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Comment by tsycho | Hacker News Reader

On the other side, unfettered population growth for the purposes of maintaining a sufficiently large proportion of young people (in a world where people are living longer as well) is basically a Ponzi scheme. We’ll have to eventually stabilize to a sustainable demographic distribution; the earlier the better.

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The distinguishing feature of a Ponzi scheme is the lack of any real productive activity. The growth on paper is fake. We care about working-age population because working-age people are actually out there fighting entropy to provision the stuff we like, and there's more or less of it to go around depending on how much of that is happening. That's reflected on paper but it's also true in the world, in our standard of living.

Your statement "the earlier the better" makes no sense. Obviously at some point there are limits; we should do as well as we can within those limits. "We can't be infinitely rich, therefore we should be as poor as possible." What?

>"We can't be infinitely rich, therefore we should be as poor as possible."

Very obviously not OPs point. What they're saying is that if you're living in a system that basically runs on a sort of 'lipstick on a pig' mentality being confronted with your problems directly and being forced to solve them is preferable to dragging it out, and there's a lot of truth to that.

You may be familiar with the old startup and systems design mantra 'fail fast', which is the same thing. If you want a long term sustainable system it is good to act in such a way as to bring systemic faults to the surface.

This.

An entire generation will be demanding their golden years be subsidized by the young like they had to subsidize their parents’ generation, who had to subsidize their parents before them.

The world is not ready to be told “No” on this. That’s a time bomb.

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