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Comment by gabbygab | Hacker News Reader

I agree. And to add to your point, we are bombarded with the demographic problem message every day. So what's the solution from these experts? Are we supposed to continuously grow the population forever? I've read our social welfare programs to private industry are being threatened by demographics change and the solution is more people. Okay, then what? What happens in a generation? We are back to the same demographic problem. Is it really a solution if you are just pushing the problem one generation into the future?

Seems like the problem isn't with demographics but the economic system if the problem is perpetual and impossible to correct.

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Yes, it seems stunningly obvious that we aren't creating new jobs that pay a reasonable living wage fast enough, for a long time. AI (and plain old automation) accelerates that even more. So where are those new jobs coming from? There's no easy new job for the truck driver that pays as well, but even for the young person who is potentially easier to train for a new field, we keep producing more with less human effort, the general outlook is poor, we won't have as many jobs.

It seems to be qualitatively different than when people left farms to go to factories, or factory jobs to office jobs.

(edit: typo, added last sentence)

Mainstream economics assumes that everything has to keep growing all the time, or it's failing.

There is a fringe subfield of steady-state economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy

None of that would have been an issue if we had put the money away it costs to take care of those people when they get old, aka SS done right.

But we won't be back to the same demographic issue, because the issue that they people who retire now in the west are the last generations that were bigger than their parents generations (it has a formal name, but you can roughly think of it as many kids born, many kids die transitioning into many kids born, few kids die into what we have now which is few kids born, few kids die).

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