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 biggest problem with one country doing some mass “debt cancellation” in modern times is that it will have economic impacts beyond that country. We live in a global economy now and there is no good economic prediction model I’m aware of for cancelling private industry debts on this scale. Moreover the global market is as much perception of the market as the hard numbers and that perception drives further investment, or in cases like this can lead to a mass retraction and the following recession/depression it can cause.

The elephant in the room is capitalism itself.

This infinite growth mindset while we live in a closed/finite ecosystem.

I hope we move to an economic system based on ecological balance.

I know a big topic of discussion among people of my generation—millennials— is that we’ve been paying into Social Security networks for 20-30 years now and yet we are increasingly wondering if ever going to actually get the benefits of them, and it seems like the people who’s retirement we’re currently supporting don’t even feel the need to leave any crumbs for us. They’ve taken everything of value and now they’re sitting on their big hill looking down at us and telling us to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps while we are forced to pay into their retirement pyramid scheme.

The problem with a debt jubilee is who holds the debt.

For example, pension funds often buy government bonds as a safe way to invest money and pay pensions. This jubilee would destroy a big chunk of those assets. Pensions would be cut or unpaid.

If you restrict the jubilee to debt held outside of the country, you have ensured that no one will lend you money for the foreseeable future.

And it won’t fix the underlying issue where the ratio of retired to workers keeps increasing.

“Shrinking birth rates” are not “causing” economic problems in any country any more than “inaccurate predictions about future birth rates” are.

The sexism inherent in the ideological assumptions and language used to discuss the topic is disgusting, FAR from “developed,” and rings of something straight out of the 18th century, or worse.

I think you’re missing some key details. The French government is in turmoil because each party wants the others to fully subscribe to their respective agendas. There’s many reasons for this, but one unifying factor is that they want to push Macron out, and by disagreeing and refusing to compromise, they make him and every PM he appoints look like failures.

Their economic issues are also very real, but their economy is still not far behind Germanys.

edit: adhd had my wires crossed in the last sentence

First: establish that the population decline has anything to do with it.

>Existing solutions to this problem – like mass immigration – have run their course.

No, this is maybe a fever dream of people who are anti-migrant, but globalization and global migration will never stop. There are very clear economic effects associated with positive economic growth (positive effects) that dictate that countries will only continue allowing new citizens to ensure positive population control. It’s countries like South Korea, and Japan, that have to worry about their situations because their population declines are substantial (Japan’s population shrank by 900,000 people in 2024 and is as closed to immigration as ever).

Good idea. Companies and governments do this all the time, it should be the same for individuals. The world won’t collapse from that.

Sorry to be naive, but Social Security is a huge savings account we’ve all been paying into. How is that the problem? It seems like a bigger problem is private health care corporations maximizing profits?

That’s why I support illegal immigration: all the tax-paying and manpower without being a drain on our social services (minus rural hospital bills).

What’s not to love!

The obvious answer is to tax wealth and ultra high income. If your country has billionaires (France does) you’re not taxing them enough. They’ve won the lottery of life, largely with the help of public resources (infrastructure, labor, legal systems, security ), and have benefitted from them the most. Economies have grown tremendously in recent decades and yet that growth has almost entirely gone to the top 0.1%.

When I was a child, we used to play with marbes. It was a winner takes all type of game. Blank/glass ones count as one, milky / colored ones were 5 and big ones count as 10. Fun times.

I was good at the game, too good even. At one point, I won almost every single marble at the street. People started not playing with me but it was too late. Only a few marbles left here and there and our families were not paying for the new ones. Other children started getting angry at me but I was hoarding my treasure like the Mighty Smaug, not giving back anything to anyone. But I was also getting bored at this as no-one was playing with me, I was lonely and bored.

At one point, my mother called all the children of the neighborhood and throw all my marbles out of the balcony, to them to collect. Suddenly, games returned back to the neighborhood. Everyone had some currency to play. In a short while, I started winning again. I was happy, I could play the game with my friends again. I also started losing a bit, just enaugh to keep everyone in game.

Our problem in 2025 as the society is the same. Some cooperations and individuals have too much money and everyone else is trying to share the remaining handful. I was lucky, my mother understands economics and she had the courage to redistribute the wealth in our little neighborhood. Our governments are not smart enough to understand the economics and they take no action (taxation) to redistribute the wealth. At one point, something bad, very very bad will happen and we all will be fucked globally. We can stop this but I see no effort from anyone (governments, really rich people, corporations etc) so far.

This sub can’t make up its mind about what the problem is. Is automation and AI going to take away all the jobs, or are declining birthrates going to fail to produce enough workers? Which problem is it? 

Do the oligarchs not have enough slaves? There is no need for more babies on this burning planet that is also increasingly fascist.

No French government is prepared to close tax loopholes that enable tax avoidance by the rich. Taxes go up on waged and salaried workers and everyone gets pissed off..

The solution to crushing debt is to declare bankruptcy. The people that made an unwise investment in lending you money take the loss.

The debt disappears. The unwise investments are punished. People make better and safer investments.

As long as the banks suffer the most, I’m all for it.

The aging of populations is directly a result of people choosing to have fewer children (and increased medical technology ext being peoples lives).  Everybody ages at the same rate, a population can only age if fewer or no new people come in at the bottom.

The baby boomers had fewer kids than their parents, so they enjoyed the boom of the 80s where collectively there was a small older and younger dependent population and a big workforce.

They didn’t set aside enough for the future, and now their children are doing the same (largely because they can’t), while also not having kids.

This problem is going to get worse, much worse, before it gets better 

Ok. Pensions and other savings are invested in bonds so you could do that if you are going to tell a person who is 65 and has saved 300k in their pension that it is rack 15k.

Cool Fuck everyone who was careful with their money. 

The solution is quite easy. Shut off tax credits and bloated government contracts to billionaires. Redirect the money to the rest of the population, instituting government subsidization for housing, child care, medical care, hospice and nursing homes. Et voila! You’ll get babies.

[France’s bureaucratic challenge](https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/french-bureaucracy/):

> France is the poster child for bureaucratic democracy. Roughly one-fourth of the country’s workforce is employed in the public sector, including central and local governments, hospitals, state-owned companies and government-funded organizations. Some 56 percent of French gross domestic product (GDP) goes to public spending. Often, different levels of government have the same mission. A myriad of agencies produce and enforce some 400,000 standards and legal requirements. The French think tank IFRAP recently estimated the French bureaucracy’s overhead costs at 84 billion euros.

[Government at a Glance 2025: France](https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/government-at-a-glance-2025-country-notes_da3361e1-en/france_fcb2c4da-en.html):

> In 2023, France had expenditure levels of 57% of GDP, above the OECD average of 42.6% the same year. Compared with 2019 (55.3%), a pre-pandemic year, general government expenditure in France increased by 1.7 percentage points. The latest data show that France’s general government expenditure increased slightly in 2024 (57.2% of GDP) compared to the previous year.

You want birth rates to increase? Let’s try giving up on our dystopic vision, that might help.