When will these people just die already?!
Right-wingers reach for these religious or moralistic justifications and laws, but Putin is probably just noticing, like many other countries, that their economy is screwed if their birth rates continue to decline. And yet the planet is screwed if we continue to increase. As climate change eats away at the habitable areas of the planet, the obvious thing is for habitable countries with declining birth rates to accept many immigrants from places climate causes people to flee from. This will help those people and help the receiving country’s economy. Unfortunately the right wing is also too wrapped up in xenophobia to accept this solution. They’d rather double down on controlling women.
I recently heard a “housing expert” say that cities have to keep growing, there’s no sustainable static level of population, and I thought “there’s better be or we’re all fucked.”
The problem with capitalism is that it only works if there’s perpetual growth, which (as many before me have pointed out) is the logic of cancer.
Tbf, people moving from rural areas to more dense and urban areas is kind of inevitable as time goes on. Megacities when?
Economies are only screwed with declining birthrate if the goal is unlimited growth. What will happen if the trend continues is stability. Stability is bad for empire building types. It leaves less room for manipulation.
In any country with public healthcare, there is a problem with how to afford to care for the elderly when the population contains more elderly people needing expensive healthcare than working people paying the taxes that fund it. This seems like a problem that extends beyond capitalism’s growth-seeking. It’s an issue of how to achieve stability.
