I didn’t blame anything.

Reading comprehension is not strong in your family is it?

You’re reading things that are not there and wanting me to defend things that only exist in your head.

You are having a conversation with yourself. You don’t need anyone else involved.

r/shitamericanssay in assuming capitalism is an “American” thing. So embarrassing!

Found the disillusioned economist.

Saying “some dogs shit on my lawn” does not communicate to anyone without a chip on their shoulder that I am suggesting the dogs are ‘to blame’ for that and especially not that I am blaming every dog in the world.

You have invented a lot of stuff I never said and never thought. I am not responsible for what exists in your head and not in mine. You are having a conversation with yourself.

There will be less consumers next year. There will be less again the year after that. That continues for about a century.

That means a declining demand curve for a century.

How are you going to finance something with a guaranteed reduction in return? Punch that assumption into a bank computer program and see what loan you can raise.

Every year you’ll need less housing, less white goods, less food, etc.

Whose going to hire people or buy robots when the demand for what you produce is certain to be lower in the future than now.

If you don’t think that requires a different economic model than the current one I suspect you haven’t thought about it carefully enough.

Be clear I am not saying “no more capitalism” just not capitalism as it is as a minimum. I don’t believe there is a command and control model built on the assumption of a century long declining demand curve. The attempts at socialism I know of have all assumed a growing demand curve for their modeling.

I’m not saying I know what the answer is. I’m just hoping groups of people smarter than me are getting ready, and I currently doubt they are.

It’s not in any way a relevant comparison.

The Black Death was a sudden decline.

This will be a slow motion demographic move through a series of unusual states of population mix as the various cadres go through the stages of their lives.

Your answers are solving some of the wrong problems.

When everyone knows there will be less consumers next year and even less in a decade and so forth what is the incentive for future investment? Using the current assumptions means the whole system collapses. So the assumptions must change. No amount of focusing on robots and that side of things will address these issues.

Will the robots change things as you suggest and do we need to work on preparing for that? Yes. Plenty of interesting thought work to do as you suggest.

Is that enough to deal with a downward demand curve being the norm for centuries? No.

Yep. But that’s not the future being predicted in these models.

The expected future is a peak at 12, 16, or 20 billion (depending on assumptions) and then a demographic decline for a century or two. No sudden crash, just below replacement birth rates becoming the norm.

During those centuries of declining population the economics we’ve been using for the last 300 (?) years won’t work.

Working on a response to this predicted new world should be an urgent area of huge funding and interest. Instead Japan is announcing trying to turn around there birth rates hoping the future isn’t coming.

Interesting times ahead.

While it’s not certain we are probably looking at a declining population starting this century or the next.

This is not a “problem”. It’s the cure. However it does mean the end of capitalism as we know it.

The response from most economists is trying to find ways to keep the population growing which is a strategy of doom.

What we need is to face facts face on and come up with something to replace a system that is about to stop working.

Not sure this is a minimum but a few years back the consensus seemed to be that a population of 2 billion would ensure the current arrangements of world trade etc and allow a livable planet going forward.

2 billion was the population in World War 2 so seems to be plenty for rapid technological advancement given the leaps achieved in the 30s, 40s, 50s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

There is zero point complaining that people don’t take your story about having an invisible friend seriously if you are going to let pictures of group stupidity like this circulate.”