But who is saying that billionaires are gods? who says that Amazon would exist without the state?
The state and extremely wealthy people/companies both are deeply flawed in many ways, everyone knows this and no one is disputing it.
Headlines
OECD 2024 report: 28.3% of Japanese women born in 1975 are childless, compared to 11.9% born in 1955. (and, my writing on the birth rate crisis)
- Thread starter ggx2ac
- Replies 88
- Views 6,321
- Start date
- Market Research
The state and extremely wealthy people/companies both are deeply flawed in many ways, everyone knows this and no one is disputing it.
OP
OP
- Thread starter
- #52
It's funny that you continue on being this obtuse with your thread derail that started with:
Tokuiten
Banned
Enthusiast
Infected with 'Xenoblade'. 御免なさい🙇♀️
Antagonistic behaviour, thread derail, repeated behaviour, 4th infraction in the last seven months
So both the state AND billionaires are equally "necessary"?
OP
OP
- Thread starter
- #55
Not to mention that Walmart also underpays its workers that the workers have to go on Food Stamps i.e. government welfare while Walmart makes billions.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yep. Store employees, restaurant employees, a whole bunch of national chains, etc. are all paid like crap and can barely survive. If it's labor intensive, then they are not seen as valuable or treated with even a modicum of dignity.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
And there would not be towns without rivers nearby. What's the point of that argument? Entrepreneurship and war were the drivers of development.
I don't understand why the era of farming was better for people. But it is usually the take of people living in developed countries.
OP
OP
- Thread starter
- #58
Thanks for taking my post out of context. I'm going to repost the whole thing here for you:
Your whataboutism doesn't take away from the fact that capitalism as it exists cannot function without the state because it is inherently unstable.
Calm down. You still need to contextualize what a billionaire does and what their impact is to measure their use. I don't know why you are so hung up on that. If a billionaire makes 20 billion, you need to see how he uses that money to judge him.
Come on.
Tokuiten
Banned
Enthusiast
Infected with 'Xenoblade'. 御免なさい🙇♀️
Antagonistic behaviour, thread derail, repeated behaviour, 4th infraction in the last seven months
Not "come on". I'm repeatedly astounded how you talk about billionaires as if they're a force of nature that MUST exist, that we cannot live without, and that is a good thing.
Fwiw, a point could be made that millionaires are necessary to drive certain business. Billionaires are nothing but money hogs that nurture further divide.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The answer is a billionaire has no use but to leech on everyone else. They don't actually provide anything, and they should be heavily taxed, and their wealth redistributed so that money can go into social programs. Billionaires do not help anybody but themselves and will fight tooth and nail to not help anybody else.
This is culture-based. The US is extreme, and the stress and lack of mobility make sure a large part of the workforce is unhappy. Where I live, the vast majority of people are happy in their job and it's incomparable to the US. It's not billionaires that's the problem, it's your sheer population. You are not gonna have a country with over 300 million work very well. If you taxed all the billionaires, the effect on long-term work culture would be about zero because there are completely different powers that rule it.
When you ask gotcha questions, you must expect silly answers. I don't think billionaires are a force of nature that must exist, but your rhetoric of "fuck capitalism" comes straight from the really low-brow places on twitter and reddit, just like this OP. What exactly do you think would happen if billionaires would get taxed harder? what social change do you expect? this is far more complicated than you give it credit for.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Unions had to fight for even basic breaks and to end child labor. Reagan stripped the US of a lot of social programs and safety nets when he came to power and introduced his own brand of "Reaganomics" which helped make way for the billionaires we have to today. A lot of the suffering we have in the US largely stems from Reagan that you can literally point out his term in historical graphs of where things diverge and start going wrong.
Even pointing out Reagan is a point for this thread and neoliberalism's issues because his "Reaganomics" was all neoliberal reforms which only harmed everything we have today.
Even pointing out Reagan is a point for this thread and neoliberalism's issues because his "Reaganomics" was all neoliberal reforms which only harmed everything we have today.
Tokuiten
Banned
Enthusiast
Infected with 'Xenoblade'. 御免なさい🙇♀️
Antagonistic behaviour, thread derail, repeated behaviour, 4th infraction in the last seven months
My "fuck capitalism" comes from my very own believes and life experience. Fuck capitalism.
What would change if we taxed billionaires harder? Our governments would have more money to use for their citizens. Stop it with your "it's far more complicated" which is only an attempt to defend billionaires. However, we shouldn't just tax billionaires harder. We should make it so nobody can become a billionaire anymore. There's no need for it. The very existence of billionaires is the result of unregulated hyper capitalism. Being a millionaire allows you to stop working and enjoy life. There's no need to be richer than that. There's only one thing that requires more than millions: Political influence. And no person should gain political influence via money.
Last edited:
It doesn't matter if the government has more money if they don't know how to spend it. If you removed billionaires right now and all their companies, the entire nation would self-implode overnight.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
No economy system can exist without some form of state (whether it is a country, village or anything). Not sure what it has to do with being stable or unstable.
We don't really know if Amazon could exist without government because we can't really tell if Internet would not be created without government either. I am pretty sure there was a lot of research on data transmission. Radio, telegraph etc.
Tokuiten
Banned
Enthusiast
Infected with 'Xenoblade'. 御免なさい🙇♀️
Antagonistic behaviour, thread derail, repeated behaviour, 4th infraction in the last seven months
No shit, sherlock, if any such crass move was made rn, it wouldn't work. But nobody is saying that, so why did you reply with it? Weird. First you go on about "it's too complex", and now you cannot even think for yourself that the end of billionaires would obviously be a medium-slow process?
That's exactly why I said it was complicated. Because it's ingrained in our society. They are also not gonna stay in the US if that happens which complicates it further.
OP
OP
- Thread starter
- #69
I'll explain it to you since it wasn't obvious even though we have been living under capitalism our whole lives.
In capitalism, there is periodically an economic downturn somewhere around every 4 to 7 years. It's labelled as the "business cycle". You have already seen this just happen in 2020 with the start of covid where there was a lot of economic activity thanks to state intervention, and now in 2023 to 2024 a recession occurred with lots of job layoffs in the video game industry as was mentioned by another poster earlier especially from the company Microsoft with its $3T market cap.
That's an example of the instability of capitalism and it has happened constantly, you can look at what happened in the past and there is no doubt it will happen in the future.
There is no way the "free market" would survive without state intervention, if the government wasn't handing out welfare to everyone then there would be a revolt.
With how unstable capitalism is, there is no nation that can run capitalism on a "free market" basis because the free market would collapse.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
There has always been cycles it is just in the past people resolved them by waging wars, plundering and stuff.
OP
OP
- Thread starter
- #71
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The point is that I don't share the negative view on capitalism that you have. That's all to it.
OP
OP
- Thread starter
- #73
That's okay, I don't share your view on the idea that "going back to living in the Middle Ages or growing humans in tubes" as solutions to fertility rates.
This is such a strange sentence, are you using chat gpt and wikipedia? A business cycle is not a capitalistic system.
OP
OP
- Thread starter
- #75
*Goes through explaining how capitalism is unstable that it can't survive without the state*
*Sees quote*
I think you're the one that needs to calm down, not me.
Is this really how you want to be spending your time?
*Sees quote*
I think you're the one that needs to calm down, not me.
Is this really how you want to be spending your time?
The OECD report's light on demographic data, so here's some additional context courtesy of BirthGauge on Twitter. He has somewhat of a following, so his replies are generally filled with people posting more frequent updates from national or subnational authorities reporting their demographic statistics.
I'll be posting some of his tweets and retweets over here for their data.
Here's his summary of up-to-date births and TFR estimates, with Europe on the left and then a selection of countries from the Americas, AU/NZ, and Central/East/SE Asia on the right.
Some of the countries he forecasts will have a lower TFR than Japan this year include Thailand, Costa Rica, and Chile. These are not (yet) developed economies, but they will be an interesting watch over the medium term as they will approach the demographic character of developed economies in Europe and the Americas.
While the OECD report makes a big deal out of childlessness, that explains only part of the the decline in birthrates. To get a clearer look, we can use Birth Order, which is closely correlated to the TFR. By using this metric, we can see the differences between how countries get their births (e.g. low childlessness but a large number of small families or high childlessness with more larger families).
Birth order helps explain how countries' TFRs change over time.
Can you see where the postwar Baby Boom was for the US? That helps explain how the post-WW2 Baby Boom came to be.
Speaking of historical baby booms, taking infant and early childhood mortality into account shows that decreases in births were offset by advances in medical care in modern times.
We can use another metric, cohort fertility, to figure out trends (e.g. are women simply postponing having children?).
Lastly, some more selected tweets showing data on a more granular level than nation states:
...with metropolitan areas generally having depressed fertility compared to the countries they belong to.
And now, a more tangible representation of the effects of declining birthrates: age pyramids.
Please guess which of these age pyramids is going to have to increase retirement ages or slash pensions or both.
This has been quite the data dump, so I'll just close this post with this tweet that coincidentally summarizes my thoughts on the discussion in this thread.
Let's say that, at the level of a country, size matters.
I'll be posting some of his tweets and retweets over here for their data.
Here's his summary of up-to-date births and TFR estimates, with Europe on the left and then a selection of countries from the Americas, AU/NZ, and Central/East/SE Asia on the right.
Some of the countries he forecasts will have a lower TFR than Japan this year include Thailand, Costa Rica, and Chile. These are not (yet) developed economies, but they will be an interesting watch over the medium term as they will approach the demographic character of developed economies in Europe and the Americas.
While the OECD report makes a big deal out of childlessness, that explains only part of the the decline in birthrates. To get a clearer look, we can use Birth Order, which is closely correlated to the TFR. By using this metric, we can see the differences between how countries get their births (e.g. low childlessness but a large number of small families or high childlessness with more larger families).
Birth order helps explain how countries' TFRs change over time.
Can you see where the postwar Baby Boom was for the US? That helps explain how the post-WW2 Baby Boom came to be.
Speaking of historical baby booms, taking infant and early childhood mortality into account shows that decreases in births were offset by advances in medical care in modern times.
We can use another metric, cohort fertility, to figure out trends (e.g. are women simply postponing having children?).
Lastly, some more selected tweets showing data on a more granular level than nation states:
...with metropolitan areas generally having depressed fertility compared to the countries they belong to.
And now, a more tangible representation of the effects of declining birthrates: age pyramids.
Please guess which of these age pyramids is going to have to increase retirement ages or slash pensions or both.
This has been quite the data dump, so I'll just close this post with this tweet that coincidentally summarizes my thoughts on the discussion in this thread.
Let's say that, at the level of a country, size matters.
Spend my time? tell me, how much time did you spend writing this OP?
Mods, I don't understand what is going on, I don't know if ggx2ac sponsors the site which gives him privileges or something. But isn't this supposed to be a gaming forum or is political content allowed?
While ggx2ac does write some good threads about gaming-related finance, most of his stuff is based around some financial topic that he twists into some insane anti-capitalist content. He will usually write some little line around games to pretend it's on-topic, but this is and always has been about politics for him. He is clearly using this place as his political dumping ground.
OP
OP
- Thread starter
- #80
To use your words, I don't know why you are so hung up on that. You're definitely not calm.
You could have not posted in my thread at all but you're the reason it has reached 2,000 views.
And now the thread has reached a new state of absurdity from you.
I think the main thing is that most of the site includes some mods agree with ggx2ac. Gimmick, you are one of the weird ones who thinks billionaires do much positive stuff. I think most are probably uncomfortable talking about politics but politics are essential for the long term discussion of the economy and industry.
Alright let's pull back on turning this thread into (a.) some fixated discussion on billionaires, (b.) a character study of posters, and (c.) completely unrelated to gaming. The thread is tenuous already when it comes to the purpose of this forum.
This thread has been allowed as it ties back to a previous discussion and article on birthrates and the impact of that on gaming in Japan. It is a loose connection but for now we are allowing it.
Additionally @Gimmick don't call for mods in a post, use the report function. It's very awkward to just see mods get called in like Batman with a bat signal.
This thread has been allowed as it ties back to a previous discussion and article on birthrates and the impact of that on gaming in Japan. It is a loose connection but for now we are allowing it.
Additionally @Gimmick don't call for mods in a post, use the report function. It's very awkward to just see mods get called in like Batman with a bat signal.
Passive incomes need to increase, housing costs in cities need to go down, rural areas need to become more popular. The higher living standards of people leads to a expensive lifestyle. I don't think the issue is complex or anything like that but the solution certainly isn't easy. I'm in favor of capitalism but the truth of the matter is that some companies can get too big and basically become a monopoly and decide the fate of humanity. Just think of it, all the data that Google has, it uses it to strenghen their business to a degree that no one can compete and it is not paying for that data at all. It's all free for them. I hate these kinds of megacoorporations. If anything, any capitalist system should not allow a company to become a monopoly. There should be competition at a large scale.
Great post, the vast majority of the world is decreasing their TFR without increasing their Human Development Index at the same pace, in my country Brazil, we already had to do a retirement pension reform because not only is a ponzi scheme like most pensions around the world, the TFR has gone below the replacement levels in 2005 and we are en route to a population decline in the next 10-15 years, even in poor and uneducated regions you have 1-2 children in contrast with what used to be much higher. I think only Malaysia, Thailand and Chile could become developed without reaching the population decline, unfortunately many will be old and poor.
Outsider cases to the rest of the world are USA where i've noticed that families with 3 or more children are more common and indeed proved by the data above, Israel, and former URSS and their allied states. In the case of Israel, Haredis are responsible for most of the births, the non-haredi jews and arabs have a TFR around 2.7, in the case of the former it could be by religion, the latter two, by war scars. In case of eastern europe, there was a major emigration and population decline with the fall of communism in 89-91 and only by 2000 saw many returning to the homeland and an economic prosperity.
As stated in the first few tweets, the fertility rate worldwide was already falling pre-WW2, the war itself caused a incentive to many to marry and have children as quick possible because they were afraid of being killed without successors, after that the major economic prosperity in turn made having children cheap as buying something. The reason why TFR was falling before that is because our living standards were getting better over the years alongside cultural changes, cheap labour and survival were two reasons why children were being born before that.
Fast forward we have numerous programs in developed countries to increase the TFR, but it has come to little, you can have a few years of increase then it all goes back to where it was before, its not just financial reasons, its also cultural, you have people who doesn't want children, others who want to settle with just one, even if they had the financial means to have more. Another very important thing that is forgotten to be told is that you need two, not one, children to keep the population level, which is a very hard thing to expect from anyone.
TL;DR: Its not just economical factors, but societal-cultural ones that play a equal role. A poor family in the 60s and 00s would have children regardless of the challenges, now the same challeges today are unnaceptable to be dealt with. The economic prosperity from that time even if its repeat today might not bring the same TFR increase.
Last edited:
I'll back off and stop using the bat signal. Next time I'll use my horn.
I'm going to add my two bits and say that one reason why people are not having children is because we can't even afford to buy a house anymore.
The power and the wealth is increasingly in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and the cost of living has been skyrocketing to the point where putting money aside to buy property, even with a very well paid job, is a big challenge. Let alone making and raising kids.
If all those CEOs want the population to change attitude and start making more kids, they should stop being greedy assholes and start sharing more wealth with everybody. Stop giving all the money to the shareholders. Regulate large corporation and stop having them hoarding property and inflating prices. Tax the super wealthy and corporation, and distribute it to everybody.
Do it already. No excuses.
That's a bunch of crap and I'm going to challenge it.
I'd change a society of a few ultra billionaires for a society with many, many more millionaires immediately. Billionaires create enough jobs to keep their business steady and protected, and the vast majority of the profits and wealth steadily remains in their pockets and in the hands of the shareholders, who in most cases are large corporations or wealthy shareholders. Employees often get only enough pay to survive paycheck to paycheck and when profits go down, they get fired. Shareholders keep receiving their profits.
Forbes' annual world's billionaires (2021) list included a record-breaking 2,755 billionaires with a combined worth of $13.1 trillion (https://www.reuters.com/business/pandemic-boosts-super-rich-share-global-wealth-2021-12-07/). This bunch of money could be used to fund schools, infrastructures, rail services, parks, and a trillion other projects.
Keeping all of this in the hands of a few people is locking wealth away instead of using it for the benefit of the whole humanity.
Worst: it's not a recipe for innovation. Putting too much wealth and power in the hands of the few does not stimulate competition, nor it is conducive to a healthy democratic system, nor it is conducive to collaboration across multiple minds. It mostly leads to echo chambers, where opinions are unchallenged.
It is undefendable for anybody who has eyes and ears.
The power and the wealth is increasingly in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and the cost of living has been skyrocketing to the point where putting money aside to buy property, even with a very well paid job, is a big challenge. Let alone making and raising kids.
If all those CEOs want the population to change attitude and start making more kids, they should stop being greedy assholes and start sharing more wealth with everybody. Stop giving all the money to the shareholders. Regulate large corporation and stop having them hoarding property and inflating prices. Tax the super wealthy and corporation, and distribute it to everybody.
Do it already. No excuses.
That's a bunch of crap and I'm going to challenge it.
I'd change a society of a few ultra billionaires for a society with many, many more millionaires immediately. Billionaires create enough jobs to keep their business steady and protected, and the vast majority of the profits and wealth steadily remains in their pockets and in the hands of the shareholders, who in most cases are large corporations or wealthy shareholders. Employees often get only enough pay to survive paycheck to paycheck and when profits go down, they get fired. Shareholders keep receiving their profits.
Forbes' annual world's billionaires (2021) list included a record-breaking 2,755 billionaires with a combined worth of $13.1 trillion (https://www.reuters.com/business/pandemic-boosts-super-rich-share-global-wealth-2021-12-07/). This bunch of money could be used to fund schools, infrastructures, rail services, parks, and a trillion other projects.
Keeping all of this in the hands of a few people is locking wealth away instead of using it for the benefit of the whole humanity.
Worst: it's not a recipe for innovation. Putting too much wealth and power in the hands of the few does not stimulate competition, nor it is conducive to a healthy democratic system, nor it is conducive to collaboration across multiple minds. It mostly leads to echo chambers, where opinions are unchallenged.
It is undefendable for anybody who has eyes and ears.
Some billionaires are very generous with their money but most are greedy bastards! Such is life.
