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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

I believe this is an unsolvable problem. The math just doesn't work anymore. Back when exponential population growth was more of an option you'd just have 6 kids to spread the cost of elder care across. It doesn't matter whether you care for your parents or hire someone to, the fact of the matter is there is increasingly just not enough young people to provide the elder care and also perform the other kinds of productive work we need to get done in society.

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Maybe we should start letting in all those young immigrants from demographics who have lots of children who want to move to the US.

Not to mention...those who are already here contribute billions of dollars to Medicare and Social Security every year -- just their existence in this country helps seniors (unfortunately, so much of the propaganda pointed at older Americans buries this fact).

I wonder if you'd have better luck if you told those older Americans that your goal was to redistribute the wealth of poor minorities from other countries to them.

I'm pro immigrant, but this doesn't solve the problem. At best it postpones it slightly because as soon as those immigrants become a little more prosperous they stop having so many kids too.

If you "postpone" it often enough, that's basically the same as fixing it.

Postpone means "fixing it for now, but not for all time." Fix it for now, then let tomorrow figure out how to postpone it again.

That's only a problem if postponing it involves incurring worse future problems.

Whether or not it creates worse future problems depends primarily on whether or not it creates net tax revenue. So the new immigrants pay taxes, that helps. But presumably this new elder care is going to be funded in part or in whole by an increase in taxes.

Your argument comes across to me like "Let's not do a thing I agree would be short-term useful and helpful because it's all bad news, all the time." It sound super pessimistic.

Long experience suggests to me that fixing what can be fixed today makes tomorrow better. What a lot of people scoff at as bandaid solutions are very often perfectly good solutions.

Bandaids need to changed regularly while the wound heals. You don't slap a bandaid on and leave it there forever.

It's only worse than doing nothing if it isn't sterile and thereby introduces infection to the wound.

As long as your metaphorical bandaid solution is sterile, it's probably better than doing nothing.

Sometimes, fixing today is the best way to arrive at a brighter tomorrow.

I think we have very deep problem in our culture where so many systems are built on unsustainable exponential growth. It encompasses everything from our elder pension/healthcare system to tenure at the universities. Huge cultural, social, and economic changes are going to be necessary and it's not going to be pretty. Eric Weinstein calls this phenomenon EGOs, or embedded growth obligations.

On the good news front, one of the current trends in elderly care is an increased reliance on tech to help elderly individuals maintain their independence. They are increasingly using alarms, text messaging notifications and similar to help them take their medication without a person supervising that in person and to notify a relative if they fall and fail to get back up and similar.

Technology is helping to address the issue in a way which reduces the need younger labor to care for an aging population while simultaneously improving quality of life for the elderly. Win/Win.

Exponential population growth is hard to keep going indefinitely.

Postponing the problem now gives more time to find ways to postpone more later, like fixing the societal issues that drive people to delay starting families well past when they do in other prosperous countries.

Or maybe we could provide a better social safety net and more incentive/assistance for having children.

I think people, in part, feel like they don't need to have as many kids because of the existing social safety nets. When times are extremely tough a big family isn't more mouths to feed, it's more workers/fighters/etc.

Elder day care can be reasonably cheap.

It's also worth noting that the elderly have a big chunk of wealth :

https://dqydj.com/the-net-worth-of-different-age-groups-in-a...

Eldercare for more serious ailments is pretty pricey if you stay aboveboard, but healthcare benefits in the US for 65+ are pretty great. Combine Medicare with their private plans, and as a person under 65 watching the medical care my elders get: it's mind-blowing.

I have to believe that a good chunk of Medicare-for-All folks are middle-aged people who see how the over-65s don't worry a whit about how much anything costs, because it's all covered, while younger folks are setting their own broken bones or dying over insulin or going bankrupt due to bike accidents.

Anyway, lesson here is: The +65s vote reliably and politicians allocate benefits accordingly. Dear everyone who is not 65+: please vote.

Society is 10x as productive as it was 30years ago. The number of people is irrelevant. Just need to spend more on elder care from the huge economic pie.

I agree that it's an unsolvable problem. It's also largely cultural. I don't think it has to do with unconstrained exponential growth.

Visit any poor regions of the world and you'll find there's a lot more emphasis on taking care of the elders regardless of the median number of children per family.

For a variety of reasons, that kind of culture gets wiped out in developed nations, to the detriment of everyone. Outsourcing it out of the family and building a capitalist industry around it is super dystonian yet here we are.

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