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A comment on Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate. Parent comment

Re:Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertilit... by CatWChainsaw on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @04:10PM (#32585098)
Historically population drops were bad. When you lose population, you lose the labor required to support as many specializations, and civilization regresses. Now, though, fertilizers and modern medicine support excess human population, fossil fuels are an energy wellspring that helps reduce the need for physical labor, and AI can free people from repetitive mental work.

Combine this with the fact that yes, our overshoot is horrific, I really do not see why declining birth rates in this era are a bad thing.

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Re:Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertilit... by onepointsixC on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @09:12PM (#32588113)
You're missing the demand side and the dependents problem. AI, Automation, etc. may replace factory workers but those workers also consumed products. With less consumers you have less demand thus your revenues are doomed to shrink year on year.

Just about every society has dependents who can no longer work and younger workers who support them through tax revenue. With fewer and fewer young workers and more and more dependents you have no good options. Cutting services would be bad for the elderly and likely impossible to pass in a democratic society as they would make up the majority of the voting population. Not cutting services would accelerate flight of workers and worse birth rates as overwork youth don't have time to start their own families.

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Re:Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertilit... by visarga on Thursday August 25, 2022 @01:16AM (#32589793)
We might have lower demand for consumption but have higher demand on "global works" - fight global warming, upgrading with AI the economy, space development. You can think of them as technical debt we have to pay.
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Re:Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertilit... by CatWChainsaw on Thursday August 25, 2022 @05:26AM (#32591459)
It would seem common sense that growth cannot continue on a finite planet forever without catastrophe, hence our current situation. The overarching problem is that no system has been able to replace the one we have currently in order to prevent or mitigate the consequences of loss of population or growth on society, but that was never an easy problem to solve.
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Re:Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertilit... by imtringued on Thursday August 25, 2022 @04:04AM (#32590937)
Historically population drops have led to the industrial revolution with increased labor productivity.
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