Anecdotally, I keep seeing more and more obese Japanese people and more and more eating junk. It's not terribly surprising, in that case.
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Huh, is this a world-wide trend? The US's life expectancy keeps falling too...
Not really, a lot of countries already reversed the trend from 2021
The US is one of the worst performers.
There were also instances where deceased people were misrepresented as still living so relatives could collect on their pension. When the government began cracking down and the numbers corrected, the reported population of extreme elderly shrank. Obviously it isn’t the only reason, but it may have some impact.
wow...
Wondering if it’s Covid
From the very first line of the article and the blurb autopulled into the body of the post:
The average life expectancy of Japanese people declined in 2022 for the second straight year, affected significantly by the coronavirus pandemic, according to the health ministry.
Still wondering if it’s Covid
Yeah, it’s a mystery all right.
I will express a very unpopular and controversional opinion, but truth can be cold and merciless: if we don't make life interplanetary a lot of people will die of starvation from overpopulation in a few decades.
Elderly people, while being an important source of wisdom, are objectively a burden to every society, economically and sanitaryly. They can't be the majority.
We need young and productive people to keep any form of society going. I'm not saying that coronavirus was a good thing but maybe, just maybe, reducing life expectancy is not such a tragedy, for now.
Please reply objectively and rationally, not with your gut
And you think we will make significant enough farms on foreign worlds to make any dent in this in the next few decades? If we can't make enough food with a planet that's literally designed with us in mind, there is no hope of making it work anywhere else that we can reach.
I’m confused. You reference the challenges associated with an aging population and seem to be attributing it to over population. Isn’t it the reverse?
Longtermism is just modern day eugenics and ignores the people living today in favor of some nebulous future.
We somehow manage to feed more then the total human biomass in livestock as well as waste more than a third of the food we produce. We are far from eating in the most efficient way possible.
The myth of overpopulation is one propagated by the bourgeoisie in order for them to be able to kill certain percentage of the working class.
Basically, since labour is a commodity in the market, they need for it to have a surplus, so that thanks to supply and demand the price of labour goes down, and they can have cheap worker from where to choose. It's what Marx called the "army of the unemployed". At the same time, the bourgeoisie cannot allow for too many unemployed to exist, since otherwise there would be too much discontent and the working class would protest, or worse, and it's counterproductive for them. They need a delicate balance of employed middle class people and unemployed lumpenproletariat or low class people. The resources are there to feed everyone, we have worked out the scarcity issue, it's all artificial.
We indeed need young and productive people, but the reason why recent trends of natality have gone down is because living prices have gone up so drastically that people cannot afford to reproduce any more, and choose not to have children. There's no need for the elderly to go away, a source of income for young people could be precisely to take care of them, we just need to stop sustaining and working for a parasitic class that the only thing it does is live off the work of other people.
It's going to be far easier to grow enough food for 10 billion people on Earth than to somehow do it on Mars lol