“The real barrier is the soaring cost of marriage and child-rearing. Many young people simply can’t afford to get married. To truly raise marriage rates, the government needs to lower these economic burdens.”
“The real barrier is the soaring cost of marriage and child-rearing. Many young people simply can’t afford to get married. To truly raise marriage rates, the government needs to lower these economic burdens.”
The issue is that under our current economic model consumption always has increase because revenue and growth for businesses is essential and CEOs are mandated by law to increase shareholder value as much as possible. While the number of people will and is decreasing, the ammount each individual will consume will have to rise so much as to increase overall despite the smaller number of consumers.
That, or the system, as it currently stands, will collapse - degrowth means recession and our society isn’t built to embrace recession yet.
One slight correction, this applies to publicly traded companies that appear on stock markets, yes. This isn’t a requirement in privately held companies.
It actually is for both. In the case of private firms, it’s not necessarily to increase shareholder value, but instead to increase profits and market share due to competition. If they don’t, they’re outcompeted, ran out of business and/or taken over by their competitors.
Besides that, many many private firms are owned by private equity investment companies which can be even more persistent in pushing for higher profits.
Thats a bit different. There isn’t a mandate to do those things which is where OP was going. Many private companies may engage in the same behavior but there isn’t a legal requirement they do so. There are companies that don’t just look one quarter ahead and run their businesses for the long term customer satisfaction. I’ll admit they are getting more rare though.
Yes but it’s important for onlookers to understand this mechanism. I often hear people believing that private firms don’t have to profit maximize. I used to think that too but it doesn’t match reality. The competition mechanism explains what we see around us.
And of course there are exceptions depending on the exact context and market conditions of a private firm but they don’t negate the mechanism under the assumptions it operates.
And if they aren’t they are often sold into one of those systems once the younger generation of the family decides they have no interest in running their parents’ company.
Thats certainly possible, but there’s no legal requirement they do so. With publicly traded companies the CEOs have a legal fiduciary responsibility to increase shareholder value.
Our society isn’t built to survive either.
Humans will never be able to embrace each other. We only embrace money and power. There should be no “economy” or “borders.” But that isn’t how human brains work. We can have small pockets of this way of thinking, but it always gets destroyed.