You’re talking about this video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjHMoNGqQTI

It raises good points about the parasite pharma story and their funding, and I was never ready to ‘trust’ kurzgesagt, but ‘billionaire propaganda’ seems pretty strong. It’s also leaning into bill gates conspiracies pretty hard, and whatever the association, kurzgesagt advocates for some fairly progressive/redistributive policies.

the working class will have more and more leverage the smaller the class gets.

Not if they don’t have any wealth.

And again, by the time they’re even complaining about this specifically, it is waaay too late.

The population demographic projections look quite definitive to me, barring something drastic like a high-mortality pandemic. They’re much shorter term than overpopulation projections, hence probably closer to reality.

HOWEVER, things will change, societies will react and adapt to the evolving situation.

The probable reaction is to just burden the working class, as is happening right now with every other problem. This very thread, and pretty much every disaster in the world, is an example of how, well, societies aren’t going to react until its waaay too late.

“Just an organizational problem” is a hell of a problem though.

We’d already be transcendent if it weren’t for that little thing, heh.

Organization aside, it’s also (IMO) a productivity issue without enough automation to take care of elders, or good enough healthcare to keep them “young.” Unless you want to force old people to work.

Open borders are good because they balance age demographics between countries that skew too old, and poorer countries struggling to support massive birthrates. It gives the immigrants opportunity, their relatives back home wealth, and the “host” country young productivity. It also ties countries together culturally.

I’m not sure where you’re going with that.

And on automation, another big problem is just… enshittification. It’s like we’ve burned all these efficiency gains with horrendous systems, with workers grinding away doing basically nothing useful.

Runaway capitalism 100% did that. It also diverts so much production to be wasted by billionaires.

…But, like, mass communism wave could still have similar problems, minus the billionaires. Lots of other systems would too, depending on where you look.

I think a lot of society just needs to be “simplified” and more a-la-carte instead of ideologically driven. I often cite TSMC as an example, which shifted between straight up despotic, state sponsored socialism, democratic capitalism with a lot of private investment, and stuff in between (mixed with a lot of international cooperation) to get to a kind of “best case” where they are today. Could do better, of course (maybe as a worker/researcher owned coop?)

…I’m going way off topic though.

Yeah, there’s an extremely unfortunate intersection with a very bad line of thinking, polluting the argument.

If those eugenics guys really cared, they wouldn’t be trying to firebomb immigration, parent welfare, or wealth redistribution to young people. They just want to purge ‘others’ like a WH40K meme.

Hard disagree.

This video (from kurzgesagt) completely changed my perspective: https://youtu.be/Ufmu1WD2TSk

For this exact reason cited in the OP article.

But the bigger problem with Walsh’s argument is that it only makes sense if you care about the quantity of human life more than the quality of human life.

The video illustrates it better than I can, but basically, underpopulation is societally destabilizing and makes people miserable. It reduces quality of life.

It works if we live in a utopian future where people are living longer working lives, staying young longer, automation is reducing job loads, governments are smart, immigration is free and open, global warming isn’t a looming crisis, AI will solve all sorts of problems…

But we don’t.

In the near term, we need a big mass of young people to take care of retired people, otherwise those young people are utterly miserable because they have to work their butts off to support a huge retired population. Again, you can wave your hands and say “automation! immigration! reduced hours!” but that fantasy is clearly not where the world is headed to. Technology is much closer to addressing overpopulation issues, and then we can worry about plateauing birthrates once we got robot butlers taking care of our elders and making their stuff.

The US hasn’t dealt with this because we are privileged enough to have a massive influx of immigrants (who skew young), but we are royally screwing that up.

I despise how this article tries to write it off as an ideological belief, like you’re a Musk loving fool for thinking this.

…I realize I’m probably posting this in the wrong sub. And I’d love to be wrong, but that article is not selling it for me.