Analysis: The fertility crisis is here and it will permanently alter the economy

"A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.

And while net immigration has helped offset demographic problems facing rich countries in the past, the shrinking population is now a global phenomenon. “This is critical because it implies advanced economies may start to struggle to ‘import’ labour from such places either via migration or sourcing goods,” wrote Paravani-Mellinghoff.

This is just mask-off capitalism. They want people to have a lot of babies, and/or large numbers of poor and desperate people migrating into the country, so that they have a constant, reliable source of cheap labor.

Paying workers more is inflationary, but raising the cost of goods because you control the supply chain is "business"

Basically, raising product costs to cover increased labour costs are bad because actual workers are getting that money instead of the wealthy capital class.

I wish people understood boycotting more. Sure 6 companies own everything, but remember when the cost of a barrel of oil went significantly negative because people weren't driving for 2 weeks?

If people collectively decided they didn't want to buy anything but the absolute necessary staples for a few months there would be an absolute catastrophe in the supply chain and they'd be forced to lower prices significantly.

They may not lower prices forever, but modern business is built entirely on supply chain logistics. If people stop buying anything, or buy things exclusively to return them we would see some serious changes
- I've tried to convince people that if we can have a No Nut November, we ought to be able to put together a No-Sales September or something. These mentally defective executives would absolutely go back to taking care of the customer if this were a practice.
I knew even before I opened the article it’s gonna be about fewer babies = fewer workers. Remember folks, when an article cites the “economy”, it just means the businesses and industries’ profits.
You know what slows down inflation? An upper limit on the cost of goods. But hey im just a filthy commie.
- It didn't, not in the US, not in Soviet Union
  
  In the Soviet Union it caused rationing instead. Here's your coupon for 1 stick of butter
I'd like to put Simona's mind at ease because economics research into the relationship between wages and productivity shows a casual link where higher wages increase productivity. That is, higher wages force firms to invest in technology, equipment and training in order to offset the increased labor cost.

Remember kids, "the economy" is double-speak for "record breaking profits for the rich".

Personally, I always substitute it with "rich people's yacht money"

Infinite growth is an absolutely insane bar to set for the economy.

The lowered birthrates are because we're getting ground into dust - my engineering team of twenty millennials has two folks with kids and two folks who openly plan on having kids... we're aging out of the window and it's not that we're trying and failing - most of us just don't want a fucking family. We're too fucking busy already.

Mental health never being addressed, so we're also too tired.
- "Burned outs just another word for not taking your bosses shit" - sing it to the tune of Me and Bobby McGee.
Viruses, Pyramid Schemes and Capitalism, oh my!

Half my life was spent fearing the result of limitless population growth and contemplating the inevitability of war and famine to shock population levels back down to sustainable levels. They warned us about this starting at least as far back as the sixties.

I see organic population collapse as a categorically good thing.

Long-term, possibly. But if the collapse happens too quickly it may cause a lot of issues. A slow steady decline would be best but may be difficult to achieve.
- The oligarchy is welcome to not poison people.
That's why I tell hard-right folks that childless homosexuality is the cornerstone of God's plan to save humanity

There are more people in the world than ever before and we have folks writing news stories telling us there's a crisis building and that we need to have more kids?

They're farming us like ranch animals.

Infinite growth requires infinite bodies to feed it.
- Unfortunately I don't have infinite fucks to give
Look at long term trends, population is already dropping in East Asia and Europe

Sure, there might be more people in Nigeria, but they are not paying into your retirement
- Yeah maybe this way of handling retirement doesn't work? It's clearly a pyramid scheme.
I think our planet would be described as a free-range human labour farm, to anyone who was able to view it independently. Well, lots of it not so free-range. Its why they're coming for reproductive freedom. They're doing for the same reason a beef farmer wouldn't give their cows reproductive freedom.
Always were

HEY WORLD LEADERS: make the world a less shitty place, so I don’t feel guilty about bringing a child into it, and I’ll rawdog more often. Do we have a deal?

Sorry, the best I can do...

The problem with capitalism, is eventually you run out of other people's labor

Capitalism is just a complex pyramid scheme. Change my mind.
- No, you're correct.
You run out of other people's money. You can squeeze labor to starvation working in a salt mine. However, if most all people lose all their money, capitalism is done, and currently runaway capitalism is doing everything it can to increase that disparity.
- This person was referencing the obtuse and infuriatingly repeated quote from Margaret Thatcher (rot in piss) "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money".
  
  I don't think I need to point out exactly why this quote is stupid.
- Then falling birthrate shouldn't be an issue?

In a world with too many humans already, can you imagine painting a drop in the birth rate as somehow a bad thing?

lol

I don’t really care about its impact on the economy, but I do feel for those who are attempting to have a child to no avail. I can only imagine how soul crushing that process can be.
- "Fertility crisis" in the headline doesn't refer to anyone's inability to have children. It refers to the fertility rate, which is just statistics about how many kids are popping out.
- Thanks for remembering us Not Rick.
- Where do you live where the economy doesn’t affect you?
The problem is the average age increases, and you'll have more of an elderly population, meaning barely any people actually working while a ton of people are on pensions
- That's why I'm living now, not waiting for retirement. I got a good 15 years left, maybe 20 if I push it. Then I'm tapping out. Not a fan of keeping on living just for the sake of breathing.
- Then invest in medical research on keeping me young for longer, instead of keeping me old for longer

The solution is obviously to take away womens' reproductive rights. Duh.

The world needs more babies.

Does it?

Or do we just need to embrace migrants?

“A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.

"Have babies," said the billionaire, "or else who am I going to exploit in the future?"

Or, better yet, do we need to embrace the idea that infinite growth isn’t possible, and adopt economic systems that do not rely on it?

Less people means less stress on the environment though.

And more houses, and more job opportunities.

We'll be.....the new people will be fine!
- Except the population (at least in my country) is quickly growing anyway because so many refugees come. And there will be far more if climate change continues at this speed.
  
  Edit: this comment isn't directed against immigration (judging by the downvotes you probably interpreted it that way), I'm just stating the way it is rn

Sounds awesome. Bring it on. Less people is better fuck the infinite growth economy

The problems listed in the article are real. we've built a system:

Where a lot of economic growth stems from an increasing supply of (cheap) labour

That relies on people of working age being able to financially support a retiree class.

Both of these are going to fall apart if the population stops growing. The smaller group of working age people won't be enough to support the amount of retirees, and without population growth there's no economic growth.

It's sad that economists correctly see all this coming but then conclude that the only solution is "make more babies." It's short term thinking almost by definition, because in the limit it's rather obvious that at some point we will not have the resources to support any more people. And the closer we get to that limit the less each individual person will have (even worse when wealth is not equally distributed).

Unfortunately I don't see any economist putting forth a plan that accepts population decline and alters the system to account for it. It wouldn't be easy but it seems no one is even trying.
- How is it not easy? 90% of all jobs are automated or are going to be automated away in the next few years. I only see one social class that holds us back from de facto post-scarcity. We just need to get rid of it.

It is a basic math problem.. they keep raising housing prices ain't nobody going to have kids when 1500 in rent is due monthly

How is your rent so cheap?
- I haven't rented in years, luckily I found something that wasn't dumb expensive and I've slowly been fixing it up
$1500 a month? I wish!

Turns out that whole idea of women being the primary bearers of hundred of years of exploited reproductive labor might have had some weight to it, huh.

All that labor being redirected into "L'economie" means that, at base, you'll have less children.

I really have no idea what these sentences mean. I feel like I'm having a stroke. Is it just me?

That means the supply of workers in many countries is quickly diminishing.

I thought AI was going to take our jobs.

Of course it is! We are simultaneously facing a labor shortage and mass unemployment. The important thing is to keep being angry and frightened, the specific subject you're angry about at any given time is flexible.
Right? They must not think AI and automation can replace very many human laborers, otherwise they wouldn't consider declining birth rates to be such a crisis.

Many Boomers voted their progeny away when they put Reagan in office.

How is this a fertility issue? Are people unable to have children, or just unwilling?

Sperm motility issue rates are rising worldwide and I found out I was one of them this year. Mid 30s, waited to start a family while we went further in our careers. Now that we're ready, we got hit with this, fuck me for being responsible I guess.
- Are we sure the increasing sperm motility rate isn't because they are trying to get out of this country?
I think the consensus is that it's mostly as a result of women having greater reproductive choices, greater access to family planning services, and more women choosing to delay having children or choosing to not have children at all, often so they can instead focus on a career.

Edit: I want to point out that what I'm describing is the consensus, as I understand it, of mainstream experts in the US. However, I believe there is evidence that this consensus opinion is not entirely accurate. If I'm not mistaken, surveys indicate that there are a fair number of people who would like to have children but are not because the right circumstances are not present for them to feel secure enough to have children. Many of the people who are not having children would have them if they felt more financially, romantically, and/or emotionally secure. Therefore, it's possible that it's not so much that people are choosing not to have children as it is that the necessary conditions for making people feel secure enough to have children are not present for a large number of people.

There's no economic reason the nominal GDP of any country or the world in general has to continuously increase. The important metric is per capita production. As long as people get continuously more productive through innovation, standards of living will continue to increase.

At the national level, vying for long term economic power in the world, a higher and younger population is going to be a huge advantage very soon and countries should be trying to get as many immigrants in their borders as they can. But instead they are...going a different direction.

You say that, but when I'm more productive I'm inevitably much less happy. Work sucks.

Does anybody think about the fact that every year on average 9-10 million people die every year from starvation and malnutrition related deaths. The vast majority of these numbers are children under 5 years old. The 9-10 million number was pre-covid. There was an uptick due to the supply chain issues. I think I read an article saying the number for 2021 was around 14 million. Again, mostly children.

It's mostly kids in 3rd world Africa, middle east, India, etc.

We over here need to have more kids though. Because profits.

Idk I just think all this is dumb. Fuck capitalism and the system we have. It's all fucked.

Do not worry. When you refuse to live on in absolute poverty with children, your rukers will import those that will. The capitalist machine marches ON

Good, lower OECD birth rates means member countries can open the borders more for immigrants looking for better prospects, better compensation and benefits for jobs in high cost of living areas, and less stupid hiring processes. Every labor shortage is a capital shortage. Also notice how CNN quotes executives and no labor leaders.

Fortunately population numbers are returning to sane levels, and doing so without bloodshed, famine or diseases. What a fortune.

Capitalist economy . Needs a lot of humans to keep its shit up. I guess a big change will come . The only help that can keep the moterfuckers doing their business is AI. It came to save them. Let’s see what happens. We humans are constantly adapting and correcting ourselves so many years already.

For years this demographic crisis has been coming (it was taught in schools in my country over 20 years ago!), yet we still harp on about overpopulation.

Population collapse is coming if this doesn’t change.

Thank god*

Is this fair?

Is this sane?

What is normal?

The labor market is a market. It is regulated by supply and demand. The good being traded for money is human labor.

If supply goes down (fewer workers being born), prices go up; that means, higher wages.

If supply goes up (more workers being born), prices go down; that means, lower wages.

Analysis: The fertility crisis is here and it will permanently alter the economy | CNN Business