this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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ShowerThoughts
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Sometimes we have those little epiphanies in the shower.. sometimes they come from other places. This is a home for those epiphanies.
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I'm not convinced it's as simple as you make it out to be, as places that experience more poverty and violence appear to have higher fertility rates (1).
Unless we're planning on this route (which it seems the US is set on), the alternative is to make parenthood attractive (or at least not-unattractive) enough to negate the costs.
Additionally, fertility rates are dropping worldwide, even in low-income countries. They're further back on the curve, but they're definitely moving along it. Some institutes claim we've already dropped below the global replacement rate of ~2.3, though it'll take a few years to confirm the current statistics.
You forget that most of the assholes in charge right now don't give a flying fuck about fertility rates, having an educated workforce, or even anyone's rights and opportunities. All that matters to them is making more money and hanging onto power. The fuckers can practically read the future as long there is a dollar sign in front of it, and as far as they are concerned, the rest of us don't factor into that future.
I believe some of the rich assholes really do see birth rates as a sort of global crisis. Mostly because it poses a threat to their bottom line. Less workers = less labor to exploit, less consumers to buy their shit, pay subscriptions or blast with ads. And a demographic shift where the size of the older generation is greater than the younger generation massively screws up social security systems that depend on taxes from the young to pay the benefits for the old. And, more nefariously - because parents necessarily consume more and become more reliable workers: when you're living paycheck to paycheck you can't afford to quit, take unpaid leave, turn up overtime or go on strike. But perhaps too, some may be experiencing the existential crisis that there is a real, natural limit to the growth of the human race, that we are not god-destined to just expand forever and ever, but rather finite in our place in the cosmos.
I didn't forget it, that is one of the main reasons why there's no political will.
Many are concerned. Capitalism requires a growing population. It is just they seem to believe force is the way to go.
How so?
Sloppy/oversimplified explanation:
In capitalism, each business is trying to maximise its own margin of profit. And to do so, it needs to produce more for a cheaper production price, and sell it.
Technology makes each worker output more production, but it also makes their labour more expensive. So to produce more, better tech is not enough; you need more workers.
And to sell more of your production, you need more people buying your stuff, because there's a limit on how much each will buy.
This means each business needs an increasingly larger number of workers and customers. At the start they could do it by venturing into other countries, and killing local businesses; but eventually you reach a point where you have megacorporations like Unilever, Google, Faecesbook*, NestlΓ© etc. Where do they expand into? Where do they get more customers and workers from?
*call me childish, I can't help but misspell it.
Isn't that a bit like argueing that a bathtub needs to increase in size every time you take a bath, as you add water?
In other words, it's ignoring a whole part of the bath: the drain.
In the same way it's ignoring a whole part of capitalism: bankrupcies and other forms of debt foregiveness. As some businesses become irrelevant, and as new ones are started.
Bankruptcy is a mostly a risk for small and nascent businesses: raw material is more expensive, economy of scale works against them, they start out with less know-how, they have a smaller reserve of capital to handle eventualities, banks are less eager to give them loans, so goes on. Eventually they get outcompeted by another business, often a considerably larger one, that keeps growing.
So the analogy with a bathtub full of water doesn't work well. It's more like a box full of balloons; except those balloons keep growing, and the bigger balloons are actually harder to pop than the smaller ones. Eventually the pressure forces a few small balloons to pop, but as soon as they do the bigger ones take the space over. And they keep exerting pressure over the box. [Sorry for the weird analogy.]
That's untrue? The big ones also go bankrupt. It's a risk shared by every company, to keep adapting as the world changes.
Even the VOC, at a point the largest company in the world with more assets than most countries, folded.
The likelihood of the company going bankrupt decreases with its size. It's a gradient, not categories, so saying "big companies can also go bankrupt" does not falsify what I said at all. (Note that I outright listed some of the reasons why this risk decreases.)
And bigger companies are clearly in a better position to adapt to changes than smaller ones, so your argument is only reinforcing my point.
You're now aware that the VOC would look like an ant in comparison with modern megacorporations. For example, Walmart is around 350 times larger than the VOC was in its prime*.
Also note how poor of an example the Dutch East India Company is, given that it was effectively a vassal state of the Dutch government, not an independent group like the megacorpos of today. And it didn't simply go "bankrupt", it lost a literal war against the United Kingdom (the fourth Anglo-Dutch War).
*Note: around 1670 the VOC had 50k workers (source), and its annual operating profit was estimated to be equivalent to US$ 80 millions (source). In the meantime, Walmart controls 2.1 million workersΒ³ and its operating income for 2025 is around US$ 29 billions (source for both).
How so? The replacement rate is shorter than in recorded history (1)
It seems that the older corporations had a very hard time adapting to new technology, to the point that they've been replaced by new smaller ones that outpaced them in only 30 years?
It also went bankrupt.
Of course you have to place it in historixal context: both in world population and in respect to other contemporary companies.
A bigger business:
Data contradicting my claim would show that smaller businesses have a similar or better rate of survival in comparison with bigger businesses. Your link does not show that, it does not even compare smaller vs. bigger businesses, as it focuses solely on the S&P 500 bankruptcy over time.
Note that your link confirms what I said here, as it shows big companies being eaten by biggER ones:
And the war totally had nothing to do with this, right. Nope, the VOC "just" went bankrupt, the UK snatching its stuff was totally irrelevant, and the VOC's fate can be totally generalised for the sake of your "ackshyually, big biz also go bankrupt, see VOC." /s
If you did the maths beforehand, to know if your argument is sensible or bullshit (it's the later), you'd know that Walmart is ~twice the size of the VOC in number of workers, even when normalised for the world pop. (500M back then.)
But odds are you ain't bringing context up because the context would be relevant here; you're only grasping at straws.
There was barely any global market back then, almost all companies would stick to their country of origin. The VOC was the anomaly, being the first multinational and being rather government-like. You got an elephant and 503499398988989387349 ants.
Nowadays a Walmart or Unilever or Alphabet or Apple or NestlΓ© is not an exception. Those companies seised the economic activity of the world. You got a handful of blue whales, and most ants got the DDT.
inb4 "then this shows that VOC was hueeeg for other companies lol lmao" - refer to what I said about it being extremely government-like, and fighting a literal government.
Given that you brought up exactly zero relevant counterpoints, I'm not wasting my time further with this discussion - it's simply unproductive.
It does, even if you fail to see it. In only 30 years, those small garage sized startups outpaced century old megacorporations.
According to the logic: "Larger companies can better adapt, has more capital, can survive temporary losses, etc", that should not be possible. We should be conversing on ExxonBook. Yet the examples are right there.
For a really bad summary? Capitalism requires economic growth, business, industry, etc. must increase output, therefore the consumer base must increase, and so it goes with the true labor underclass. For a real explanation check the link below to a PDF file of a dissertation on the subject.
https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1462&context=dissertation
That dissertation does not explain why capitalism requires population growth.
Rather it takes "capitalism requires positive economic growth" as an axiom, to argue that such growth can not persist.
Yes, and growth is sustained by striking a balance of quality and quantity in terms of the human population. If this balance becomes out of whack you will decline into what they refer to as "malthusian stagnation". So the population does need to grow in order to sustain economic growth, along with the quality of the individuals that make up the population. What they refer to as "economic darwinism" beings to truly take place as a population has the extra resources to put more into children than parent, creating generational progress. Post industrial economic darwinism gets a buffer, so-to-speak, due to the increased per capita productivity introduced by technology. However this is also not infinite, and so, at some point this will plateau, and the population will need to begin rising again to spur growth. We are likely in the midst of this plateauing.
The argument is going round in circles, but never explains if nor why capitalism requires economic growth. Therefore it also does not explain if nor why it requires population growth.
That reminds me my grandma. My family is not exactly wealthy, even for Latin American standards; and even in times where women were not supposed to work, my grandpa was doing grunt work while grandma worked as a hotel maid.
And as I was getting older, I often visited my grandma. Drink some yerba together, chitchat, smoke some cigs together, this kind of stuff. And she told me some shitty stories about my mum and her three siblings when they were kids. In plenty of those, one of the four muppets almost died. (Including my mum. Hoooooly fuck - eating berries known locally as "horse destroyer", rolling inside a tire into a high traffic road, perhaps she likes cats so much because she identifies herself with them, they both have nine lives?)
Well. Turns out that they weren't supposed to be four children, but six. My mum wasn't the oldest one - her two older brothers died before she was born. My grandma once mentioned that once, but in no moment she showed a change in expression; it was a fact of life.
Even as a man I could not picture myself being so stoic. If I had a child and they died, I'd probably lose my marbles.
It first came to my attention in a book - The Poisionwood Bible - about missionaries into Africa.
And fwiw, my friend with four healthy children has also had nine miscarriages. Nine!
Israel has high fertility.