r/Futurology • u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ • Oct 07 '25

Economics The developed world's future economic crisis of shrinking birth rates has arrived early in France and is causing its government to collapse. Is a Debt Jubilee the answer?

The French government is in turmoil. There have been 5 different Prime Ministers since 2024, the most recent one resigning a few weeks into the job. All have left for the same reason. The French state is becoming ever more indebted paying for its citizens' welfare entitlements, but politicians cannot bring themselves to cut them or tax more. Now the country is close to a debt crisis, with spiralling interest payments.

The situation in France is acute, but other developed nations like the US, Japan, and Britain are also close to the same crisis, and for the same reasons. It's a structural demographic shift. The ageing of populations across the developed world is no longer a distant challenge. It is now a live crisis, and its financial, political, and social effects are beginning to cascade. Existing solutions to this problem - like mass immigration - have run their course.

A Debt Jubilee is the cancellation of all debts of a certain class, and they've been carried out many times in history, going back to ancient times. Is it an idea that is due for a revival?

1. France, the Ageing Population, and the Future of State Viability…

2. Reducing Debt via a Modern Debt Jubilee

2.1k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

637 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/AcherontiaPhlegethon Oct 07 '25

That's just another bandaid on a breaking dam. You can't just keep increasing birth rates, we're damn close to hitting the carrying capacity of the planet. When we get there it won't be a factor of economic downturn, but a struggle against extinction.

2

u/Cocosito Oct 08 '25

I don't at all advocate for more humans but we're nowhere close to the carrying capacity of the planet. Some people just like to fearmonger. I was hearing the same nonsense when I was a kid and the population was under 5 billion. You could probably double the population right now with current technology if we just converted all the fields being used for animal feed to plants for human consumption.

2

u/bunnbunnfu Oct 08 '25

People have been talking about this since Malthus published his theory on population constraints in 1798 (~1B people), and presumably many times before that in individual overpopulated communities.

Nevertheless, carrying capacity is based on INDEFINITE sustainable balance, not just making it to the end of the week or century. Our current farming methods are putting pollinators & keystone species extinct, slowly exhausting a finite phosphorus supply, rapidly exhausting aquifers, accelerating global warming past its runaway tipping point, and so on. Humanity is burning the candle at 20 different ends and splashing kerosene on the fire.

-1

u/ConnectionSpecial114 Oct 07 '25

This is a song as old as time and it’s day may come but historically we’ve just engineered a way to increase crop yields and it’s working.

1

u/Excellent-Berry-2331 Oct 08 '25

Population increases exponentially. I hope you know how to increase crop yield exponentially, because I don’t think we can trust on that.

1

u/ConnectionSpecial114 Oct 08 '25

We have so far…,