Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
view the rest of the comments
This is not correct. There are lots of breakdowns as to why, but the clearest and most obvious is to look at productivity.
We are more productive than we were previously. If we compare how much GDP is produced by an hour of labour over time we see that we are getting better and better at making GDP with each hour of labour. We tend to increase at about 1-2% per year, so if one year you made $100000 of value the next year you would make $101000-102000.
This seems odd as surely this should mean people need to work less or have less trouble affording to live? Well, that is where capitalism comes in. Someone is finding life easier, but it isn't you. It is someone who is rich, someone who owns the means of production, a capitalist. By virtue of owning the company they can take your productivity, the total amount of GDP you produce, and then take a slice of that and pay you.
For the capitalist any productivity gains are just pure profit for them, so they love increases of productivity. They also love reductions in labour cost as that is often the largest cost they can potentially get rid of. From their perspective if they could pay you nothing they would. A good example of this is offshoring. Companied do this all the time to send the labour to somewhere that pays the worker less allowing the capitalist to extract even more value.
So how does this relate to the birth rate? Increasing the population increases the number of people you can extract value from. If you are a capitalist this is good because it also increases competition for the jobs you offer, lowering the labour price further.
The simple fact is we could afford to have way less population growth, in fact a bit of a contraction, without any ill effects if we wanted to. We would just need to give the capitalists less of the productivity per hour of labour. They would need to make less profit. They don't want that so they have made a big effort to make people think it would be bad to have low population growth.
Also, parents should get education before having kids. There should be courses you can do to learn what you need to be a parent, we agree there. It shouldn't be women alone getting that. Men who want to be parents should be able to learn the skills needed to be good parents. Putting all that on the mother is sexist and also just silly. Men would be better served by gaining skills to manage parenting than by outsourcing that duty to women.
Current fertility rate in US is like 1.6
1-2% GDP growth isn't going to cover it. And in Japan it's even worse
1-2% per year, compounding.
At a 1% rate it is 10.46% after 10 years, 22% after 20 years, and after 25 years or one lifetime it is 28.2%. This means the GDP per person is almost a third higher after one generation at the lowest estimate.
If you use the 2% estimate it is 64% instead, so you have two thirds more productivity per person. You reach double at 35 years.
So if you can produce double the output for the same input why are we all more poor than our parents? Someone is taking the growth and putting it in their own pocket. It isn't the immigrants or the gays. It absolutely is the rich people who own things, the capitalists. People who contribute nothing but permission to use their stuff and honestly it sounds like a scam to me.
This is actually first really good argument in the whole debate. There's an assumption growth will be sustained, and that fertility rates won't get any worse, which is IMO debatable, but it's a good argument nonetheless.
Capitalism isn't perfect, but trust me, you don't want to experience the alternatives.
To be honest, I do. I want the alternatives and advocate for them on the regular.
Capitalism is not commerce. You can have markets and personal property and so on without capitalism. On top of that you van have degrees of capitalism, like the difference between the US and other English speaking countries like Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. All of those except the USA have universal healthcare. All of those have more restrictions in business. All of those have some degree of socialised services.
I think that if you let capitalists have control of the government they move it towards fascism. I think that if you have a degree of state intervention and you have an accountable state then you can potentially move in the right direction. It doesn't have to be fully communist or socialist, but what we have globally right now is not working.
Capitalism with taxation is still capitalism. What you want is welfare state, with higher taxes and more funds diverted towards things like state run healthcare. It works decently well in EU, but the foundation is still capitalism.
When I'm talking about alternatives I mean all the communists here advocating for some impossible utopia.
Honestly, I want much more democracy than we have. Right now we have a vote over who represents us every couple of years, depending on the system. That person goes to the seat of government and casts a vote ostensibly because that is what all of the people in their electorate would have wanted.
The fact is we actually have an oligarchy. The people we get to choose from are almost always landlords, at least where I live. They have multiple houses, lots of wealth, and connections. This is needed to get elected, but it means that the only choice we really have is which arseholes we want to vote for. There is no option for "none of the above". Those people who we can pick from get a 4 or 6 year term and then we vote again with either the same person winning, which happens the vast majority of the time, or someone else who is also a rich fuck.
These rich people don't know what life is like for a poor person. They are completely oblivious to how hard accessing our social support systems is and how dehumanising the process can be. They don't know how often you will get your payment cut because someone else didn't do some paperwork properly. They don't understand that it takes a whole day on the phone to fix it every time.
They also don't know the price of bread and milk, how much school uniforms cost for kids, how hard it is to afford anything nice at all on so little money. They don't know how to cook because they can afford to have someone else do that for them, so they don't know how hard it is to budget your tiny income to feed a family. They don't understand that the major reason people don't want kids is because it is too damn expensive.
The rich pigs have to go. They have been slurping up resources for all recorded history in one way or another and they really don't add anything to the world. Could they be reformed by having their insane wealth removed and being average in wealth and income? Maybe. I would be willing to run the experiment. But at this point they have all committed so many crimes that a vanishingly small number of them would not be due to serve considerable prison time for wage theft, fraud, worker exploitation, and all the actually salacious crimes such as in the Epstein Files.
So I do actually want a radically different world than we have now. I do want to have a world where if someone abuses a child they face a fair and impartial justice system and then have justice play out, be it prison time or something else. I also recognise that aiming for that society from here is like aiming for a Mars base to build a space program. It is a reasonable long term goal but the steps along the way must be incremental and will involve a lot of time, effort, and energy. It won't be a linear process, it will have stops and starts along the way, but with determination we can make the world much better than it is right now. Each step towards that amazing goal is progress that makes living here better, so I am willing to take those challenges and victories along the way.
First things first. I'd want to see acts posted on github and developed like every open source project. With higher quality of law and better engineering practices you'd see a lot of smaller issues gone. One can only dream tho.
One can dream, but action is better. Asking for transparency is a good start, having legislation presented before voting for public comment is actually not that hard an ask for a legislature. Starting at your most local level and asking them to put legislation under consideration publicly on the local governmental site is a reasonable ask and may actually be done in a reasonable timeframe. Asking the next level up for the same once it is done locally and works out fine is actusy easier than starting at that level, so starting smaller is practically more effective.
I would recommend asking your most local form of government for the transparency you want and explaining your reasoning. Go to town hall meetings, be part of the process. It is more possible at that local level than at any higher level.