Study: Aging population could be a drag on economic growth
around.uoregon.edu
around.uoregon.edu
That itself drives wage inflation, and it's great, it moves money to those doing useful work. What you're saying with inflation is basically "the value of an hour of work 20 years ago is less than the value of an hour of work now". That could be because of improved productivity, or could be because of a reduction in supply.
It's the only thing that's going to save western society from the scourge of the concentration of wealth in the handful of a few.
They do not want labor to have power. And all this can be linked in with AI. They love AI because it takes power away from a lot of labor, including code jockeys.
Increasing productivity is a great thing. In the US post war environment people shared that increased productivity fairly evenly. It was only once the Regan years arrived that workers in general stopped participating in the boom.
Why do you think I do not agree that those were also bad. Maybe not as bad, but they all led us here.
> Increasing productivity is a great thing. In the US post war environment people shared that increased productivity fairly evenly. It was only once the Regan years arrived that workers in general stopped participating in the boom.
What make you think that where we are now is not because we "increased productivity?
Have you ever question the need for increased productivity? Who is telling you you need to be more productive? (Let me help you, the people who profit off your labor are telling you to be more productive.)
Seems reasonable to assume most people consider advances in healthcare, emergency response, communications, etc that were possible due to computers as “good”. Ditto for the tractor and the ox.
I do not care for the appeal to popularity as my past comments here can testify on their own.
These "advances in healthcare" have led to an aging population who are now considered a burden. If there is good there is bad. When you stop seeking the good, you will create no more bad.
Marxists think the benefits of the increased productivity should go to the labour. Monopolists think it should go to the owners.
Im not aware of anyone who thinks it’s better for a human to spend 10 hours work to produce enough food to eat that day rather than 1 hour.
This is true of the computer, the tractor, the healthcare system, and the loom as made famous by the Luddites.
Healthcare in the US leaves more people bankrupt than any other cause while massivley enriching ownership. Tke for example Rick Scott, who was the CEO of Columbia Healthcare during the era in which it was convicted of the largest (at that time) medicare fraud in US history. Then he bacame Florida's governor, and is now a US senator.
Immigration is great when private investments and the economy is growing faster than the labor market can absorb them (like the US) because then it fuels the fire and lifts everyone up. But, if you're in a meh economy (parts of Europe), stagnating wages, high taxes, high bureaucracy, low investments, high CoL, expensive real estate, then importing extra workers only increases inequality as it puts downward pressure on wages and only enriches the upper class who can now affords a platinum trim on their superyachts instead of a gold trim.
Immigration is a very complex topic that doesn't have a right or wrong answer but depends on the economy of a country and the situation of housing and public services which the immigrant population will need.
Fundamentally, people don't immigrate to countries where they think their lives will be worse. They move to places with more economic opportunities. That introduces more labor supply into the destination country. At controlled immigration levels, this is healthy and necessary.
Contrary to the idea that there is only a fixed amount of work to do, increasing an economy’s population tends to increase its aggregate output at an even greater rate than the headcount, ie average wages increase. One of the reasons is that it increases the ability for greater specialization. If some other economy paid for the unproductive years of childhood, the benefit is even greater.
That's true only if you cherry-pick certain countries with already booming economies, like the US, where adding more workers adds more fuel to the fire, especially in the low interest environment of the past 10 years.
But most other countries with much slower economies, won't benefit from even more workers the way you described ( average wages increase) but more like average wage decreases. Adding more workers won't benefit a stagnating economy.
What happens is where before you had e.g 3 working people for every non-working (retired person), now you have 1 working person for every retired person, but productivity has not improved much, so the working person has to spend 3x more of what they produce supporting retired people than before, leaving them less. Everyone's standard of living is worse because you have less overall production (due to fewer people working) to support the same population.
It's not hard to understand that a society with 10 people working to support 50 people has worse living standards than a society with 50 people working to support 10 people, assuming the same level of technological development in both.
The amount of healthcare, and other services that someone can consume while not being able to work, is massive and has not been automated away. From daily things like cooking, feeding, bathing, etc to healthcare providers providing physical therapy, massages, consultations, to work around the residence like plumbing and electrical and otherwise swinging a hammer.
I do not see automation picking up these tasks in the near future, and the number of man hours demanded for them seem to be getting larger my whole life (more old people, living longer, and more healthcare options).
Imagine a high school leaver being able to live in a 4 bed suburbia with a couple of cars, stay at home spouse and 3 kids. That was the norm in the 70s. Not today. Money has been taken from the workers and given to the parasites for the last 30 years, it’s about time it flipped back the other way.
The desperate need for continuous growth will be the downfall of our species.
This is already true, we’re seeing the worst wealth inequality since the gilded age. The benefits of growth are increasingly being captured by the wealthy.
To your point, if the minimum wage in a lot of areas is $15, then why aren’t there any decent houses selling for $30k anymore like they were back in the 50’s? $15/hr is quite wealthy by those standards but it is becoming pretty poor nowadays.
The problem with wealth is that we tend to measure it by the concrete dollar amount in our bank account and not the purchasing power it represents.
And that would show up as an improvement in GDP growth, because unless you banned private businesses, there's always going to be some people (business owners, independent contractors) working more than 20 hours, so they'd produce more than before, which would show up in GDP.
Any system that intentionally pays out significantly more than people pay in is going to have sustainability problems.
It's so bad with the California pension systems that they're facing immenant collapse, despite being in an economy with the highest growth rate in human history.
Creating an unsustainable pension system solves nothing. The only real solution is to root out the causes of unsustainable cost of living and address them. But doing that is far more difficult than just giving out "free" money, and gets almost no recognition from voters.
Also, population growth rates vary a lot by country. Many countries have a negative growth rate, whether due to birth rates or immigration rates. I think Canada's birth rate is almost as low as Japan's, but Canada allows a lot of immigration and Japan allows less.
The main problem is that caring about the environment becomes a competitive disadvantage to your business when your competitor doesn’t care and is willing to do anything to get ahead. Sometimes it’s fine if you’re a luxury brand trying incorporate sustainability into your brand, but that matters less in a B2B context.
The “bad” money inevitably beats the “good” money.
“Bad” money works to circumvent society altogether and is not interesting in participating in a societally-driven dialogue about what’s ethical and what’s not. If it did, there would be no dark money or influencing-peddling in the system.
This is where various checks and balances are vital and society needs to constantly remind its young people that ends do not justify the means. Something we are definitely losing these days.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? Because people mean different things by this. Do you mean it in the "the economy should keep becoming bigger" sense or "human experience should keep getting better" sense? Or do you think it's the same thing?
So probably they mean someone opposed to people like that.
If we dramatically change our lifestyles and industry for the sake of the environment, we would still, at current population numbers, have a huge, negative impact on the environment. Especially once more countries join the developed world.
It's a fantasy to think we can sprinkle some solar and sustainable farming on our societies, and the environment will be just fine as the human population triples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_environmen...
The inverse of course happened post-WWII. The soldiers were coming home and needed places to live and raise children. WWII was the thing that actually pulled the US out of the long term effects of the Great Depression. Mind, the Great Depression is identified with starting in 1929.
It’s access to resources, stupid. If you want your populations to grow then incentivize your populations growth. Things that push back look like: bailing out banks and forcing individuals out of their homes in the Great Recession, leaving the minimum wage so low that labor markets fail, failing to police labor employee/employer relationships (see the concept of “wagery”), etc. If you tell your workers to simply “make better choices” you’re not supporting them. You’re telling them to become their own labor dispute lawyers. But of course no average individual worker is going to have the money and time to actually push back legally even if they are wronged. Hence, wagery-your boss becomes something more like a personal tyrant and less of bargaining partner.
Things like NIMBYISM and BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone) contribute to this. They were also largely not present during the post-WWII period. I mean modern day Las Vegas owes its existence to infrastructure and technological progress. The Hoover dam took a lot of planning and building and the US has a lot of growth over the last century thanks to it. Similar to the highway and road system. NIMBYISM and BANANA point to the stagnation problem in government and a general lack of the US citizen of being informed and performing basic civic duties like voting. Not going to flesh out those points for lack of time.
In short, my hot take would be: “if you want your populations to grow then stop worrying about what people are or aren’t doing with their genitals and start asking what you can do to make people feel secure enough to think having a kid or at least bumping uglies is a good idea.” Corporations don’t have genitals.
They're all aging incredibly rapidly and the first three have generous pension systems that are going to be impossible to reduce
The thing is that it's not that cheap a country anymore and salaries are still quite low compared to the larger EU economies. Housing is a lot cheaper in Italy (another country with a large diaspora in the Americas).
> "it is an analogy for supposedly insuperable extrapolated problems being rendered moot by the introduction of new technologies"
[1] Great horse manure crisis of 1894 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of...
To acquire $400,000 a year - one ten thousandth of that - you would have to pay about 300k a year in tax, or about $15m, before you even spent a penny.
Have Musk and Bezos paid $150b in tax over their lifetime?
Logan? Why are you running Logan?
The statement that an "aging population could be a drag on economic growth" is really saying that capitalism cannot profit off of the elderly and that is a bad thing for stock holders.
How about you try visiting somewhere like North Korea, or some country in Sub-Saharan Africa, the countries which have had the least economic growth, and try to say with a straight face that economic growth doesn't make a difference.
>The statement that an "aging population could be a drag on economic growth" is really saying that capitalism cannot profit off of the elderly and that is a bad thing for stock holders.
To put it in simple terms, compare two situations: in one you're working to support just yourself and your father, in the second you're working to support both your parents and two grandparents. Obviously in the second one your standard of living is going to be worse, and as a society that's what it likes when the ratio of working to non-working people decreases.
There is a difference between economic growth and strangling a county into poverty with sanctions (North Korea) or economic imperialism (Africa and the IMF). That is not economic stabilization.
> Obviously in the second one your standard of living is going to be worse, and as a society that's what it likes when the ratio of working to non-working people decreases.
You are confusing economic growth with economic stabilization. I am for the latter. The need for economic growth is based ion the need for a profit.
Yes, fatcat wall street stockholders want the companies they hold stock in to be profitable so that they receive a return on their investment. But small local business owners want to earn a profit so that they have a take-home income that they can use to feed their family. Even bottom-rung workers employ their labor in such a way that it profits them. You wouldn't work a job if it didn't earn you a paycheck every two weeks which they you can use to buy food, shelter, furniture, electronics, etc. that give you a higher standard of living than what you could make with your own two hands. Everyone everywhere is always trying to get out more than they put in by being intelligent about what they put in. But if you're very young, or very old, or sick, you can't play that game. That's part of why the rest of us are trying to amass profits: so that we can all chip in some of that surplus to donate to those who need it. And eventually, we'll be part of that group ourselves, which is why we try to save for retirement.
It's a given that we all have to expend effort to stay alive and comfortable in this world. You have to do that whether you're part of a bustling economy or a hunter gatherer in the woods. But if you're part of a bustling economy, there's a chance that everybody can live an easier and more comfortable life because 1. people get to specialize their work towards what they're best at or what they enjoy most, and 2. because you can build on the shoulders of giants by using existing designs and infrastructure to more efficiently capture what we need from the ground, soil, etc. A growing economy is even better because it makes it a good bet that if you lend your money away to people who have a short-term need for it, they'll be able to give you back more than what you originally handed them. And because that person who has a short-term need believes that an infusion of money now will make even more profit than what they'd give back, they'll agree to that deal. Those conditions are good for supporting an aging population because you can give money to the most active and productive people, then get back more right when you need it.
Without a growing economy, none of that logic works anymore, and everything becomes less convenient for everybody - the elderly most of all.
I am using the economic definition of profit. Labor does not gain profit from selling their labor hours.
Extending effort does not mean there is profit. Ask any non-profit. The need for profit means the theft of labor value from the worker.
Economic growth is basically shorthand for producing more of those things so we can enjoy more of them.
What we don't do is record the negative externalities of production and that means gdp is a bit of a poor measure.
More grandiose plans would be somehow triggering a nuclear war - making mankind extinct would be great for the environment in the long run. Not many people can do that, but I guess if you work hard you might get into such a position.
Assuming you don't want to do that, reducing human impact on the environment is of course good.
Jevons paradox
or minimize your impact, for example my footprint is about 1/20th of average, if more people lived like that, global warming wouldn't be an issue at all
there are many possibilities between 0 (no human) and 1 (many homo consumericus)