It's the only way to break the system. Politicians will do nothing to fix the problems. Most people can't protest due to being unable to go long without income. Rioting will have a riot squad sent after you. However, not having children? There's nothing the government can do to force you to have children, and it even saves you time and money and improves quality of life (in first world countries). Women, in particular, experience the largest increases in happiness, as childcare responsibilities often disproportionately fall upon women.
How to end capitalism
Capitalism all boils down to wanting to make more money. The 2 ways to end capitalism are to reduce the need for money and/or make it too difficult to make money. There are several methods to achieve this:
- Providing easier access to universal needs, e.g. food and shelter. Over someone’s lifetime, the largest portion of the average person’s income goes to housing in the form of mortgage repayments and rent. Making housing affordable will significantly reduce people's need for money.
- Stopping inflation. Inflation is the largest factor responsible for needing more money. By making everything constantly more expensive, people constantly need more money. The point at which people no longer need money keeps moving further away.
- Increasing the individual wealth of people/GDP per capita. The richer people are, the closer they are to no longer needing more money and retirement.
- Regardless, it’s still necessary to increase the difficulty of making money, particularly for the ultra-rich. People like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already have enough money to last several lifetimes but they keep trying to increase their wealth. There is clearly no limit to how much money they need. This necessitates increasing the difficulty of making money. The most effective method is to increase taxes for the rich, but politicians would never agree to that. In fact, history has shown that taxes have only decreased overtime via tax cuts. The only other option is to make it harder for businesses to grow by weakening the economy. Businesses would clearly perform much worse in a declining economy than a growing economy
I discuss how population decline achieves all of this in the next section.
Why is population decline important?
Capitalism relies on constant population growth for sustained economic growth. Most economic models assume constant population growth. Without that, economies would stagnate or fall. A study found that an annual population decrease of 0.5% would cause an economy to stagnate. Larger decreases would result in economic decline.
If economies stagnate or decline, inflation would eventually stop and deflation could occur. Stopping inflation is essentially stopping the cost of living from rising. The aforementioned study also found that GDP per capita rises as population declines and that in the long-run, GDP per capita would rise to 7.4 times 2019 levels if population declined by 1% annually. Both of these occurrences would solve the cost of living crisis.
Population decline would also solve the housing crisis because a constant supply of housing would enter the market from people dying and demand would constantly fall from a shrinking population. Supply would eventually exceed demand, making housing affordable.
Employers would also need to treat employees better because people will keep becoming scarcer, which causes people to become less replaceable and more valuable. A shrinking population causes more vacancies (relative to population size), which opens up relatively more options on where to work. Also, with GDP per capita increasing to 7.4 times 2019 levels, people will have far more money. This makes work much more optional. Basically, the more options people have, the less power employers have because employees can quit anytime for another job. Changing the dynamic to employees being in power forces companies to improve their working conditions and compete with each other to attract and retain workers. Companies with poor working conditions will keep losing workers and eventually go bankrupt.
Governments also don't have a choice but to fix population decline because there are only 2 options:
- Fix population decline, or
- Face extinction and economic decline
I assume they would take the 1st option since even the countries with the lowest fertility rates, e.g. South Korea and Japan, are trying to fix their population decline. This means addressing the root causes, such as poor work-life balance and high cost of living. They have tried throwing money at the problem and it's failing completely. This concept of forcing the government to act isn't much different from striking. By placing the owner class in a losing position, they are forced to make changes to avoid further losses. However, if everything is going well for them, they will make absolutely 0 changes, which is why many issues, such as cost of living and housing affordability, have only deteriorated over the past few decades.
Finally, the environment would improve since a smaller population means lower consumption and hence impact on the environment. The benefit would be massive. There is no other option that comes remotely close to the reduction in pollution that occurs from having 1 fewer child.
How close are we to population decline?
Actually, not that far. There are several projections for world population. Most of them show the decline starting in 2050-2060. The 2022 UN projection shows 2100 but more recent fertility rate data shows fertility rates have fallen much faster than the UN predicted, so the UN low variant projection is likely more accurate.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/983253
However, there's a large detail that these projections don't show: almost all future population growth comes from undeveloped countries, particularly Africa. For example, the UN mentioned that “Countries of sub-Saharan Africa are expected to continue growing through 2100 and to contribute more than half of the global population increase anticipated through 2050.” If Africa was excluded from these projections, the world's population would already be declining in 2030. Considering not much immigration comes from Africa, it would be fair to exclude it for most developed countries.
Also, fertility rates are falling much faster than all of these studies anticipated. For example, Lancet00550-6/fulltext) predicted South Korea's fertility rate to remain at 0.82 all the way to 2100, but it's already at 0.72 and projected to fall to 0.68 in 2024. Another example is China. Lancet predicted its fertility rate to fall from 1.23 in 2021 to 1.16 in 2100, but it was already at 1.09 in 2022. Due to much faster fertility rate decline, world population (excluding Africa) may start declining before 2030.
Criticism
Many people will mention immigration as a solution to population decline but immigration isn't an unlimited supply of people. If the population of emigrating countries fall, there will be less people emigrating. As world population falls, there will be less and less people. Immigration can only delay the inevitable. Also, the top 2 countries which immigrants comes from are China and India. Lancet projections00550-6/fulltext) show that these countries will have some of the lowest fertility rates in the future, which would result in fast population decline.
Another issue is higher pensions due to an aging population but that would be insignificant compared to the gain from home ownership and higher GDP per capita. The amount saved from lower mortgage repayments and not paying rent for decades far exceeds a pension. Also, GDP per capita increasing to 7.4 times 2019 levels means having far more money individually.
Many people have pointed out that convincing people to not have children is extremely difficult. I also agree. This post is more so to discuss my theory rather than convince people not to have children. Whether I convince people or not doesn't matter. World population is already projected to fall. Not having children would speed it up but it would occur regardless.