Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

A very good read in the Journal Genome Biology explaining in simple words how Ponzi and Madoff made millions, and then, describing his idea:

Now, the reason you're reading about this here, is that I just realized that life itself is basically a gigantic Ponzi scheme, and the pyramid is dangerously close to collapsing. In the developed world, we have evolved a society in which a relatively small number of old people have many of their needs cared for through the financial contributions of a larger number of much younger people. And that made sense, because for over 12,000 years the age distribution of the human population was, in fact, in the shape of a pyramid, with a huge base of young children rising to a smaller number of teenagers and a still smaller number of young adults, and so on up to a tiny tip of the elderly. But sometime in the 1950s, as the birthrate declined and life expectancy continued to increase, the pyramid started to be shaped more like a column. Within the next 40 years it will become one, and then it will slowly invert.

I can recommend a full read, it’s worth the time.

If the young people's contributions can be largely replaced (or rather, supplemented to the necessary aggregate contribution) by technology, does it really matter? There'd be no question of a ponzi scheme.

You can sort of already see it happening. Productivity is greater than ever. But wages have decoupled from productivity, because it's not human labour, but rather technological inputs that have become the drivers of productivity.

I won't sit here and predict that we'll have healthcare, food & beverage and cleaning robots within a decade and we'll only have leisure left. But we're definitely moving in many small ways to singular superpowered humans, who use tech, that can replace entire shifts of employees.

Take machines like these: https://www.tennantco.com/content/dam/tennant/tennantco/prod...

Replacing half a dozen people doing the same manually.

I mean who am I kidding, there's a billion examples like this. Yes, we still have to do our laundry clean, but we have washing machines that do 95% of the work. We still have to drive our busses, but 95% of bus ticket sales are now automated. At some point we'll probably get to that last 5%, too.

I'm pretty confident that the demographic age inversion will not be as catastrophic as a ponzi scheme falling apart. Because we the productivity of young (and hell, old) people has a technology multiplier that's ever increasing.

I believe you are right. Tech evolution has always been our saving grace, from the discovery of fire, to the invention of agriculture, ships to conquer new worlds, etc. I don't see the end of the world - I see opportunity, lots of it.

Probably the most well-written piece i’ve read via HN.

Well written in the sense of artful rhetoric perhaps. But it makes no sense at all to talk about demographic issues without accounting for productivity growth and technological progress. This is pure scare mongering.

Imagine what you could have written around 1700 when the share of farmers dropped below 50% if you had ignored productivity growth.

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