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The World’s Population May Peak in Your Lifetime. What Happens Next?
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Futurology
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Except capitalism requires infinite growth, and will go catabolic and destructively consume modern “infrastructure” if it cannot grow. Such catabolic consumption and destruction is already in play, and the leading edge of which can be seen in the “pullback” of GenZ from any hope of home ownership and parenthood.
This significant reduction of a next generation of workers and consumers will cause a spiral of increasingly catabolic destruction as capitalism will go through increasingly desperate attempts to extract more and more profit from smaller and smaller spending-age populations, thereby exacerbating the economic decline and the lack of children.
Well, in the big picture, we will either have a civilization collapse or we will find a sustainable way to maintain civilization. This isn't a new phenomenon, and hopefully nukes aren't part of the equation. It would make the recovery much harder.
The same problem would arise in a hypothetical socialist socity.
Sorry, but no.
Capitalism is growth based. It requires infinite growth in order to operate normally, and we are on a finite planet.
Nothing within socialism points to growth of any kind, and well-structured socialism can even function well under degrowth conditions.
It is impossible for capitalism to function at all under degrowth conditions.
I see your point but for "academic reasons", is there any proof of this claim.
have to disagree strongly.
Even a socialistic society has to follow this logic since their resources, like the workforce of younger people, are limited.
The situation we'll face in the near future, the situation of having more and more older individuals, while we need resources for a lot of other fields like AI, political stuff and clima, would be problem in any human society. In every society which suffer the problem of limited resources.