You are viewing a single thread.
View all comments View context
2 points

Old people can’t work and need someone to pay for their retirement.

If there are more old people than young people (population pyramid wrong way round) every young person needs to pay a crapton of taxes so that old folks don’t starve to death

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Why can’t immigration replace births?

permalink
report
parent
reply
0 points

Because Japan doesn’t do that.

There is an -ism they’re pretty big on, it starts with R

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Because Japan doesn’t do that.

They apparently don’t do procreation, either.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

Okay, but then we can’t just frame the discussion as “increase birth rates or society collapses” because there’s a very obvious third option that they aren’t taking.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points
*

Why should it?

That’s asinine, you’re treating periphery countries like they’re glorified breeding-stock for the developed world’s work-force.

Edit: To make my point more clear, the whole reason why developing nations have higher birthrates than developed ones is because they’re developing/underdeveloped. They lack access to contraceptives, and substantive access to women’s healthcare; and they also oftentimes have economies that still rely to some extent, or a large extent on non-mechanized smallholder, or subsistence agriculture. That, or they otherwise have social institutions that allow for, or require children to enter the workforce. This means that having children in those countries is often an economic boon to a family (because they can contribute to household incomes through work), and avoiding having them can be very difficult for women.

If you solve their problem of being underdeveloped, & hyper-exploited (which you should be doing if you’re a “queermunist”), then that means that they are likely also going to be in a position where they have declining birthrates because there will no longer be an object material incentive to have children, and women who don’t want to would be able to prevent it.

The idea of shoring up a declining population “through immigration” only works so long as you have an underdeveloped periphery of peoples who want to come flock to the West, or to developed nations in search of higher wages & a higher standard of living (or just avoiding Imperialist political meddling), rather than staying at home.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points
*

Well, no, birth rates are low because the reproduction of labor is unpaid labor. Yes, development is associated with lower birthrates, but only because no developed country has ever seriously tried to make reproductive labor a real job. Doing so would decrease the size of the workforce for production of commodities.

Now you’re totally right that the people migrating from the Global South are fleeing underdevelopment from imperialism, and that this is itself a factor of underdevelopment. What you haven’t considered is why the imperial core limits migration.

Racism is part of it, but only part of the larger structural base. If they allowed unlimited migration the imperial core would be filled with people from the periphery as they flee underdevelopment. This would at once reduce the availability of labor in the periphery and raise the contradictions of imperialism by making peripheral concerns into domestic concerns.

Migrants influence the society they’re part of, causing agitation against imperialism. This would, ultimately, destabilize the core and allow for development to resume without imperial meddling.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

Nah. Food is cheap and plentiful. We don’t need young people working in fields for old people to be fed.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

You do understand that just dumping a bag of produce at grandmas door isn’t enough?

She needs to pay rent, get medical treatment and maybe even help around the house because she isn’t as nimble as before

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

You understand that there will still be a lot of labor available. It’s not like there will NO workers.

permalink
report
parent
reply

World News

!worldnews@lemmy.ml

Create post

News from around the world!

Rules:

  • Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc

  • No NSFW content

  • No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc

Community stats

  • 5K

    Monthly active users

  • 12K

    Posts

  • 121K

    Comments