A demographic time bomb that could hit America | Hacker News Reader

A demographic time bomb that could hit America

washingtonpost.com

23 pointseplanit61 comments

For the USA, this probably isn't a problem as long as we allow immigration the way we do now. Here's the population pyramid diagram for the USA:

https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...

For Japan: https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2017/

For the whole world: https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2017/

Ideally, the "pyramid" would be a cylinder, with all ages being roughly the same distribution. This would be a population that is not growing or shrinking. You can see that Japan's younger population is less than it's older population, for the whole world there are many younger people than older... and for the USA it's pretty close to a cylinder.

So will this demographic time bomb hit America? Probably not.

Isn't allowing immigration like we do just going to create an even greater demographic time bomb in the future? Eventually, immigration is going to decline and we are going to be faced with an even greater problem because the population is so much larger.

And that's not factoring in climate change issues. Shifting millions of people from countries that cause very little pollution on a per capita basis to the country that leads the world in per capita basis is going to add to climate and pollution issues.

Seems like we are between a rock and a hard place.

The long play is that by allowing immigration will make the USA the youngest nation in the near future, and beyond that, immigration from previously 1st world countries because the American economy is much better for them than their own. Younger nations have more workers to keep social security afloat.

One day these young workers get old and need social security. You can't rely on a constant influx of young people forever.

It hasn't stopped since 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

The whole battle about immigration shows to me that the country is filling up slowly. For a long time they could just settle on empty land or take it from native americans but that's not possible anymore.

The BBC has pushed the line a couple of times recently that 'people think the UK is overcrowded, but there's actually loads of room left!'. Somehow the environmental consequences of concreting over the countryside magically disappear when it might lead us to question open borders.

> Isn't allowing immigration going to create an even greater demographic time bomb in the future?

No. This particular problem happens when there is a bubble of elderly people to care for, and not enough young people to fund/provide the care.

Importing a bunch of young families compensates for the declining birth rate among the native population, and helps smooth out demographic changes.

* * *

There are certainly also other serious global problems resulting from providing a resource-intensive “modern” lifestyle to billions of people.

I would disagree on two points; that a cylinder is desirable and that you need immigration to fix the inverted pyramid.

On point two; the inverted pyramid is IMO largely a symptom of a changing demographic layout. Younger people create less families and briefly cause the pyramid to invert while the ripple of low births goes through the entire lifetime of a human.

On point one; if your pyramid is a cylinder, it implies people die at any age in a uniform distribution. It is unlikely this will be the case ever. IMO a somewhat slopped pyramid is okay, people tend to die as they get older and this lessens the costs on social welfare systems (plus being more realistic).

The article mentions childcare, and I can definitely attest that it is a factor in people's family size decisions, along with the push for two working parents. We are privileged enough that we can survive on one income, however, were that not the case we'd be looking at paying $12/k a year for each child in childcare, on top of other baby-rearing costs. As it is, my wife plans to drop to (extreme) part time once we hit baby #2 ... at that point we'll still suffer some loss, but at baby #3 it will be a wash.

And why such a childcare shortage? The government, of course. In a time of extreme demand, shortage, and rapidly rising rates, the availability of childcare is still decreasing. I asked about this, and our local center has to report to & be inspected by three separate government agencies. Their compliance costs are enormous. They're as much a paperwork collection, processing, and reporting center as they are a childcare center. With the advent of nanny cams, I can watch my child any time I choose, and record the action whenever I wish. Makes me wonder if the regulation needs to be quite so heavy in the modern age.

On a separate but related note: the impact of low birthrates and long life expediencies is unavoidable. Either:

1) People need to work longer, or

2) Retired people need to have a lesser lifestyle (so that the working population can live approximately the same lifestyle that current retirees had while they were working), or

3) Working people need to have a lesser lifestyle compared to past generations (to free up resources for retirees)

It seems that we are slow-walking towards 3), which is a problem because it'll to some extent push the working population into a death spiral. They have less, so they work more, so they have less children, and the problem worsens. Repeat.

At the risk of getting political, those regulations around child care providers were put in place due to rampant child abuse by care providers. No one just sat down one day and said "you know what we need, some overbearing regulations for no reason". Children were dying at the hands of their care givers. The regulations only seem unnecessary because they're working. Now that children aren't being beaten to death by their care givers quite as often, people now have the luxury of asking why there are so many regulations.

Cameras have blind spots, can be turned off, and if you really want to monitor them, as a parent you have to be able to watch the camera all day to ensure nothing bad is happening while your back is turned. Hardly an ideal situation for a working parent.

How do you explain then that many states have almost no regulations on small child care operations while others have extremely harsh and specific ones?

Past experience in those states, perhaps? Scandals reported in the media within the state but not nationally that meant the state electorate demanded regulation?

I don't know which government you work under, but it's pretty simple math.

* There are maximum child to minder ratios. Where I live it's 3:1 for kids under 1.

* Minimum wage exists, though childminding really shouldn't be a minimum wage job. I want someone who knows CPR and first aid watching my kid. And who isn't looking for a better job all the time.

Say you're open 8 AM to 6 PM. Minimum wage is $10 per hour.

That's 10 hours * $10 = $100 per day. Or $33.33 per kid.

Figure 21 workdays per month. That's ~$700 per month per kid.

But of course, minders go on lunch breaks! And they take vacations! Tack on another 15% to cover for that and you're at $805.

Those child minders want health insurance! How dare they! Tack on a few hundred per month per employee, or another ~$100 or so per kid. You're at $905.

Oh, but the government demands taxes on what you pay the employee too! Well you're up to $1000+ per month, or the 12k you mention,

So do you want to increase the child to minder ratio, cut benefits, or cut opening hours?

Or, maybe you hire someone from a poor country as an au pair. They're abusing the hell out of their student visa and you're breaking employment law but it means you get cheap childcare.

Of course, there are places where childcare has a low price to the consumer. It's generally where the government is footing the bill.

Regarding your points 1,2,3, there is another option - we use improved technology to recognize that an improved lifestyle can be had for the same, or lower, cost. A basic, decent life can be pretty cheap these days. Except for housing, because the retirees voted to make it illegal to build new homes, and health care, which is too large a topic to cover here.

> So do you want to increase the child to minder ratio, cut benefits, or cut opening hours?

All of the above, if the market will bear it (and I think in the case of reduced benefits, it will not - see my last paragraph).

The point is that these decisions shouldn't be made by the government for the center and the parents who use it.

Where I live the ratio is 4:1. Who's to say that 5:1 couldn't work, aside from the fact that the government doesn't allow it? What about something like 9:2, which would enable a single person to handle tasks that crop up (changing diapers, dealing with a fussy child, etc.) while the other handles the happy kids? what about 3 rooms at 6:1 with 2 floating caregivers who go where they're needed?

Under a heavily regulated environment, none of these options can be explored.

As far as benefits, as you said, I think at this point they are probably already getting above mandatory minimums, so regulation probably isn't having a huge effect there.

> We are privileged enough that we can survive on one income, however, were that not the case we'd be looking at paying $12/k a year for each child in childcare, on top of other baby-rearing costs.

This seems like a bit of a puzzle here. Staying home means you lose one income. But going to work costs you almost that entire income if you have a couple of children for childcare costs, and on top of that you also never see your children. So why not stay home? Same money plus better life for all three of you.

Is it so you can stay in the industry and in the future when they go to school you have kept your high paying job?

It's not as straightforward. The stay-at-home-parent leaves the workforce which is good for the first pre-school years cost-wise, but getting back into the workforce after those "lost" years (bad term, as they're not lost -- there's true value in them to society, it's just not paid work) is inheritently difficult.

Overall lifetime income is impacted by this decision.

This is the substantive metric for the gender wage gap as that gap is measured in the overall lifetime income, not the per-wage of equivalent positions as it's inaccurately reported.

Women generally leave the workforce to care for children, lose their prestige/position and when re-entering have to start at the beginning or lower position/wage and try to catch-up.

Better childcare options would improve this immeasurably, or less stigma around both parents sharing the childcare time equitably would as well. In some countries this is the case, and it is having a measurable impact on childbirth rates.

This exactly.

My wife and I have one child. For the first six months, the child was home with her (the typical maternity period in this country)

For the second six months, she worked and the child was in daycare. It was a really good daycare, and the minder was damn near angelic. But it was also kind of horrible. Many nights I had put the child to bed before she was home from work. We wondered what the hell the point of having a kid you get to see on the weekends is.

After paying for childcare, she had relatively little to show for her job. We were also a lot more likely to do expensive things like eat out, etc. due to exhaustion. Part time work was not an option for either of us.

We eventually decided to have one parent stay home. It was her, because she made less money (perhaps because of a self-reinforcing bias that mothers are more likely to stay home, and thus are paid less?). Realistically speaking, it wasn't "I want to take a few years off work" but rather "I am throwing my _entire career_ in to the dumpster for this". Because in most fields that have decent jobs, you just _can't_ leave for 3-5 years and hop back in where you left off. It doesn't happen.

Paradoxically, because she's home with the kid this makes us more likely to consider having a second, because childcare is a sunk cost. If there were inexpensive childcare and better part-time options we'd be more likely to stick with one. I suspect this explains why Nordic countries have low birth rates and high labour participation rates from mothers. That's not a bad thing though - ultimately the world should be working to get the fertility rate below 2 children per women, especially in the developed world.

We fell in to the two-income trap in the 1970's and it's been getting worse ever since. Combined with the death of decent-paying blue collar jobs (though programming is quick becoming blue collar) it will result in similar decisions.

My mom stopped working when I was born. My dad didn’t earn a large income but was extremely cautious with money. You can save a lot of money by never eating out, not flying, and so on. There are people who nickel and dime everything but make terrible financial decisions in aggregate (eg getting a great deal on something you don’t need.)

Interestingly I have multiple male friends now who have children and work from home, and whose wives are the ones who leave to go to an office. I imagine there are quite a few people that would fit under that category reading this thread now. This was an option none of our parents had even a hint of being possible.

Ultimately you have to decide what you really want to do and how you are going to do it. The macroeconomic limitations exist. In the long term they may become even more constrained than they are now. There are only so many resources to go around. The worst that you can do is end up in a situation where you aren’t doing what you want and can’t justify it.

It is also because there just isn't enough money in the business. For infants, most states have a 4:1 ratio of babies to teachers. Most people pay $40 a day for this kind of care. Most centers have to cover 12 hours for that cost because people drop off their kids before and after a 9 hour work day. Just doing the math 4 * $40 is $160 and paying teachers a paltry $10 / hour leaves staffing costs at $120. That is not enough left to offer benefits to teachers and food for the kids and toys and cleaning and ... Generally you also have to run under capacity because so many people get sick as germs are passed around and you want to be able to run at full capacity when someone is out. Now you end up with normal operations running at 75%-90% which leaves almost no extra money.

> Their compliance costs are enormous.

You are totally free to use an unlicensed daycare provider. They will be entirely unencumbered by regulations from the state, and you will have to assess the provider's quality and safety on your own.

Generally not. We prefer to have our child in a center, where there are more children, more support staff, and more teachers, and in our state such institutions are not allowed to operate without a license (the state will shut them down).

You prefer them for their sheer size, rather than for the safety provided by the licensing process?

How does the rest of the world manage to have enormous families (by our standards) without childcare service and on a much smaller income?

To put it simply and bluntly - those cultures remembered it takes a village to raise a child and have sane cultural expectations around children and child rearing.

In the US the typical "middle class" child raising experience is utterly miserable. There is very little expectation in the rest of the world to end your life as you know it just because you had kids.

Family, friends, even the community all sort of collectively engage in child rearing. In the US it's gone down this relentless road of sequestering oneself off from society whilst simultaneously being expected to devote your entire existence to child rearing or be seen as a bad person.

This is a topic I've thought a lot on and have my ideas of what caused it, but it's really not for a place like HN :)

So true. The last time my wife and I had a night out by ourselves was like July.

Not sure on what specific countries you referring to, but my guess would be mostly:

1. Having social norms or laws that force women to stay at home.

2. Having large economic inequality to make the cost of childcare services affordable to certain families.

1) Extended family and close friends care for children. If you have a friend or sister or cousin who's pregnant or just given birth, they keep an eye on your kids. Same goes for elders who no longer work outside the home.

2) Lower standards for supervision of children - as it was in the US in the 1970's, it's considered normal not to know where your 9-year-old is or what they're up to between breakfast and dinnertime.

3) Lower penalties for leaving the workforce for several years to take care of infants and toddlers - jobs that don't involve career progression or even necessarily what we'd consider formal employment (e.g. people working in their own fields or small market stalls).

what's the matter with a shrinking population? we keep hearing how automation is going to put so many people out of work anyway. a lower economic throughput isn't dramatic if the population gets proportionally smaller. not to mention that population growth can well be cyclical: there used to be a time where the US population was just half of what it is today after all, no reason why we couldn't be headed toward some kind of equilibrium. it doesn't have to be a downward spiral to zero.

the real concern seems to be coming from the elites whose leech-like business model is premised on squeezing as much wealth as possible from the consuming masses. it's this uninterrupted funneling that prevents their whole machinery from collapsing.

A shrinking population places enormous strains on social benefits ( social security, medicare, etc ) and would devastate the two largest retirement assets of people - homes and stock market ( 401k ).

The dominant 20th century economic and social model is based on constant population and consumption growth. Ultimately, as a society, we've borrowed too much from the future. If these assumptions fail, the stock market would collapse and housing prices would decline.

We could head towards an equilibrium, but that would require an economic and social paradigm shift and lots of near to intermediate pain for a lot of people. Paradigm shifts rarely happen and when they do, it's because of extreme circumstances causing a lot of societal pain.

It's like we are on a runaway train that's about to crash but we are too afraid to jump because jumping could mean death.

> The dominant 20th century economic and social model is based on constant population and consumption growth.

This. It's probably worth reiterating just how fundamental this is: the necessity of growth is built in, fundamentally to the way that the dollar (and the euro, then yen, etc) itself works.

I'm not convinced that punting on decisions has to be as bad as a crash. Japan has failed to meet growth for a few decades, and the way they handled it, there is just social malaise, an alienated generation, and excellent melancholy anime.

Watching NHK World, parts of Japan look idyllic and make me want to retire there, or even move there now. I watched a charming piece the other day about an island whose inhabitants have amongst the highest life expectancy in the world. A genuine community, shared activities and culture, lack of stress, plenty of fruit and vegetables as well as little traffic seemed to be the recipe. Perhaps the rest of the world could do with some of this so-called stagnation!

NHK World (my mother watches this) is definitely government propaganda. This is not to say that Japan is a horrible place, it's generally nicer than the US, but there's lots of societal malaise going over there. Also Japan sweeps a lot of poverty and soft corruption problems under the rug.

In the long run, yes, a smaller population may be better. It's getting there that would be painful.

Part of the issue is that our economic safety nets for the elderly work only if there's a sufficient (working) younger population to fund them.

At best, this is a recipe for intense intergenerational political conflict. At worst, it's a choice between bankrupting the younger generation and leaving the older generation out on the streets.

Like you said, it is a major concern for companies that must show X% growth year over year. Part of that is built into the fact that population keeps growing. It isn't possible for all companies with a negative growth rate.

The other issue is that the issues Japan is facing is there are no people to take care of all the elderly. It will be a challenge to make sure they just don't starve to death. There will be a lot of people that may just die at home and no one knows. I do think that as automation increases, more and more jobs will be around elder care.

> what's the matter with a shrinking population

There's no problem apart from the fact that the gov't doesn't tax robots and the tax burden falls on the shrinking population causing hardship, while the debt keeps rising. I've just read somewhere that this years' interest rates exceed US military expenditure.

well, that seems to be a bit of an asymmetrical argument. sure, less taxpayers means less tax revenue. but that's only because the work force has been partly replaced by automation, with all the implied savings.

you have think about where that lost tax revenue would have gone: infrastructure, military, health care, etc. now if it gets that bad that automation has taken over (yes, even doctors and surgeons...), surely that means these sectors are a lot more cost efficient, thus not as tax dependent as they used to be. if it's done progressively (and it's unlikely it will happen overnight) there is no reason why a good balance cannot be maintained.

Health care? Since when is health care in the US paid for by the federal government? Robot doctors and surgeons, not during my lifetime, but robot infantry support is more like it. You still need taxes to pay for those aircraft carriers and the robots and the personnel that maintains and fixes the robots. Then what are they going to do about the interest rates? Devalue the dollar? Start a war like Germany did? Or maybe just get a haircut.

Because younger generations subsidize the retirement and care of older generations, who interned subsidized the retirement and care of their predecessors, obviously.

So then isn't this the time bomb, not the demographics? Why do we call it a demographic time bomb and not a "we keep mortgaging the future generation" time bomb?

ever wondered why Poor countries tend to population increases whereas rich countries with abundance of basic resources tend to have low/negative population growth?

here is your answer:

http://www.physicsoflife.pl/dict/calhoun's_experiment.html

If only there were a large population of people literally risking their lives to come here with their children to help us resolve this issue.

see my comment above. the job market these people are supposedly propping up is going to get wiped out by automation in a few decades, thus only exacerbating the problem.

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