This, unfortunately, is correct. The birth rate means jack shit. People with the capital to do so will just buy multiple homes. Holiday homes, homes closer to work, rental properties etc. If the crash ever came it would be so bad it would make the Great Depression look like a picnic. This is why governments will go to ludicrous measures such as bailing out the banks during the financial crisis and then pumping the markets with money for an entire decade (!!!) afterwards. The problem is that the system might well collapse anyway. Here in the UK we seem to be right in the center of it and it’s not looking good. The health system is on the verge of collapse and almost every public profession is striking or in the process of voting to strike and there’s now talk of coordinated action between the unions for maximum pain because the government is flat out refusing to talk.

I’ve said it before but I will say it again: the government came out and said during Covid that we were essentially running a war time economy. And the war in Ukraine and the disruption it is causing means we’re essentially still in one. During WW2, tax on the wealthiest in society was around 90%. To be quite frank, that kind of tax rate for a few years on the super rich and the globo corps is the only thing that is going to turn the ship around. No-one expects that as a long term solution, no-one is saying that is how it should always be, but in times of real, actual crisis like this, the super wealthy have to step up and take responsibility to save the system they have profited from. Temporary, very high tax rates to get some normality back and then the cycle can start over again. The poor cannot shoulder the burden anymore because they’ve been shouldering it for the last decade. They have nothing left to give and there is nothing left to cut from public services.

The problem we have today is that the super rich now have very little ties to their own countries. They are hyper mobile with private jets, multiple passports, secret tax havens, and armies of lawyers and accountants to hide money and assets. They don’t have the same pride or sense of civic duty they once did in 1939-1945 where many of them took command positions in the war or oversaw industrial production. Nowadays, they are all snapping up mansions in New Zealand and other perceived safe havens in case shit goes sideways and governments decide to play hardball. Getting them to pay their fair share to keep the system running would be exceptionally difficult, perhaps even impossible.

So where does that leave us? With either a form of brutal neo-feudalism and potentially a peasant revolt or, perhaps most likely, a technology driven dystopia where enough of the populous is given just enough support to survive. Creative can kicking accounting from the civil service to quell the threat. To make it more tolerable, the populous will be plowed with endless distractions to sedate them into compliance. Bread and circuses, quite literally the standard playbook for millennia.

Eventually, once the surplus older generations have died off and the global birth rate has declined sufficiently everywhere, all of the world’s wealth will have been concentrated into a smaller set of hands and enough resources will be in circulation that life will be comfortable once again. A generation or two will go by with no direct experience of the hardships of the past and they will start living large again. Borrowing from tomorrow to pay for today. And thus the cycle continues…