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Comment by creato | Hacker News Reader

It is disturbing that people take for granted that this is an economic problem. This thread is full of people lamenting the fact that we could support X times as many people as we do now if we all just sacrifice Y.

When I look around the world today, I think the biggest resource that is lacking is economic opportunity. Huge swathes of people are desperate, angry, and depressed, I think because there is no opportunity for them. The best case scenario for huge numbers of people is stagnation.

A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again.

The techno utopian solution of allocating everyone a 20 m^2 apartment, a vr headset, and 1500 calories of soylent per day is going to be a disaster unless you also allocate everyone some future drugs to keep them sedated.

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I do believe it is an economic problem, in that people are not secure in their job, housing, and life enough to bring new people into it.

Think Maslow's wotsit of needs. And I think back on where I grew up, what my parents did; they got married early 20's, and were financially secure enough in blue-collar jobs to afford a house twice the size of the one I managed to finally buy at age 32. With that house and the luxury of being able to make ends meet on a single income, they were able to raise three kids.

Meanwhile nowadays a lot of people have to work their ass off just to keep afloat. You can't have a healthy relationship if you don't have the time or energy for it, you can't raise kids in a shitty shared apartment, you shouldn't have kids if you can't take care of them because you have to work.

This is the main reason I never want kids. I'm just not sure I'll ever be secure enough while young enough to really care for them. Student loans being the main killer; if I could get rid of them and buy a house, things might be different.

But, more than that, I'm also not sure if I'll ever be secure enough to make sure they're secure in the future that seems inevitably coming, with regards to global warming, etc. I just feel it isn't responsible currently.

Having kids took us from “will retire comfortably, probably early, without seriously having to sacrifice for it” to “uh, might retire only a little late, somewhat comfortably, with great effort and luck?” We’re also at much greater risk, financially. On both counts healthcare costs/risks are a big part of why (lost wages and direct costs for childcare are are #1 on the cost side, though). Friggin’ American healthcare system.

I also had/have reservations for the same reason before having children. If I didn’t pair up with another high earner, I would not have tried to have children, as I believe the labor market is too volatile.

I also would have wanted to spare them the effects of climate change/societal turbulence, but partner wanted kids so I said sure, but I wonder if that was the right call sometimes.

In India, student loans have mainly been in demand from people seeking an MS degree in the US. But things are changing, and education is getting more expensive across the board, and I do worry about my kids. My immediate reaction right now is to save enough fuck-you money for my kids so that they don't have to get into the education rat race at all. I don't know how that will work, if at all, but that's the best I can do. If they choose to spend the money I saved on expensive degrees, I hope collectively as a family, we know what we are getting into.

The correlation goes the other way. The poorer the country the more children people tend to have.

"A nyomor nyomort szül" - Poverty breeds poverty - Hungarian proverb

> The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again.

I'm not so sure about that.

Loads of wealth is consolidated at the top, both in terms of economic class and age. People who got their jobs and attained management positions after barely graduating high school are demanding bachelor's or master's degrees for jobs that will barely pay rent. Landowners bought up when it was cheap and refuse to lower prices or sell for below what they think it's worth, even going as far as evicting people during a pandemic, knowing full well those units might not be filled in months or years, if ever. Some young people will get to a point where they can buy stuff up and work their way up the ladder, but there will be plenty more people who have it all given to them by those who established themselves when it was easier. I don't expect the next generation to be any more compassionate.

There are already endless reports of there being insufficient workers for agricultural jobs, nursing, teachers, etc. Wages haven't risen to meet the demand. They've remained stagnant or dropped in the long term. Meanwhile, those at the top are richer than ever.

Wealth at the top is often created by rent seeking. Just extracting money without actually making anything. I'm pretty confident that if the number of workers dropped and demand for labor increased, they'd just squeeze harder. Shut out the ones who didn't make it and terrify the ones who've managed to hold a job about the possibilities of what'll happen should they quit.

People are already getting paid more being unemployed. Employers are trying to get people to work for them again while offering them less than unemployment pays. They're not even trying to compete because they know people are going to come desperately crawling back.

I think we need to ask ourselves why some of those things are the case.

Why are the same jobs requiring higher levels of education now than they did in the past? If you've worked these jobs you know they don't require anything past a highschool education.

Why is housing seen as something that must constantly increase in value? It doesn't, we've been through housing bubbles but people still cling to this belief and continue to pump air into the bubbles with speculation based on it. If you've owned a home you know that it is a constant sink for money just to maintain its existing state let alone what it costs to upgrade it to modern standards as it ages.

What is driving people away from the sectors you mentioned? Is it only lack of pay? Why are we not funding these sectors when they are so essential to the functioning of our society? Where is the existing funding going, specifically whose pockets does it wind up in?

Why don't employers offer higher wages? Are they really being greedy or are their profits going to something else like rent or other business costs?

I don't think this is entirely to be laid at the feet of the richest members of society. Yes they protect their own interests but all of us are responsible for ensuring that our communities continue to function and improve. We've neglected that responsibility, we've all collectively failed. We all have to work together to fix this, blaming one group or the other will solve nothing.

"Why are we not funding these sectors when they are so essential to the functioning of our society? Where is the existing funding going, specifically whose pockets does it wind up in?"

Because there is no capitalist imperative to keep people alive. If investors and landowners can't make any money producing food, then no food will be produced beyond that which is needed to feed the investors and landowners.

Yes!

> There are already endless reports of there being insufficient workers for agricultural jobs, nursing, teachers, etc. Wages haven't risen to meet the demand. They've remained stagnant or dropped in the long term. Meanwhile, those at the top are richer than ever.

Who do you think is responsible for those reports? It's employers who have enough labor for now, but foresee a more competitive labor market in the future & don't want to have to raise wages.

> People are already getting paid more being unemployed. Employers are trying to get people to work for them again while offering them less than unemployment pays. They're not even trying to compete because they know people are going to come desperately crawling back.

People don't eternally just walk around in blind terror of being unemployed, irrespective of the labor market. If the labor market gets tight, economics and history indicate that wages will adjust.

You are thinking very short term and in a very narrow range of conditions around our current economic situation.

We have never seen economic conditions remotely close to what we would see if the population were actually shrinking.

It's not actually that unusual for a country to have a shrinking population. Italy, Croatia, Lithuania, and a few other central and Eastern European countries currently have declining populations, as does Japan, some due to ageing and a drop in fertility and some due to that plus emigration. Economically and socially they've not entered into the death spiral some people seem to think will happen and are actually doing alright. Countries with declining populations due to war, economic collapse etc. are a different matter but in those cases the decline in population is a symptom not a cause. The transition to a shrinking world population will happen gradually over a period of decades and at different times in different areas of the works giving us plenty of time to for economic and social structures to adapt to deal with it. If it were to happen over night we would be in trouble but it won't.

It's a question of degree. I think the article is kinda hand-wringy, but not incorrect in the attention they're giving to orders of magnitude. You've got to remember that if a country like Spain halves in population, that's a colossal shift from A to B, to the extent that each decade will feel like a fairly major leap on its own. I don't think it'll be a death spiral, but it'll definitely absorb resources that otherwise could be directed to advancements, rather than preventing retrenchments. And that's assuming the rate of change doesn't cause nonlinear effects of its own.

Also, if Spain halves, it may well be that other countries shrink even further. You've also got to wonder about the distribution of old folk: some countries will end up with far more extreme distributions than others, but what I suspect we'll find is that, just as there's a quality of life level above which the reproduction rate decreases, there'll be a population level below which the quality of life decreases, so it'll self-correct.

We haven't even seen this scenario play out yet. I'm from the region and I don't think it will turn into some Fallout-type scenario, but I think it will definitely impact the well-being of all citizens in these countries, some 20-30 years from now. It's hard to say yet if/how these countries will recover.

I live in Croatia. Its population has been shrinking since 1991. Almost 30 years of unchecked population decline and it's still not an apocalyptic hellhole.

In spite of entrenched corruption and other issues, standards of living and wages have gone up, even as the government does everything it can to destroy nascent industry and chase that tourism nickle.

The more old people die, the more domestic opportunity there is for the younger generation, and the lower the tax burden on young workers.

Honestly, I'm not sure population decline is something Croatia can afford to "recover from".

Those aren't related. I'm from Romania, which has:

1. A higher population population than Croatia. 2. Higher emigration than Croatia. 3. A lower fertility rate than Croatia.

And yes, the economy is going up despite people becoming old, dying, or just leaving the country. But the reason for that is temporary, it's because Croatia, just like Romania, is still a developing country, you're converting low productivity workers to higher productivity ones.

But how long do you think this can last? What happens when active people are 1/3rd of the population or less and there are no more easy gains to be had?

I just said that things won't look like in Fallout, so why are you even mentioning "apocalyptic hellhole"?

A country doesn't lose 20% or more of its population without major changes happening. It's extremely optimistic to hope that there won't be at least some major negative changes.

> What happens when active people are 1/3rd of the population or less and there are no more easy gains to be had?

Old people retire, opening up jobs for younger workers. Old people die, freeing up housing stock and capital and tax money. And these will happen long before Croatia or Romania achiever maximum productivity. There's plenty of fat left to be trimmed.

As long as the sustained rate of youth emigration is below the mortality rate -- or marginally higher while the country continues to develop -- conditions should improve for working age people (ignoring the chaos of politics).

But perhaps I'm misunderstanding your implication or just not thinking this through. Could you elaborate on some of the negatives?

I’m also from Croatia...we actually had population growth in early nineties and we are losing more people to emigration rather than natural decline. It’s myopic to think that population decline doesn’t harm us. It puts rural areas in vicious cycle of losing population -> smaller economic base -> losing population due to no economic opportunities. Also cohort of women able to give birth declines even faster thus preventing any future recovery.

I live in a small town that is almost 1700 years old. Something is very wrong if we are unable to maintain or grow our population while living in unprecedented luxury and wealth compared to historical norms.

We're unable to grow our population largely because of that unprecedented wealth. Children are no longer seen as an insurance policy, and young people are better educated, choosier about their partners, and more likely to utilize birth control.

I agree that it is sad that rural areas continue to die out -- I live in an island, so I feel this keenly -- but objectively, is that such a bad thing?

Communities don't have an innate right to exist in perpetuity, and it would be an unsustainable resource nightmare if we tried to keep them all alive.

After all, it's because of rural flight that we have huge tracts of natural parks like Velebit. That's a resource that enriches the commons, even if it came at the cost of some individual welfare. It's also vastly better for the planet.

But I feel I'm missing something. What are some more of the downsides?

We have a good enough understanding of capitalism to know that the average person will not benefit from a shrinking labour pool. You have no clue just how devastating a shrinking population would be to an economy where the real average wage hasn't increased in 40 year.

The economy in Britain improved after the black death wiped out half the population.

The black death didn't discriminate and wiped out people of all social statuses equally. It upset power balances rapidly.

Barring absolute chaos, people can generally plan for years and decades from now. Declining population is something we all know is coming. Those with wealth will, for the most part, hold onto it. Those born into wealth will, for the most part, hold onto it. Japan is always mentioned as the prime example of declining population in these threads, and while the population is declining and demand for labor is increasing, wages are not rising but poverty is. Maybe it'll change 10 or 20 years from now, but the trend is downwards for the average person.

That's true but I think which bit of the population remains matters.

The demographic impact of a plague is pretty much the exact opposite of economic flight. In a plague the fittest and healthiest survive and are unencumbered by the elderly and unfit, but in a demographic flight the fittest and healthiest leave. Similarly in a birth rate collapse the demographics shift towards the elderly and away from the young and fit.

That was under feudalism, not capitalism.

So change the economic system? The balls to the wall neoliberal, winner takes all, no safety net model that the Anglo American world has been moving towards for the past thirty years is not the only one. The Anglo American post war consensus model which was more redistributory correlated with higher growth rates (not saying it caused them, kinda hard to tell) while the Northern European corporatist, Scandinavian mixed model and Japanese corporatist models have all been successful in both creating economic growth and distributing that wealth more evenly amongst the population. It has always entertained me that the one thing that the average Marxist and neo liberal share is a belief that there is only one type of capitalism.

But neither the Northern European nor Japanese models can cope with negative real growth in consumption. Nor negative real growth in savings.

There is a fundamental issue in capitalism that there must always be growth. Without growth, the entire concept of investment breaks down and the business cycle cannot continue. You could totally replace it with something that isn't capitalism, but that's not a small endeavor and won't happen without massive conflict.

Our current reality is that if the population shrinks significantly, there is a good likelihood that will happen.

Insufficient/shrinking supply of a good, but prices going down instead of up? What economics are in play here?

Inelastic demand and cartel behavior. People require jobs to survive; survival is an inelastic good; businesses know this; they work together to suppress wages to as close to subsistence level as possible.

> The techno utopian solution of allocating everyone a 20 m^2 apartment, a vr headset, and 1500 calories of soylent per day is going to be a disaster unless you also allocate everyone some future drugs to keep them sedated.

I don't know if you live in California, but I think that there's sort of a reality distortion field that comes with living in a big and expensive city.

Here in Georgia the rents are cheap and people seem to be moderately satisfied. A little money goes a long way. You can own acres of land dirt cheap and do with it whatever you want.

I grew up in Georgia (metro suburbs and later GT in Atlanta) and moved to the Bay Area two years ago. Georgia offers a very nice quality of life at a great price, but in my opinion the Bay Area has it beat in absolute terms on just about everything except friendliness: food, weather, nature, jobs, art, culture, proximity to other interesting places (further drive but more interesting when you get there), universities, international diversity. I’m not trying to disparage Georgia — in fact I’m currently attempting to relocate there as a remote worker for my current company to be closer to family since we just had our first child. But I really can’t think of a whole lot about my time living in Georgia that I prefer over living in the Bay Area except that my family happens to be there and all of the great memories I have of growing up with them.

The bay area probably beats GA if you're in the tech industry.

If I were a plumber, accountant, teacher, or anyone else who isn't on the tech gravy train I wouldn't want to deal with it.

The Bay Area part of that comment is a redherring - yes it's a popular destination here on HN but there are much more financially accessible areas in California that bring 90-99% of the same climate, cultural benefits, and metropolitan amenities as SF like the San Diego, Los Angeles, and Orange counties. I think the most unique things SF has for the general population is mass transit and walkability, which is a real crapshoot in the rest of the state.

In San Diego, for example, you can buy a 2+ acre property with a decent house that's 20-40 minutes away from the beach and downtown with all the operas, sportsball, and meetups/events you could want, excellent weather year round, and still be a part of the 5th largest economy in the world, only a few hours drive from Los Angeles or short flight to SF. It's not as cheap as Georgia but it's not San Francisco: the aforementioned exurban property can be had for half a million which would also get you a decent townhouse somewhere in the suburbs of Los Angeles or Orange county. There are a lot more plumbers, teachers, accountants, out here with property than there are engineers in SF - and they receive 80%+ of the benefits of California with only 20% of the hassle.

>food, weather, nature, jobs, art, culture, proximity to other interesting places (further drive but more interesting when you get there), universities, international diversity

With a little either self-starting or help from the local authorities, there's no reason another town/city/state couldn't have these unless there is such destitution it's in some kind of death spiral.

Every place has it's own niche, their own culture, and not to put the blame on you but too many people go "I'll move to a place that is already nice" and escape trying to build up where they come from or another small place.

And don't get me wrong, it would take more than an individual or a small group to turn a place around and you may be genuinely moving away from an unfixable, bad situation, but too many people I graduated with from high school/college think everyone needs to pile on the Golden Coast to make it and live an enjoyable life.

But maybe I'm curmudgeonly and a little antisocial even at 23.

I didn’t move away from a bad situation at all. I liked living in Georgia. It’s just that I like living in the Bay Area better.

Also, one of the major reasons I like Redwood City is the almost constant sunshine and moderate temperatures. That has a really positive effect on my mood, especially during the winter. There’s no way to get that in the southeast short of altering the climate.

Who wants to live in Georgia though? I mean this unironically, there's not much to do in terms of entertainment and opportunities for a young 20 yo vs LA or NY

Perhaps some 80% of global population would be very grateful to relocate to Georgia.

I know Americans on the internet usually view their country with rose-shaded glasses but this comment has to take the price. I don't know the number, don't think anyone does, but off the people I know, 100% would never want to move to any state in the US. Probably the real number of people wanting to immigrate to the US is closer to 0% than 100%.

It doesn't really make sense to try to pinpoint an exact number, but I think you are right in answering to another subtly different question: the real people that would move, given just the opportunity, and nothing more. E.g. my grandmother would not move, most non-white people would face racial difficulties there that might not be present in their home country and would not consider moving, a lawyer might not be able to maintain a bar status there, etc.

But if you read your parent post caritatively, and the context to which it is responding, they are discussing just location - so the implicit question is more of "would a random world citizen complain about moving to Georgia, in the conditions that a US citizen would move (belonging to society, job prospects, no issues with recognition of citizenship, education, job experience, no language issues, etc. etc.)". He is just answering to the dismissal of the Georgia standard of living.

So yeah, answering to that second question, and speaking as a western european, I do think that most (more than 50%) of my acquaintances would take the chance (I think this because most barriers would be being far from friends and family and language issues, but following the spirit of the initial complaint, we are talking about an american who already lives probably far away from friends and family, in LA or NY). Obviously this is also just opinion and I did not run a poll, but I thought the rose-shaded glasses thing was a red herring.

The people you know are almost certainly not representative of the world at large. Maybe 80% is a bit high, but the number is certainly over 50%. The median global person earns less than $3000/year.

> The people you know are almost certainly not representative of the world at large

Yeah, most certainly.

> The median global person earns less than $3000/year

What does that have to do with anything? In plenty of places you can easily survive and have a good time with $3000/year, so not sure where or how this is relevant.

And how you get the "certainly over 50%" number from? You happen to be American too?

That figure is adjusted for cost of living.

It's not very usefull to make a point of: "unlike you, some people have to live under tyrany or war"

My bet is that of people living in functioning democracies, the percentage will be in like 20-25%.

Perhaps, but that's not really relevant since the vast majority of people do not live in well functioning democracies.

Your post sounds like an assumption like "the people who live in war are a small minority so their position is an exception compared to humanity in general" when actually it's the opposite, the people who live in the well functioning first world democracies are a small minority so their position is an exception compared to humanity in general.

In that case leaders of USSR could use the same line to boast about their country.

In the 60s-70s life in USSR was better than in China, India, virtuall all of Africa and Latin America.

Yes, the leaders of USSR could do that and did just that, but I don't understand what this has got to do with any challenges to the original assertion that large quantities of people worldwide would be "very grateful to relocate to Georgia" - they would be. At the moment despite all the immigration restrictions that USA has implemented, the Green Card queue indicates a mass willingness to become residents of USA.

It's not about boasting, it's about whether USA can rely on people wanting to immigrate to ensure that places like Georgia stay sufficiently populated even if population naturally declines - and IMHO they can.

Depending on who you ask, percentage of people living in functioning democracies would be 0-10%.

Probably much higher for those living in the UK with its insane housing prices (10x the hours worked per square meter of Chicago!)

15% of the world wants to move to another country. Of those, 20% want to move to the United States, the most desired location. The second most desired destination is Canada with 6%. More stats here: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245255/750-million-worldwide-mi...

One wonders who is wearing the reality-distorting glasses on HN. ;)

Thank you for proving my point, indeed HN (and the internet) is filled with the reality-distorted glasses :)

I'd gladly live in Georgia. I'm no longer 20 but that's beside the point :-)

Georgia would be ok. As long as I were in a more rural part. I don't much care for Atlanta. I would take Texas over Georgia.

Isn't Atlanta a major metropolitan city? I would assume that many of the same opportunities present in LA or NY wold be available there. I live in Portland, OR and there are tons of 20 year olds here and we are a very very tiny city.

Portland is very very tiny? It has 600k people. That's larger than Atlanta.

The Atlanta metropolitan area is home to more than 6 million people and is the ninth-largest metropolitan area in the nation. Portland is located in the 25th.

Sure, but 25th largest city in the US is not "very very tiny". I grew up in a township of 4k people. That would be what I consider very very tiny. I was nearby a city of 30k people. I considered it a decently large city.

You're right, but the point is that Atlanta is overall larger than Portland in terms of being a major metropolitan area. The original post was talking about ATL's largeness and number of opportunities for youth.

Metro Atlanta is 10x that. Atlanta proper is tiny compared to the suburbs which sprawl for miles where most people live.

I can drive around the entirety of downtown Portland in about 5-10 minutes (depending on traffic). It would take at least an hour to drive around downtown Atlanta.

As someone that lives there let me tell you there is no "downtown" Atlanta. There is a neighborhood called Downtown, but it's one of three (four, or maybe even five, depending on who you ask) major, dense business and retail districts in the city limits, and even more in the suburbs. And yeah, would take you about an hour to hit all of them. Probably more with traffic.

It's a very polycentric city. Kind of throws people off when they first come here.

and LOL at the guy saying "no one wants to live in Georgia." This is what happens when you don't ever leave the Bay.

I’m thinking of driving the 285 loop around Atlanta.

Maybe most people in Portland live outside of downtown. Or maybe Portland just has better traffic management.

This route around downtown Portland Google estimates will take 22 minutes:

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/45.49314,-122.6699199/45.492...

This route around downtown and midtown Atlanta Google estimates will take 25 minutes:

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/33.7440027,-84.4006901/33.74...

No way. The 285 around Atlanta is 66 miles long.

The 5 and 405 around downtown Portland can be driven in under 10 minutes under ideal circumstances.

Also, your google map link for Portland is bizarre. I honestly have no idea what that route is supposed to represent. It definitely isn’t any route someone would take who was trying to circle downtown Portland.

Both of those routes are trying to contain the tall buildings inside and the single family homes outside. If you expand the route I drew around Atlanta very much in any direction you start to include single family homes.

285 around Atalanta encloses forests and suburbs, a lot more than just downtown.

Anecdote I was told, shows how quickly cities can grow into metroplexes.

Back when Interstate 285 was built, it was a 2 lane road out in the middle of nowhere for the truckers going from Florida north to be able to bypass Atlanta traffic.

Kids could play hopscotch for multiple minutes to hours before moving off to the let the singular car go by.

285 was the orbit of pluto, separating sleepy suburbs from the great flyover nothingness that people ascribe to the empty swathes of, say, Nevada (?).

Nowadays, 285 is more like going from outer core of earth to inner core. Moving from 285s westernmost terminus further west, the analogy of Pluto's orbit is more like Carrollton GA.

Atlanta the city is small. Atlanta as natives know it is large.

Dallas-Forth Worth TX is a twin sister in terms of growth rate but also bigger on an absolute scale.

It's so interesting that the rich elites need to be entertained so much. You can have a good life just about anywhere. Only boring people get bored.

There's a burgeoning film industry (well, at least there was before COVID hit pause on it), thriving nightlife, beaches... a pretty big tech sector in Alpharetta (northern suburb of ATL)... lots of opportunities for Black creators (and creators of all colors obviously) and individuals as there's a lot of existing infrastructure for people who want to get started in music, film, arts, entrepreneurship, et. It's only a red state because of voter suppression, which is a topic for another day, but that's the truth.

The fact that people on this forum don't really know what the world looks like outside of the Bay Area and Boston is concerning. God forbid someone ever describe Illinois the way you just described Georgia. Hordes of angry Chicagoans with deep dish from Giordano's are gonna flood this thread.

Giordano's is crap. Lou Malnati's is where it's at.

Seriously, though: First chance we got, the wife and I fled Chicago. Great hospitality, fun culture and reasonable diversity (for the Midwest), but the weather is awful but for two decent weeks per year (aka "spring" and "fall"), the lake is disgusting, two centuries of unchecked industrialization have made the place a gigantic Superfund site, and the lack of unspoiled nature is disconcerting.

People's needs differ. We left a lot of very good friends behind who adore the place and have no need for mountains, streams, oceans, beaches, wilderness, etc.

I see this idea here in several places. Effectively "more money = more kids"

There is ZERO evidence that's the case. In fact all evidence points to the opposite. The more money people have the less likely they are to have children.

I'm not suggesting that we should therefore lower people's incomes. Only suggesting that the idea that his has anything do with lacking economic opportunity has zero basis in fact.

The richer a country gets, the less kids they have, period.

---

follow up: According to this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

birth rates do rise at some level of income but not enough to cover deaths.

Here's some other charts to look at

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

---

To put in another way, let's wonder if we lived in a post scarcity society and everyone had all they needed and more. Would the birth rate explode? Would it go up a bunch? Would it hit the replacement level? I suppose it's all speculation but my reading of the data it is would not hit the replacement level.

Basically, for whatever reason, people that are well educated and well off want children less than those that don't for whatever reason.

The “more money == more kids” hypothesis comes from the observation that women are typically having fewer kids than they reportedly want to have, implying that something is holding them back from having the number of kids they want.

In places like America, the cost of childcare is commonly pointed to. However this phenomenon is common enough across multiple countries with different labor arrangements that I genuinely doubt its just the cost.

Adam Smith mentions explicitly in 1776 how "women of stature tire after having 2 or 3 children, if any at all. Poor women have up to 20" (couldn't find the literal quote).

> Huge swathes of people are desperate, angry, and depressed, I think because there is no opportunity for them.

As a slight digression, mental health is particularly dire because culturally we have not learned how to advance it yet. Mental health is not given the same reverence as physical health.

It's common sense more or less that you need to drink water, eat healthy food, get good sleep, get exercise. Some people don't do it, but it's well known that you should.

What do you do for mental health? Take some time off occasionally? There is simply not an equivalent body of knowledge as what is needed for physical healthiness.

If the industrial revolution made food abundant and jobs sedentary such that obesity is a problem, the information revolution made similar problems for mental health- but we don't spread awareness because being depressed or anxious isn't as visible as being obese.

IMO, as someone who has struggled with mental health problems throughout my life, the needs of good mental health are pretty easy to understand but extremely difficult to achieve.

Good mental health comes from feeling loved and needed and having a purpose in life. Love can come from one person or a community but it's absolutely essential. Having a purpose and feeling needed are as important as having the time and energy to feel like you're living up to these obligations.

I feel like the idea of communities has all but been broken down. Similarly with purpose. Simply working to achieve more comfort doesn't seem to be a fulfilling purpose. Most people work just to get by without any sense of what they're doing is important. People are generally made to feel replaceable and powerless.

I have no idea how to solve these problems as I feel like they are fundamental problems of our society. How can you feel necessary when you compare yourself to billions of others instead of 100s? How do you feel connected to other people when you don't even know your neighbors?

I can tell you what I try to do for myself. First, I make sure I'm being healthy. I get enough sleep, exercise regularly, and cook a large portion of my meals. I try to prioritize my relationships with other people over work. Within my work, I left software to start a company that made me feel more connected with the people benefiting from my work. I still struggle with mental health a lot but when I look at where my life was 10 years ago to now, I feel a much deeper sense of fulfillment.

IMO, purpose in life as motivation to live is a double edged sword. It motivates someone for sure, but when he/she lost the very purpose, depression comes, even suicidal thoughts.

Which is why I like the concept of Dukkha in Buddhist, that knowing how meaningless I am can make me enjoy life more and not caring too much unimportant things, such as comparing myself with billionaires.

For me, purpose comes from my impact on other people. Is it positive? Does my existence lower the suffering of others? I don't think purpose should be comparative.

I'm not very familiar with Buddhism so I appreciate you sharing. For philosophy, I tend to look more at Stoicism. What I take away from Stoicism as it relates to purpose, is that how you live your life is more important than the things you accomplish. Living a virtuous life can be a purpose onto itself.

To add to that, even if we can technically support a lot more people with the sustainable resources we have, which I personally doubt, getting close to our max capacity means we will have zero wiggle room when things go wrong. With climate change accelerating and guaranteed to cause drastic changes to our environment, a lot of things will go wrong at the same time.

The analogy I like is your income/spending ratio. Yes, you can technically spend 100% of your income, or even >100% with debt. But if you choose to live like that, then when you get laid off, or get sick/disabled, or divorced, or forced to start caring for a relative, or have your house burn down, then all of a sudden what's already a major emergency is exacerbated by financial issues.

Decreasing our population now is like increasing our savings rate. We know difficult times are coming. Fewer people will only help us navigate the transition more humanely and equitably. Not only is this true from a macro/global scale, but also a micro/family scale where it's obvious that having more kids than you can afford or have time to raise is its own kind of cruelty.

Anyway, if you're choosing to have kids, one is enough. The real winners adopt.

Also, I can't see any of our problems going away or getting better/solved with more people.

> Anyway, if you're choosing to have kids, one is enough. The real winners adopt.

Not from an evolutionary standpoint, lol

Meh. The continuation of the species is more important than some silly desire to mix my own DNA into a new human. A kind of corollary to the Gay Uncle theory.

I also consider the memes > genes in terms of leaving a legacy. Shaping a kid's mindset doesn't require them to share half of your genes.

I can appreciate the idea that one's work can (potentially) function as a superior alternative to children, with respect to legacy. In general, I'm all for elevating the rational part of Human mind. On the other hand, I think it's dangerous to describe the reproductive priorities of the "primitive" mind as a "silly desire". To put it more concretely, imagine a husband who has just learned that the children he's dedicated years of financial, emotional, and educational support are not his own. Imagine the gamut of emotions that cross his mind: anger/hatred toward his wife's deception; the humiliation that comes from being deceived; the conflict that comes from both loving the children, yet despising them for what they represent. How do you think that man would respond if you told him that his feelings were the consequence of a "silly desire". It's all well and good to have a world with gay uncles that support their nephews and nieces; but somebody's gotta make those nephews and nieces.

> A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again.

An economy exists to fulfill human needs of various kinds-- making stuff, providing services, etc. Old people intensively consume (medical services, etc) and don't produce anymore. Getting too high of a ratio of old people therefore has some impacts beyond equilibrium labor prices.

The problem with the economic line of thinking is:

Why do peasants in Africa have more children than Lawyers in New York? Builders in Arkensas have more kids than tech workers in San Francisco?

Poor people in general have more kids than rich people. It doesn't fit the data.

>Why do peasants in Africa have more children than Lawyers in New York

Because below a certain agricultural productivity level having more kids is actually beneficial for your economic success. Once you get over a certain productivity level it makes sense to have fewer kids and invest in them moving up the economic ladder.

>Builders in Arkensas have more kids than tech workers in San Francisco?

Because the cost of every warm body in a household in SF is completely asinine so people have fewer kids than they would like to.

Poor people in San Francisco have more kids than rich people in San Francisco. The explanation just doesn't fit the data.

I was assuming you knew that your comparison of a builder in Arkansas or a programmer in SF was intended to be a comparison of two people not at the top of the income ladder but reasonably financially secure.

Poor people everywhere have more kids than richer people in the same places because various welfare programs make the net cost of each kid less. There's also a massive cost cliff once you get below the threshold at which parents have enough income to justify saving for their kids college.

That doesn't mean family sizes aren't smaller in high cost areas. This is a well known trend.

I posted anecdotes to contextualise the trend. I don't really think there's much point in getting hung up on them because my point is: poor people have more kids, on average, and this trend holds pretty much everywhere. The real question is: what is it about being rich that causes you to have less kids?

>what is it about being rich that causes you to have less kids?

Are we talking locally rich or globally rich?

People in industrialized (rich) nations don't have tons of kids because that's not how you get ahead in that kind of economy. Subsistence farmers have tons of kids because that's how they get ahead economically.

Within richer nations richer people have fewer kids because the way social safety nets and social expectations of how one should raise one's kids make kids more expensive the higher up you go.

Well, the relationship holds at every level. It's true within and across societies. It doesn't matter if we're talking locally rich or globally rich.

I'm skeptical of local explanations because the relationship is so universal.

I understand that the real reason is Women’s education. The more education a woman has the more life options she has. Uneducated women have lots of kids, educated women tend to have fewer.

I thought the relationship between wealth & offspring was actually stronger for men, but I might be wrong about that.

Rich people tend to think they're going to have high quality kids and K select as opposed to the R selection the poor use? /not entirely serious

"it's in the very poorest places that you're going to have a tripling in population ... it's amazingly as children survive, parents feel like they'll have enough kids to support them in their old age. And so they choose to have less children."

https://www.gatesnotes.com/about-bill-gates/a-conversation-w...

I actually don't agree with that diagnosis. I think the very poorest people genuinely can't access contraception. Once you get above a fairly low level and the pill becomes affordable, something else becomes the bigger factor.

I just don't buy that very poor people ration out sex under a precise calculation of how many kids they want. Doesn't fit my observations of how humans behave. Most people fuck because they're horny, or because their husband is horny and they need his support to survive, or frankly because they're so poor they have to sell themselves. HIV is a bigger risk than not having children in old age, most Africans know that, but that doesn't stop it either.

> Once you get above a fairly low level and the pill becomes affordable, something else becomes the bigger factor.

The life choices of women are an important factor. Having both a career and children is still difficult today and more women choose careers.

Poor people beget more poor people. That's the economic data point right there.

The reason peasants in Africa have more children is manifold: from religion and lack of knowledge preventing contraception to outright necessity, because in these regions child labour is a thing.

A for developed countries: again, multiple reasons with religion still being right up there.

You can't just draw a parallel between a poor agricultural worker and a New York Lawyer, because obviously there are a thousand confounding factors, anything from education to where is the nearestvdoctor, so general stavility of the country.

> A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down.

An ageing population likely consumes less. The demand for goods will go down and the demand for labor will likely remain constant for a shrinking workforce. Asset prices will crash if future demand does not keep up with current valuations. This is not just bad for the investor class, this is bad for anyone who relies on the modern banking and financial systems.

Lack of economic opportunity is largely a man made problem due to poor social institutions. Unfortunately a reduced population size won’t fix that.

I think we've come to opposite conclusions.

Fewer children increases unequality. Less children means, that inheritance does not spread across several people. To the contrary, it consolidates within an ever shrinking size of the population. And because as of today it's capital ownership and not work that makes you rich (with few exceptions), higher demand for work might not be enough to offset this development.

There is historical evidence of this, like consequences of the Black Death:

"Another notable consequence of the Black Death was the raising of the real wage of England (due to the shortage of labour as a result of the reduction in population), a trait shared across Western Europe, which in general led to a real wage in 1450 that was unmatched in most countries until the 19th or 20th century. The higher wages for workers combined with sinking prices on grain products led to a problematic economic situation for the gentry."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death_in_England

I'm not yet convinced the uneven distribution of economic opportunity is due to a fundamental shortage of opportunity. It reminds me of the food shortages in African states embroiled in conflict- there is enough food, but it is not distributed. A significant question of our time is how we might bring economic opportunity to distressed regions. The idea of remote work from rural areas is a simple conceptual example; increasing access to markets for isolated farmers is another.

Growing populations can also reduce wealth inequality and lessen the importance of inherited wealth. These are complicated issues, to be sure.

There is a lot of empty space on earth even before we start terraforming deserts or building floating cities, or colonizing other planets. So the malthusian fearmongering that we are all going to die due to lack of resources is simply false. Having X times more people doesn't lead to us sacrificing anything but to producing 2^X more art and sciense. Even for such a simple example as youtube videos, if population is reduced by half, majority of people who make living by producing videos will lose half of heir income, and will stop producing videos. Developing new cpus will become much harder because research cost would stay the same, and demand would be cut in half. Moreover drastic reduction of population in the parts of world that produce most of our science would put under question even the ability to maintain the technologies we have now.

Plenty of space, yes, but in zones where you don't have to worry about natural disaster seasons, or ridiculous supply chain issues (I'm thinking southwest US for water)? NE is no cakewalk in the winter but we generally don't have to worry about a hurricane decimating a whole city.

As far as production, remember the automation issue as well as the fact that, well, more content is great perhaps in smaller communities, but think of the absolute firehose the Internet is and how many creatives would want to be able to sustain off of a consistent fanbase at at least an average salary. If more (or everyone) becomes a Youtuber, does that itself reduce who is watching the vids, reduces payouts because of the sheer amount of content, and lead to a scarcity? AND MORE IMPORTANTLY: Is too much of the same type of thing being created (e.g., people used to one Nicki Minaj probably think it's great to have Saweetie and Meg Thee Stallion, but what if they get their own copycats/spinoff artists? Too much of the same thing at once?) I'm assuming economically both our scenarios would adjust to views in an increase/decrease in population.

Also throwing more people at the science situation doesn't necessarily help if we aren't training quality people in the field and resort to degree factories. Think about the sheer number of papers being published nowadays. I assume it is hard for them to keep up and who knows how much more bad science (or disinformation in general) would occur then.

Please put my Malthusian fears to rest!

Follow up to the scarcity mentality for creatives: I realized not everyone makes it, and there are varying shades of grey to that. But does that lead to more job stress on non-creative "day jobs" if people have to give up on the creative jobs? Everyone with their fifteen minutes of fame...if it is literally everyone. We already see that a bit with Youtube artists. At any given time there are a handful of big name rappers (or musicians in general) for instance, but how many lesser-knowns would love to continue doing this but can't financially?

Except in terms of pure economics, labor won’t necessarily become more valuable, because with less population there will be less consumption and less demand for goods. So even though the dwindling supply of labor will have an upward effect on labor’s value, the dwindling demand for goods will have a counteracting downward effect. And this will only be exacerbated by increased automation.

Economic inequality and lack of economic opportunity is going to be a problem regardless of the population growth rate, and the solution will require something more substantial than simply have less/more children.

The point about it being an aging population is that the proportion of consumers to producers will change. The demand for goods might shrink as an absolute value, but the demand for labour should increase more, as a higher proportion of the population just can't work. In addition, part of the demand which increases will be for forms of labour that we currently don't have an automation plan for.

To balance out the automation question, it's just as likely that technical advances will improve the ability of older people to do economically useful work that they want to do. There's a lot of mental horsepower, life experience, and will there, if you can work around physical and metabolic limitations.

> When I look around the world today, I think the biggest resource that is lacking is economic opportunity. Huge swathes of people are desperate, angry, and depressed, I think because there is no opportunity for them. The best case scenario for huge numbers of people is stagnation.

To a large extent, that lack of economic opportunity is a political choice that was made by the selection of particular parameters for the economic system. Trying to engineer a shrinking population to force different parameters to be chosen is an indirect way of addressing the true problem.

> A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down.

What leads you to believe demand for labor will rise with a shrinking population? Furthermore, why wouldn't most companies simply continue automating? While Japan certainly isn't comparable to most western nations, it's certainly a good example of the potential downsides of a shrinking, aging population. A growing one isn't possible forever, either; it will eventually level out. We've just been innovating so quickly our population hasn't had time to reach a new equilibrium.

I live in a small studio apartment in a city, don’t do drugs, and don’t have a VR headset. I’m very happy even when working from home, the two things that bother me the most are fear of losing my job and fear of losing my girlfriend.

Maybe some people aren’t happy without having a yard? There are plenty of plants around here though and there’s an entire block that’s left as just trees and grass for people to walk around in. Maybe without that I’d feel the same way.

A shrinking, aging population would in no way make this better. It would make it worse.

Aging societies spend more on healthcare, have a smaller working base, and typically don’t have the kind of growth that makes it easy to borrow money to invest in new things. The typical result is slow economic growth, high taxes, and low levels of services for workers.

Why would demand for labor go up in a society with a shrinking population? Both the labor market and the consumer market draw from the general population - so I would think that a shrinking population would cause both to decrease. The net per capita effect would be for things to stay the same.

fixed amount of work is required for some task in society and some work don't need to work for increasing demand (like make a drama).

I'm largely with you. I'm a bit annoyed with the BBC on this article. It seems like just last week overpopulation was a big problem. Now we are "ill-prepared for the global crash" and there will be a "jaw-dropping impact". Oy. No wonder people feel anxious.

> A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down.

In the short term, absolutely. But after a generation, the old working population has retired and the smaller new working population cannot support them.

We are on the cusp of the next step of humanity (if we don't kill ourselves first).

I think this story lays out how that could look: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

A choice of two dystopias, yeay

Did you read the story all the way through? If we're going to live in a world dominated by AI/Automation it presents a compelling alternative to the current path.

[‘Ghost Houses’ Haunt a Rapidly Aging Japan](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-ghost-houses)

Pretty sad how this lie has propagated and caused so much misery and frankly mental disorders. Theres no better time to be born than today, period. All the rest are ravings of a madman.

> allocate everyone some future drugs to keep them sedated

Facebook, Netflix, and Xbox don't count? (Or HN, for that matter ;)

This is the point I was about to make, but you've put it better than me.

As the traditional factory job disappears more and more, the aging population will provide a huge source of new caring/support jobs. We'll have to find a way to pay them a living wage, but then we had that problem with factory jobs in the early industrial revolution too.

The problem is care-jobs are incredibly low productivity.

The reason a worker today is paid more than 100 years ago is, essentially, just that they can produce/transact with more people at once.

A nurse "should" be paid what they were 100 years ago, as the number of transactions hasn't changed. The only reason they aren't is due to competition from productive sectors.

But those productive sectors need to exist! In a world where many people are doing such low-productivity jobs, everyone will be much poorer.

How can you compare productivity across functions, nevermore industries? Does a nurse produce less than a director of marketing? By what possible metric? Profit comes to mind, but I am hoping no one is inhuman enough to judge the medical care sector by its profits...

Profit is a measure of productivity, other things being equal.

A director of marketing creates a campaign which affects millions of transactions... so it's a function which can dramatically increase economic production.

It's pretty easy to compare productivity across industries. Leave what "should" be aside, when you're planning for the success of nations you cannot rely on Moral Bonuses.

The rate of economic activity (ie., people transacting with one another such that each has more than before) is measurable: it's called growth.

And you cannot grow by replacing highly productive industries with deeply unproductive ones. To pay for things we need the ratio of workers:transactions to increase.

Human history was severely impoverished because this was always a low number. We are wealthy today only because it is a higher one.

> To pay for things we need the ratio of workers:transactions to increase.

Human health is also a component of that inequation. How are you factoring that in with profit?

Also, all of that growth is meaningless unless it somehow makes people healthier and happier. So I would say that having a huge and successful healthcare industry is one of the goals of the rest of the economy (as are food production, entertainment, knowledge production and others).

So, if we have enough wealth but not enough healthcare, food, fun or knowledge, than we can trade some of that wealth for more important things, like healthcare workers, or garbage collection, or agricultural work, or mathematics research, etc. Or child care, though I suppose you view stay-at-home parents as deeply unproductive by this measure.

GDP growth is one of the most strongly correlated metrics with "health, happiness, mathematical research, etc."

Capitalism is the greatest force in history for increases in human wealth, happiness, abundance, etc., ie., for growth

Consider any metric of interest over the last century, and esp. the last 40 years: https://ourworldindata.org/

That only works because the data doesn't take into account any kind of shared wealth. Large swathes of people lived in tribal communities which had different concepts of ownership and property, but were not 'poor' by any common definition from their times. GDP data completely ignored these types of societies, which formed the majority in some areas of the world before colonization. Even then, most of the escapes from poverty have happened in state-run, dictatorial China and in the newly de-colonized India, so it is very hard to imagine how some can claim Capitalism is the important factor here.

Also, capitalism without explicit social goals imposed by a state is disastrous. Just look at the USA, with one of the worse and most expensive Healthcare systems out of the developed world, despite having by far the largest GDP (the only fully capitalist-run Healthcare system in the world!).

All of this is not to mention that capitalism is rapidly destroying our planet, with global warming, deforestation,river polution, oil spills, air pollution and other woes being fought for tooth-and-nail by most large companies.

Yes they were, extremely poor.

Child mortality rates and mortality rates in childbirth have been c. 20% for most of human history, up until c. 1940.

Almost all human beings for almost all recent history have been agricultural works (over 90% in 1800) which is a severe and precarious state.

If you wish to go before settlements into nomadic hunters and gatherers note that this cannot produce "mathematical research, healthcare, etc." -- ie., the desirable things stated.

At this point you're just pining to be a dog. You may prefer a shorter, more brutal, more violent life... but I think, rather, you just need a fantasy of a utopian "before time" to justify you enmity towards the status quo.

> how some can claim Capitalism is the important factor here.

Err... when do you think they started their massive reductions in poverty?

When they stopped blaming various other people an liberalized their markets (in china "The Capitalists" and in India "The British Empire"). Within a few years of introducing captialist reforms these societies dramatically reduced poverty.

according to that logic, lawyers, CEOs, line managers and HR should be paid what they were 100 years ago, as they do not directly produce. They're not, it's effectively through competition with other jobs that their pay is determined.

Intuitively, "pay according to productivity" makes sense, but productivity gains have far outpaced the pay of workers while the money went elsewhere. Let's face the reality that productivity prescribes the total sum that goes around but not how each individual's contribution is credited in a society.

> according to that logic, lawyers, CEOs, line managers and HR should be paid what they were 100 years ago

Is that not true? Carnegie and Rockefeller were even relatively richer than the CEOs are today, and I'm sure their lawyers were compensated for as well as today's richest lawyers as well.

yes, for almost all of human history wealth inequality has been (far) worse than it is today.

The only period of relatively more equality was post-WW2. Inequality then, as ever, has only been reduced by mass death -- either in the form of wars, or plagues, famines etc.

The mechanism of wealth acquisition, ie., investment /(preferential attachment), necessarily iterates towards increasing levels of inequality.

Er... no.

Your productivity is your effect on net increases in economic transactions. A CEO has a massive effect. Jeff Bezos can literally, right now, change the GDP of entire countries just by making a decision.

One minute of his time can raise or lower a country's economic activity.

> while the money went elsewhere

Did it? Productivity increases is still the reason people have rising wages.

That we don't see the 1:1 wage:productivity increases we used to (post-WW2), doesnt mean that productivity isnt still the key metric to be increasing.

As to why that is probably the form automation takes today has a lot to do with it, ie., that innovations in factories used to increase the productivity of working class people; now such increases accumulate to highly skilled workers.

Ironically, I think this makes my point: our economy has become politically unstable because of the relative increase of low-productivity labour. This would get much worse with people transitioning to care work.

i think what will actually happen is that rich countries are gonna move ahead with robotics, additive manufacturing and nano

and countries that cant keep up will be left behind with starving useless populations

bonus points: theres gonna be severe fresh water shortage

We're going to be a multi-planetary species. All we need is people willing to take risks instead of peons trying to live a cosy, uneventful and "sustainable" life in their government-allocated single-room apartments. And having children really isn't a huge risk even for the most incompetent.

I mean in the middle ages if you had 12 children and a third survived, you've done well.

If you look at The Black Death - great for young workers. Shit for land owning royalty.

Same stuff

People had more children when there was less economic opportunity.

Birth rates in an era with birth control and women’s ability to have careers is not comparable to birth rates without birth control and when women could not work.

A reducing labor population really won't help the working class.

First of all, you'll be able to kiss your retirement bye bye.

Second of all, you would likely see decline of the economy in real terms. This will cause huge dysfunctions in capitalism, as there will not be an efficient way to invest.

If your retirement was predicated on a forever swelling population lifting your boat, then you actually didn't save enough to retire. Secure retirements shouldn't rely on paygo systems and infinite growth.

You can have a billion dollars worth of shares in amazon, hell you can have a billion dollars in cash. It isn't going to wipe your ass in a nursing home. Someone young will. If the people who do the work are downtrodden enough why would they bother participating in your scheme?

This is the one thing people seem to forget; people who work in places like nursing homes rarely do so because they have a dream of wiping old people's asses for a living. Instead, they do it because they need the money.

In a society where there are plenty of other well-paying jobs to be had, working at a nursing home won't be the popular choice. I expect the future to be interesting.

Some people have vocation for taking care of the old and the sick. Yes, they do it for the money, but they could have chosen something else, and yet they chose nursing because to them it is rewarding. Job satisfaction and doing good things for others are very important indicators for happiness.

Definitely. The people who want to work in nursing homes are probably outnumbered by the people that have to, however, and once the others leave, others will too, simply because the job will become unbearable. Combine that with increased numbers of retirees and fewer potential employees, and things could turn ugly real fast.

Personally, I'm preparing for a future where a nursing home isn't an option. Just in case.

Someone clearly hasn't seen what a healthy lifestyle can do for you: https://theculturetrip.com/asia/japan/articles/why-japans-ok...

It's common to equate old age with nursing homes and misery in the West.

Other cultures show that this needn't be the case at all and is - for the most part; there's still about 30% genetics involved - dependent on how you chose to spend your days. Less Netflix, Facebook, and convenience food, more exercise and healthy, non-processed food can get you much further than a billion dollars and medical personnel...

If an 80 year old no longer contributes to society, and all they have is pieces of paper indicating they used to contribute in the past, they are relying on people who do contribute (by fixing toilets, growing food whatever) to accept those pieces of paper. They will only do so if they feel they are getting enough of those pieces of paper, and if they will believe those pieces of paper will work in the future.

The health of that 80 year old is only relavent in terms of the amount of resources needed to move from the working class to the non-working class. The healther the aged, the fewer the resources. The higher the working:retired ratio, the fewer the resources.

What is to stop the adults under say 50 who have barely any capital at all (401ks, houses, shares, whatever) from saying "screw this, I'm off to $other_country where I don't live hand to mouth and have no future of retirement"

A country can not survive when 90% of its population are 80 years old, no matter how healthy or rich those people are, it means for every 10 hours an under-80 works, 9 hours is to produce goods and services for other people.

Goods and services do move across borders, though. A single country’s economy doesn’t exist in a sealed bottle. Those pieces of paper can be traded for foreign goods and services.

Now if the whole world was 90% elderly you might have a point.

That's the whole point of the article - immigration is no longer the solution, the ratio of working:retired is falling.

The issue is that large numbers of people, organizations, and governments have assumed a forever swelling population in their retirement plans. So, yes, like any time in history there will be individuals who haven't saved enough to retire. The issue is that a demographic contraction throws the large majority of retirees into crippling poverty, absent government intervention that allocates capital investment and workers' consumption toward retirees' consumption.

Obviously a forever swelling population is not model we can or should try to sustain, but reaching some kind of replacement-level equilibrium is sustainable and is much healthier for workers' and retirees' economic health.

Majority of working people live paycheck to paycheck, earning enough to pay for rent, food, and maybe a few beers on a friday night.

Any extra money from pay rises goes into spiraling rent costs cause by extra money from pay rises, which goes to those who own the rentable assets.

There is more than enough housing to go round. There is more than enough food to go round. There's more than enough beer to go round. Yet there are people working 100 hours a week sweeping floors that can barely pay for it.

There have to be better ways to distribute what's being generated (which is almost entirely from those ages 20-65) among the population without disenfranchising increasing numbers of those that actually do the work

Without a population at least being more or less constant, there is essentially no way at all that the average person can retire.

Why? Because if we all start saving enough to retire without relying on growth, then that has a deletrious impact on the economy that makes retirement even more difficult.

This is because no matter how much paper you have, you still need people to grow food, build houses and run services once you retire. If there are more retirees than working people, you're in deep trouble. The average person simply won't be able to retire, ever.

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