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Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

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