• Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Need citation for this.

    Napoleonic Wars, WW1, WW2. Not even including the US, Russia, China and Japan all had explosive growth after WW2.

    War is a net negative every time.

    If a sudden drop in working age labor causes a death spiral, then Russia would have had a death spiral after WW2. Instead they had a boom and put a man in space before the US.

    The labor involved with raising children is similar but is closer to an investment.

    It’s not an investment because at the end of a child’s growth, you now have a consumer who requires more resources. When an elderly dies, that frees up resources for everyone.

    The Black Plague is a accepted factor for the Renaissance. Labor became more valuable. The death of so many workers allowed the surviving workers wages to increase and they got more independence. It wasn’t a death spiral.

    BUT you do have less total labor.

    Total less labor isn’t a problem when you don’t need more labor.

    If you shrink your labor pool too quickly, you won’t be able to sustain your infrastructure causing a collapse.

    WW2 was a far quicker and far more severe labor pool shrinkage for many countries in the world. There was no collapse.

    • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      It’s not an investment because at the end of a child’s growth, you now have a consumer who requires more resources.

      You realize working people produce more resources than they consume, right? If they didn’t, there would be no economy at all.

        • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          Dude, where do you think our food, housing, and consumer goods come from? Your cynicism has overshot so far you’re just denying the existence of the world around you.

          • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Dude, where do you think our food,

            People make products to sell to other people. When we build more homes than we have people to buy, prices go down.

            When there is more capital in the market than things to buy, people put it into investments which raises prices on those investments.

            1946 US wasn’t a post-apocalyptic hellscape because we only had a population of 140 million and 1 million of the most able bodied workers were killed/wounded.

            Your cynicism has overshot so far

            I’m not the one claiming a population decline is a death spiral.

            Japan is still so overcrowded that there are train conductors who jobs is to physically smash the riders into the train because there isn’t enough room.

            https://imgur.com/gallery/cq7aBfT

            It is my opinion that like natural predator-prey-food cycles, when population declines enough that regular people can again afford to have children like they did after WW2 because wages were high and real estate was cheap, population will go up again.