I see this as a good thing. We need less people in the world, it will be better for the planet, and civilization will be more sustainable. Better to have a highly automated more empty world than a hot crowded one with too many mouths to feed and not enough food to go around.
Japan's working population drops further - and the number of foreigners rise
21–30 of 76 posts
Re: Japan's working population drops further - and the number of foreigners rise
#22If automation is the future, isn’t a decline in the working population a good thing? The robots can just take over the vacant jobs. What am I missing?
If people don't have incomes, they won't buy the things the robots make.
Re: Japan's working population drops further - and the number of foreigners rise
#23I wonder what if one of developed countries focused on males? Something like "future is male" and "support your father/husband/son" etc. Additionally remove any child support for single parents etc. Maybe that could work? Basically the opposite of current policies.
You want to encourage population growth by removing child support?
Re: Japan's working population drops further - and the number of foreigners rise
#24If automation is the future, isn’t a decline in the working population a good thing? The robots can just take over the vacant jobs. What am I missing?
If people don't have incomes, they won't buy the things the robots make.
Is a world where we build n+1 billion tv's for n+1 billion people better than a world with n billion people and tv's?
Re: Japan's working population drops further - and the number of foreigners rise
#25Can we stop pretending birth rate decline couldn't self-stabilize? I don't see populations organically shrinking to 0 as a realistic scenario. I for one am tired of extremely misguided and unjustified attempts at engineering everything on the planet.
How do you propose to sustainably support 7.5 Billion people on this "tiny" planet without engineering?
Re: Japan's working population drops further - and the number of foreigners rise
#26Can we stop pretending birth rate decline couldn't self-stabilize? I don't see populations organically shrinking to 0 as a realistic scenario. I for one am tired of extremely misguided and unjustified attempts at engineering everything on the planet.
There are social conditions in other species that can result in extinction of a population group, despite ample resource availability. That's what Calhoun's rat population sink experiments were about.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/pdf/pro...
I don't disagree that the number of human beings on this planet is unsustainable, but I also wonder if there are underlying social pathologies that immigration is only temporarily masking. If we can generalize social behavior (and maybe we can't - but if so, "humans have reason" is not why) in mammals at all, Calhoun's experiments are certainly very alarming.
Re: Japan's working population drops further - and the number of foreigners rise
#27Can we stop pretending birth rate decline couldn't self-stabilize? I don't see populations organically shrinking to 0 as a realistic scenario. I for one am tired of extremely misguided and unjustified attempts at engineering everything on the planet.
How do you propose to sustainably support 7.5 Billion people on this "tiny" planet without engineering?
Perhaps there is a middle ground between "engineering everything" and "without engineering".
Re: Japan's working population drops further - and the number of foreigners rise
#28Can we stop pretending birth rate decline couldn't self-stabilize? I don't see populations organically shrinking to 0 as a realistic scenario. I for one am tired of extremely misguided and unjustified attempts at engineering everything on the planet.
Birth rates could self-stabilize, or the population could organically shrink to 0. I don't see why you're dismissing it. For proof, look at Pandas. They simply don't have the will to reproduce any more, even under extreme coaxing and artificial aid by human caretakers with hundreds of millions of dollars poured into their perpetuation.
Re: Japan's working population drops further - and the number of foreigners rise
#29I see this as a good thing. We need less people in the world, it will be better for the planet, and civilization will be more sustainable. Better to have a highly automated more empty world than a hot crowded one with too many mouths to feed and not enough food to go around.
EXACTLY ^^. If population worldwide were to drop 90%, global warming and mass extinctions would end. In the 1970s we all worried about world overpopulation. ZPG - Zero Population Growth was desirable. Today that disaster is here! 90% of the world's population is not changing anything about mankind's future they are just hanging out ... we should focus on a smaller world by population and more productivity for the future of humanity...
I'll tell you why you see these alarmist articles! Greedy business interests! They are programming our minds to think this is a crisis! To these misers it is a crisis because 1% of business growth every year in places like the USA comes from business sitting on its ass - just from population growth!
Re: Japan's working population drops further - and the number of foreigners rise
#30If automation is the future, isn’t a decline in the working population a good thing? The robots can just take over the vacant jobs. What am I missing?
Most vacant jobs in Japan are the kind of thing that's quite difficult to automate: farm worker, health care, construction, sole person running a convenience store, etc. The comparatively easy stuff like repetitive factory work has generally been automated already.