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Comment by Callmenorm | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this going to create another problem. Where the country gets old before it gets rich?

Depends on what you mean by rich. India’s per capita income is more than 3 times what it was 30 years ago. So it can easily support significant social programs for the elderly, though not to western standards.

On top of this western productivity is linked to low birth rates enabling a larger percentage of the population to work. So low birth rates may be required for a wealthy country rather than being just the result of a wealthy country.

But what was the actual per capita income 30 years ago? 3 times not much is still not very much. So I don't see how is a given that they can institute suitable social programs. It's still a question whether or not that'll be the case even for first world western countries

India’s per capita PPP is ~6k$ USD per year, but it’s not equally distributed. Ignoring economic growth and assuming a population distribution that eventually looks like the US (16% of the population over 65) allocating say 8% of GDP to the elderly would provide a standard of living better than most of them had 20 years ago and in fact many would see an income bump at retirement.

Of course that doesn’t pay for significant medical care etc, but I also ignored economic growth. By the time India has US style age demographic breakdown things should look significantly better.

Yes, happened to Brazil. When you've squandered your demographic dividend without escaping poverty it's basically game over.

Reference? (What are you talking about?)

Many developing countries go through a phase when fertility/mortality rates start to decline, and for a while they'll get an economic boost while the working-age population grows at a faster rate than the non-working-age population. That's when East Asian countries laid the foundation for their economic growth.

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

This. China faces it right now, where they are rich, but not rich enough yet

What is 'rich enough'? Looking at elderly issues in UK, noone ever is

China on a gdp per capita basis is still in the middle income trap. It seems likely they can escape, but they've not gotten out of the range yet.

I am very suspicious of that supposed relationship. There are tons of productivity gains to be had, and nothing like a tightening labor market to force them.

The cost of living in India is going to be pretty low compared to colder countries, so it shouldn't cost a lot to provide a decent lifestyle.

With accelerating automation, most people are going to have to depend on a much smaller set of people/industries. A shrinking population is not bad given we make plans for the future.

Cost of living in India is low because of the large population. A generation or two from now things will look very different when there's no more dirt cheap labor to go around.

indian median age is still 28, so there is still time to get relative "rich" ($8-10k per capita as china today) in the next 20-25 years.

There is A LOT of slack in a population of that size. Most women don't even work yet. Even if population declines, the labor force will continue to rise for a long time.

Yeah I’m fairly sure they work their asses off already. Maybe not that gets measured in GDP thought.

I was going to say this. We have this weird habit in the West of trivializing raising one's own children, as if that's not "real work". A lot folks would rather raise their children instead of outsourcing it to strangers just to work a job they hate.

Evidently, a lot of people would like to have financial freedom and accept the costs of outsourcing some portion of child rearing.

Many of us (and by “us,” I mean “mothers”) see it as a balance: I am outsourcing part of my child’s upbringing in order to maintain a career I like well enough that’s capable of supporting us both should life throw some curveballs at us. Say “life insurance” all you like, and my response is “unpredictable inflation”.

It’s outsourced to strangers anyway once children to to school.

Raising children might not be what people are best at, and it's more efficient to work a job that can pay for this stranger, and to have money left over.

There aren't many qualities that disqualify a person from humanity, but being so bad at caring for one's own children that an employee would do a better job might be an example.

you can't pay someone to love your child. only you and your partner can love your child. love is nearly as important as food to them. and you have to show that love in the attention you give them - tucking them into bed at night isn't enough.

I don't think anyone is trivializing it... but the government can't tax homemakers to pay for medicare, pensions, and other social services which is the relevant point of the discussion.

Which is what the article concludes with

Why is the goal to get rich? That seems lame and shortsighted

Yeah, screw social mobility. Stay poor!

Mobility != GDP

GDP == The room available for mobility.

This is a novel argument to me; a state with a high Gini coefficient has plenty of room for mobility even if GDP remains static.

Mobility is, in the modern world, as much a political argument as an economic one.

Technically, social mobility is just relative income position changes over time, which applies to zero sum games. It does not imply that you can significantly increase your income. Social mobility is also an indirect measure of income distribution, and by proxy geographic compactness -- you can double your income and still have low mobility if the distribution is wide.

A country can be "highly mobile" with flat GDP and limited income growth opportunity for the individual. That is just how the math works out. Social mobility is a term-of-art that does not mean what most people intuit it to mean.

I think it's more apt to consider mobility in absolute terms in this context as opposed to relative. Having a country with super high mobility but extremely low GDP is obviously not favorable.

If the country does not get richer faster than it gets older, the increasingly older population will suffer, having to work till they're older and getting less financial support (healthcare, pensions etc) because there would be proportionally fewer healthy young people to pay in to the system.

Nah - that's more of a system of control. You can definitely have a poor country where people are not slaves to mortgages. It's called building your own house. Many countries allow that.

I'm not talking about mortgages though...

Consider healthcare, usually older people need it more than younger people. If you have a higher proportion of older people in a population compared to younger people, you have a larger proportion of the associated costs being carried by a smaller proportion of the population, this means decreasing healthcare quality, increasing the pool of people paying in by increasing retirement age or increasing taxes. None of which are particularly good.

Mortgages are the number one cost associated with "working til you are very old".

By far in poor countries healthcare is much more affordable than in rich countries. I think one of the main outcomes of rich countries is just increased costs for everything.

I keep seeing this, but then I look at how rich countries treat their old people, and generally it's stuff them in retirement homes, which seem like awful places.

I agree, but that isn't much of a counter-point, if anything a population that is majority old people will only make that worse since the increased burden on the young would breed more resentment towards older people.

Would you rather old people be dying of starvation/due to lack of healthcare because the country isn't rich enough to support them fully than living in old age homes?

They're going to die regardless. Is it better to die younger from lack of health care than die older with dementia and bed sores? I've only witnessed the latter. Doesn't seem like something I'd like to go through.

I think that's a very defeatist/nihilistic point of view. Since we're all going to die eventually anyway, we should aim to improve our standards as much as possible so we or our kids get to enjoy a better old age than what old people get right now. Our ancestors have gone through much worse to build the better world we enjoy today.

sort of what I was saying though. Life in a home doesn't seem enjoyable.

Not having health care, savings and social blanket, education, being able to buy stuff, choice, gets pretty lame pretty quickly.

Ah yes, who will buy the plastic products! The world needs more shit to throw in the bin.

How about having the goals of developing healthcare instead of "being rich"

Who needs healthcare and social services?

You're probably rich by global standards.

Look at how the poor in India live. "Getting rich" does not mean becoming multimillionaire, it just means reaching a developed country's standard of living.

Because being poor sucks?

For all the people down voting: I urge you to consider a different perspective where the hoarding of resources is a bad thing for humanity and life at large. The US, along with other countries, have done this for too long. We should have "having lots of money and resources" as a primary goal. Resources are tools to accomplish other things, not an end in itself. This is why I say its lame and shortsighted.

There is no amount of wealth that will help. Increasing societal wealth leads to increasing power to the old, who will use it to transform the young into a slave class.

This is most visible in America’s response to COVID but also in Prop 13 etc.

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