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Japan’s population drops by nearly 800,000 with falls in every prefecture for the first time
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Funfact: Increasing birth rates in industrialized countries is correlated with increasing wealth of people in the age range 18-45 and increasing financial equality.
But that means less billionaires.
Makes a lot of sense anecdotally. So, I'm in my late 20s, making what people say is a "pretty good salary but not the highest I've seen" for someone my age, I save up religiously, and I have made zero large purchases (including holidays abroad) for the past 3 years.
I can now just barely afford to buy a decent place to live in.
That's all without children. Now how in the hell am I supposed to afford that with a kid too? They're very expensive.
Yep. A couple years ago I crossed the 6 figure threshold, which is what I was always told growing up was “good money”. But when you factor in inflation + living in a HCOL area, it doesn’t go nearly that far. I’m mostly comfortable and able to save but that’s because I save/invest religiously and also don’t make large purchases. There is 0 chance I could afford a kid right now.
And I’m not trying to say I have it the worst, I recognize the privilege I do have making as much as I do/how much less financial stress I have compared to previously. But man, 6 figures was so hyped up as a kid and it just doesn’t have the purchasing power it used to.
In my early 30s - spent my 20s saving, only went on holidays twice in the past 10 years (and one of those times was a trip to Japan - ironic), and am considered a high earner in my field.
...the idea of buying a nice house that I enjoy, in an area that isn't depressing, is so far off it's almost a joke.
Kids? The very idea seems laughable to me.
I'm convinced this is a major great filter event for all intelligent species. "Can the natural consolidation of power and resources in the world be sufficiently counteracted to avoid massive cataclysmic population crashes?"
Civilizations collapse because of environmental overshoot. Every other civilization has been in relatively small geographic locations.
Whoever thought this globalization thing was a good idea was incredibly short sighted.
We have the technology to overcome these hurdles. Just no politician wants to dictate that we do, because no business leaders will have it.
Do we?
Setting aside the issue of people who would refuse to go vegetarian, getting everyone on the same page politically, etc, we're at the brink of environmental collapse (at least the food-chain is) and the IPCC models of keeping warming under 2°C rely on wildly optimistic predictions about our future carbon capture abilities with basically no basis in our present reality.
And that's not even getting into how hopeless our ability to mine enough minerals to replace all current electrical demand with renewables. We're talking trillions of dollars, the biggest project in human history. And that doesn't account for how our electricity usage grows year over year.
On top of all that, the plankton in the oceans are dying off right now due to acidification. Without plankton, the oceanic food chain collapses. Without the ocean we're all fucked, oceanic life is most life on earth.
The best case scenarios here involve billions of deaths.
You're only proving the truth of what I said.
I may have misunderstood what you meant to say, in that case.
Was I wrong in thinking you were saying that we could avoid mass death/collapse? Because mass death seems inevitable even if we all got our shit together, that was what I meant with my last comment.
Were you saying "humanity can survive despite billions of deaths because we have the technology"?
I guess in that case we do agree.
Source? All data I can find indicates the opposite. The wealthier a cohort, the lower their fertility rate. In the U.S., for example, the wealthiest have the fewest kids and the poorest have the most.
Well here's the Personal income inequality in the Nordics for example, and look what happened to the Total fertility rate in the Nordic countries.
Look at Sweden for example (purple in the first graph, blue-yellow in the second). You have this minimum in income inequality in 1990 and a maximum in total fertility rate at the same time. Then, inequality reaches a maximum and plateaus there from 1995-2000, which is exactly where the fertility rate reaches its minimum with a pleateu. Then from 2000-2005 there's a minimum in inequality immediatly accompanied with a maximum in fertility again.