Comment by kartan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kartan | Hacker News Reader

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> (Not saying Social Security is bad in concept, but it only works in times of sharp population growth, and even then, banking on the youth to carry you just because seems squicky to many ).

Social Security works with economic growth. It doesn't matter if you get 10 babies or 10 robots. Automation makes possible to keep proper living standards without exponential population growth.

Social Security, as other services like education, stops working because it is not shared.

Actually, with enough automation, it is easier to satisfy a smaller population.

There are 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the United States. Self-driving trucks mean that you need 3.5 million fewer babies to carry out that task. Just 3 million if you actually need 500,000 people to maintain the software.

So, I agree with you that in the past Social Security was depending on population growth. That has been changing fast for the past 50 years. There is no economical reason to not have Social Security in the future.

> Social Security works with economic growth. It doesn't matter if you get 10 babies or 10 robots.

This would be true except the SS tax ceiling is extremely low. SS does not scale on the rich past $128,400.

One man owning 10 robots will pay less SS than 10 workers.

This is the whole reason why the "crisis" of SS is vastly overstated and a political choice, given the obvious available solutions.

> One man owning 10 robots will pay less SS than 10 workers.

That can be changed. The difficulty is more related to corruption and lobbying than any economical constrain.

But, you are right. If nothing changes on how taxes are collected, or if it continues changing against social wellfare then it is a problem.

I believe you mean that some theoretical structure vaguely like social security could work, in principle, without population growth. However, the social security system we actually have acquires its funds from the income of individuals.

You could structure social security as a tax on capital, but that isn't how it currently works.

> You could structure social security as a tax on capital, but that isn't how it currently works.

Yes. 100% true. I just mean that it can be changed. It is not an economic constraint, but it is the current situation.

Self driving trucks don’t pay payroll taxes (as distinct from general income tax). The engineers and mechanics maintaining them do, but if the net cost of them plus the tech isn’t cheaper than the current human driving approach then the industry wouldn’t be switching to it anyway.

When social security was started 159 people payed into it per recipient. Nowadays it's about 3 people paying in for a single recipient.

It's absolutely tied to population.

That's a really disingenuous number, most people were not eligible for social security the first few years it was in place, so the worker:beneficiary ratio was very high. The ratio has been pretty stable for 50 years. Its about 3:1 now, it was about 3:1 in 1970 [0][1].

[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employed-persons

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html

I assume the point is that if (for instance) 3 people today make the equivalent of 159 people in the past, then it still works out. (Whether or not that's true, I don't know.)

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