapse is coming if this doesn’t change.
Thank god*
Capitalist economy . Needs a lot of humans to keep its shit up. I guess a big change will come . The only help that can keep the moterfuckers doing their business is AI. It came to save them. Let’s see what happens. We humans are constantly adapting and correcting ourselves so many years already.
