There are now more people over sixty-four than children younger than five

But your 20s are also critical from a career point of view. Women still have to fight a lot of prejudice from employers, which translates into trying to show commitment to career by delaying children.

The UK now has a very soft "two child policy": you won't normally get paid child benefit for children beyond two. The US has a ludicrous healthcare system where simply giving birth can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Also, they don't call it labour for nothing: it's a physically demanding, uncomfortable process.

The risk of complications go up.

And again, it's important to marry someone you want to marry and not marry just because you're getting older or for the sake of it. Those marriages, more often than not, end in divorce. But I see a lot of people either using Tinder as a way to get as many one night stands as possible, or swiping away looking for someone perfect who they'll never find. I also know people who developed severe depression because they were on the receiving end of perpetuated ghosting.

I am, by no means, saying that online dating hasn't worked for people, but it just seems like it's done more harm than it's done good.

There are a lot of interesting things here, although some (like that first graph) are rather subtle. In particular, I'd point everyone to the graph over time of where straight Americans met their partners. To my eye, it has three distinctive elements.

First, finding romance at a traditional "third place" has been almost completely destroyed. Meeting a partner through family, neighbors, church, or college shows an undulation in the sixties, followed by a sharp downturn in the last decade.

Second, meeting partners through work or friends has ceased to be a replacement. The decline in e.g. church meetings was thoroughly offset by professional and social meetings until the mid-nineties, but those meeting sources have been declining since.

Third, the spike in online meetings, and the s-curve in bar/club meetings. Crucially, this happens after meetings through friends and coworkers flatline; they aren't just being displaced by online dating, they stopped prior to that explosion.

Alongside all of those patterns, we can add the rising age of first marriage, the lowering frequency of sex (overall and within relationships), the rising gap in sexual intent versus outcome in both men and women (i.e. how much less sex people are having than they want), and the gap between intended and actual family size. A lot of the most obvious relationship shifts over the last ~70 years seem clearly good, and seem to benefit the people I know. But the data overwhelmingly suggests that people are forming relationships later and with more difficulty, with outcomes further from what they intend.

I wrote a reply to another comment that addressed something similar. The best way I can create a correlation in the real world is this way: If you go to a restaurant with 20 choices it takes people much longer to order something as opposed to a restaurant that can fit their menu on one page.

It's some psychological paradox, or research, that I can't remember. Someone actually replied with a TED talk that touches on this matter.

It has not, alas.

Take cars as an example: if we were building Fort T models, then yes, they would cost peanuts (especially Chinese copies). But for every dollar of productivity increase we add two dollars of safety devices, emission controls and new shiny gadgets.

I find it rather naive to expect a causal link to materialize between corporate profits attributable to automation and solvency of government pension schemes. Corporations certainly wouldn’t do anything to help humans out of the goodness of their heart.

We keep talking about automation like it is _going_ to happen in the future, truth is it's happening for 40 years, if not more. In europe politicians were promising a 30 hours work week and retirement at 50 in the 70s, all of that thanks to automation, you don't need to be an expert in this field to know that it didn't turn out that way.

Do you have any evidence of that?

> Half of the people I know who have kids basically delegates everything to caretakers, they see them 30 min in the morning, and 30 min when they get back to work and kiss them goodnight.

And that’s fine. There is nothing special about biological parents being the ones to take care of kids. Daycare workers, grandparents, etc., love the kids too and are better equipped to keep them engaged.

Indeed, our parents and grandparents spent half as much time with their kids than we are spending today, and their kids (us) turned out fine: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...

> One analysis of 11 rich countries estimates that the average mother spent 54 minutes a day caring for children in 1965 but 104 minutes in 2012. Men do less than women, but far more than men in the past: their child-caring time has jumped from 16 minutes a day to 59.

This is really true.

It was just assumed that the “right” goal for women was the same career focus as men have always had.

It won’t surprise me if that changes in the future once families realize the cost of it.

People are living longer, there's no reason you can't have a career second. But biology is such that kids need to be first.

And no, kids aren't as expensive as people think. If you wait till you have lots of money you'll never have the kids to spend the money on.

This is a subtle difference, but I think it is important.

https://scroll.in/article/865569/indian-population-is-growin...

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Study_Memora...

From what I observed, increased human productivity doesn't translate to less working time.

You work the same time but you just produce more.

In practice, the one who holds the capital captures the value. The everyday man ends up working the same or even more.

Children per woman is a more relevant metric.

1. There are more people over 74 than under 5; there are more people over 80 than under 3.

2. x = [12, 62], y = 74 - x

It's a near linear relationship between those older and those younger for this age range, i.e. those older than 62 outnumber those under 12 and those older than 12 outnumber those under 62. Make note that the y-intercept equals the under 5 comparison age.

3. There's a large difference between the populations of those age 63 and 64, those born around 1946-47. The baby boom

Right now the numbers look suspiciously quiet, hiding the fact that there are a number of countries growing ridiculously fast (sub-Saharan Africa), and a lot of countries (all of "the West", except the US) in accelerating decline.

So there will be increasing immigration despite low (global) population growth.

And this is over and done with. It's a fact at this point. Policy today can only determine if in 20 years we want to cause +0.2% in kids or -0.2% in kids. I mean anything short of a meteor strike or new spanish flu won't really influence anything sooner.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...

Ultra-brief summary: it may be that technological progress is actually tied to population growth, not economic growth - and population growth is slowing down. So unless we can figure out a way to switch the driver of scientific and technological breakthroughs from population (more researchers) to economy (e.g. machines that would think for us), we're gonna stall the progress of science and technology too.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...

> You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear.

On the contrary, you're the one playing up fears like extinction events. People are not having kids because they don't want to, not because point78 asked them to.

Read Factfulness by Hans Roslin if you want to learn more about this phenomenon and similar questions about poverty in the world.

The middle class is where all those cruises are being sold to.

They have huge disposable incomes due to final salary pensions and no mortgage to pay, or they've downsized and unlocked huge sums in an over-inflated housing market because we stopped building enough homes year on year 40 years ago when Thatcher banned the councils from doing so.

Pensioners now have higher disposable incomes on average than working people in the UK.

The average person under the age of 50 today will never have it as good as the baby boomers, unless some major, socially liberating, tech advance happens.

And, on average, older retirees are less physically able and require more care.

I don't like generalizing by "generations" but this is something where I see a divergence in younger and older coworkers.

Older ones literally say, "I don't want to learn [insert relevant skill] because I'm too old."

Younger coworkers seem to come better equipped with the mindset that they will have to continually unlearn and relearn to remain relevant. And to counter your point about a recession, many of them started their careers in a recession and I see it in their conservative approach to employment.

I think this is more about a complacent mindset with people who may not have recognize that they have to adjust to continue to be valuable. I've known people who were downsized and squandered ample opportunity like free tuition to change careers. I've known others who've successfully parlayed a physically demanding job to one less physically demanding because they knew they couldn't do that forever.

There isn't enough wealth to cover it. All the wealth of all the billionaires in the world is only the EU healthcare budget for five years.

Productivity is what generates wealth, and we can't afford to have a large class of people merely consumptive. People aren't producing enough to do it.

If you want to give 20k/yr to someone it has to come from someone else. That's putting younger generations into a dire financial position.

Work of some form has to be found, even if it isn't covering living expenses for pension-age people. Some form of off-setting the cost has to be implemented, or else there'll be a political and economic crisis.

The sad fact is that expecting to be in a high-flying job your entire career and to only climb is no longer viable. Yes, older people will have to take lesser jobs, but that's what we're all going to have to do.

We can't afford to pay for people to have a second childhood when they can still do lots and lots of jobs.

It is also worth remembering that today's 65 year olds are nowhere near as run down as those 50 years ago. We've got better diets, better medicine, generally less demanding jobs, etc.

And I'm 40 and my 78 year old father only really started detiorating noticeably 3 or 4 years ago and would still be capable of many, many jobs.

I appreciate some older people won't be able to, but it's only fair that being unfit for work due to infirmity should be assessed as any other disability and paid for like any other welfare.

Something where the investment in the worker is low enough that the company doesn’t need to optimize for someone who will perform at the highest level or have some upward career path over time.

I'm reading Garbage Land at the moment and she mentions that garbage collectors have an incredibly dangerous job, more dangerous than policemen or firemen, for example.

They're risking their lives to do a necessary job, and in that case I see no problem with the early retirement.

The premise of working for cash is that no-one really wants to do it, which is why you need to give people money in exchange for the work.

So if they don't want to work, and they are entirely self funded, good for them! It's their "fault" and I'm happy for them.

But if they have enough cash flow only because of the current Australian franking credit setup (it no longer merely prevents double taxation, it's a subsidy for investors), tax breaks on Superannuation, and so on, then it's the Government's fault for incorrectly calibrating the benefits in such a way that tax payers end up paying people to be unproductive.

The proper thing to do is raise the retirement age to 75, reflecting gains in longevity and economic reality. Other options include some form of part-time mandatory volunteering component to earn the govt. portion of the pension.

However we do it, we are breaking a promise, if you will, that society made to these people when they entered the work force, in that if they endure the indignities and inequities of a salary/wage position for 35 years, then they have earned the freedom to spend the remainder of their time as they see fit.