Comment by Chestofdraw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Chestofdraw | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think it's fair to say nothing happened at all.

Aging populations, coupled with low birth rates, are causing difficult political problems. In my country (UK) pensions are the biggest government expenditure next is healthcare, which the elderly use the most. This obviously has to be paid for so you have two options, raise taxes or increase immigration. Our government chose to increase immigration and a lot of people didn't like that so the government blamed the EU, this went on for a while and brexit was the eventual response.

So the chaos is already here, war might be hyperbole but a war caused by something is not unimaginable and ageing populations would be a contributing factor.

I feel there is an increasing level of bitterness directed towards the old. The government panders to them for easy votes which takes public spending from the young and my gut feeling is having policies that cater for the old is not healthy for the long term success of of a society.

>Our government chose to increase immigration and a lot of people didn't like that so the government blamed the EU, this went on for a while and brexit was the eventual response.

Well, your government chose to increase immigration while also suppressing housing construction and wages. The result is that the government set the immigrants against the native-born citizens in a zero-sum economic contest for basic human needs, while the rich eat up all available economic gains that could have gone to young workers or old pensioners.

>So the chaos is already here, war might be hyperbole but a war caused by something is not unimaginable and ageing populations would be a contributing factor.

You need young people to staff the armies.

The solution is to raise the pension age. Just politically difficult.

Raised pension age vs longer life, fairly obvious choice.

This is already a potential social problem with there being a link between deprivation and life expectancy. Increasing the retirement age may result in the poorest likely receiving no pension.

An alternative solution is to raise wages.

Would you rather have the problem of paying for your loved ones to still be around and healthy, or the problem of them being dead right now? Seems like a good problem to have. Imagine if their brains and bodies were still equivalent to 50 years old. You probably couldn't convince them to stop working. I detect lots of bitterness to the young male and foreign and little for old and citizen. Medical progress gets rid of old people too, they just remain young instead of dead.

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