Decades of talkings heads offering an explanation for rural decline, that’s how. Look back to Rush Limbaugh and his predecessors.

The irony is rampant immigration (and our tolerance to it) was an economic miracle for the US, an envy of the world. We’d be facing a population cliff like S Korea, Japan, China or Russia without it. But now that’s coming for us too :(

The “population cliff” is a made up boogeyman for capitalists. That’s because they’ve relied on population growth for market growth. What’s the harm in population stagnation or even decline?

And I don’t want to hear about young people supporting aging populations. That’s a man-made problem that has solutions. Just not the kind of solutions capitalists can abide. (and if you think about it, it’s a temporary issue anyway).

And I don’t want to hear about young people supporting aging populations. That’s a man-made problem that has solutions.

Well, okay. I have a bridge to sell you.

Look. Everything is a “man made” issue with solutions.

It doesn’t matter what economic system we want or have; fact is something has to put a ton of work into taking care of old folks, unless you kill them off or let them rot. Hope and ideology isn’t going to fix one’s body/mind, and that has nothing to do with capitalism.

…Will we automate the problem away some day, WallE/Star Trek style? Sure. That’s the goal. But we aren’t close to there yet. Overloading the young taking care of the old IS our short term problem, and we have plenty of land to support a growing population with room for expanding conservation, as long as we don’t do stupid shit like ranch excessively and expand oil. Then we can level off the population. But we can’t do any of that if entire counties collapse from the pressure/burden of support.

But okay. Let’s say tomorrow, every country on the planet rises up, abandons capitalism, and embraces cooperative economics, with a magic snap of the fingers. That’d be great.

But we continue to let populations in developed countries age.

Then what?

How does that change the needs of elderly folks at all? How does that change the math of young people needing to devote more and more of their energy to them?

Reducing overconsumption and overproduction will help a ton. There are a lot of jobs these days that are just… not necessary. Take advertising for example, or all the job positions that are all about how to fuck over the consumers the most, then all the energy and work into fixing it or counteracting it, everything that is done not because it’s efficient, but because it’s profitable

We are far far more productive today than we ever were before in human history. It’s all about prioritization

I wouldn’t make that generalization.

We aren’t even close to post-scarcity in, say, healthcare. Keeping people alive and healthy is expensive and labor/education intense, even without the current structural inefficiencies.

Distributing healthy food is not trivial either, which ties into that.