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Comment by chrismealy | Hacker News Reader

Some days it's robots taking all the jobs, other days it's who's going to take care of all the old people. Come on people, just pick one.

Unless you count hoarding canned food, you can't really save for the future. You can acquire claims on income in the future by buying stocks or bonds or whatever, but that income will have to be produced in the future, produced by young people working. Old people have always been taken care of by young people. The illusion of the financial system can't change that. There are relatively more older people now than there used to be, but on the whole that's a good problem to have, because people are living longer and have more control over their lives. The best way to deal with an aging population is to guarantee a decent standard of living for the young, so people don't have to wait until they're pensioners to enjoy income security.

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At least in the U.S., we can rationally worry about both things at the same time! Social Security is bankrolled by a tax on labor income. Robots, however, produce capital income. We could easily be in a position where millennials have limited employment because of automation but nonetheless carry the burden of supporting the baby boomers in retirement.

You seem to be contradicting yourself. Unemployed but working to support old people? That's employment. Not all jobs have to be in factories. Why can't elder care be a booming industry that sucks up all the unskilled labor left behind by automation? The customers are the very people who can afford it the most.

You don't understand the premise. The Parent is pointing out that taxation of working people is used to fund the care of others. Low (human) employment breaks that system.

Having a large pool of potential workers is meaningless if there is no money to pay them for the work, or to pay for the other necessary elements that go into that kind of care.

Lets face it, there is plenty of money about, the problem is that much of it is is being stashed in offshore tax havens.

>>Why can't elder care be a booming industry that sucks up all the unskilled labor left behind by automation?

Elder care is skilled labor.

> Why can't elder care be a booming industry that sucks up all the unskilled labor left behind by automation?

The problem is not finding jobs for all the people displaced by automation. The problem is finding paying jobs. In your example, who is paying for all that labor? If it's unpaid, why would anyone do it?

The obvious answer is that it's paid from the pension funds. But said funds are maintained by taxing income. So if your entire labor force is working to support older people by drawing on the pension funds that were originally produced by taxing those same older people, what happens when that labor force becomes old?

Note that it's only a problem so long as you need money to partake in the benefits of automation (i.e. to buy the goods that it produces) - but which is the case for our system today.

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