An ever shrinking population of productive people (percentage-wise) is going to have to provide goods and services for an ever growing population of people who can no longer work.
It’s a huge burden. Taxes will be higher - which will have all the associated consequences.
What if we tip the scale to young more and treat them fairer? What if we start moving some of the services to the young instead of the old?
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2020/03/shr...
It's not a unique Japan problem tbf. The young people are getting shafted all over the world.
If the issue is wealth disparity, then why only target the elderly not the young people who are wealthy as well?
And the elderly largely don't work, because they can't anymore.
Shifting services means the elderly will get poorer. Which given the high wealth level they have in developed countries relative to the young is not a catastrophe. However it would be a huge adjustment to expectations downward, since the elderly would have the rug pulled out from under them. Whereas the young haven't yet had a chance to adjust their expectations up since they haven't had money yet. Hence the political settlement.
For a prosaic example, in many US states funding for public universities has been cut to pay for public sector pensions in the past thirty years. This has shifted educational costs to the young in exchange for maintaining the benefits of retirees. This is an example of shifting services from young to old.
The actual amount of goods and services produced will be lesser and/or be stretched thinner.
The only real way to combat it is to import young people from places with a mostly young population and getting them productive to make up for the productivity shortfall.
Actually my rhetorical question is only half wrong. People, young and old, are selfish. They are however not at all ignorant about who butters their bread. If you want to increase spending on the young, then you need more young to vote for that.
If anything the growing ranks of the elderly guarantee a greater share of public spending will go towards them. From a growth perspective, that's a vicious cycle. From a fairness perspective... well it kinda makes sense that larger cohorts should get more spending in a democratic society. I get there's a lot of nuance, but this is the gist afaict.
Japan has PPP per capita income more than twice as high as China, 5x India. The idea it can't possibly pay more to take care of its elderly and infirm otherwise its society will collapse is up there with the most ludicrous wall street craziness I've ever heard. And they've already been ousted as shysters, mind you, because they've been repeating the same thing for a generation now. Because what they are really scared of as I said is people waking up to the fact that their pyramid scheme isn't the only way to do things.
Seems to me that by the time we reach a global crunch, countries like Japan that will already be a generation or two into addressing this problem and restructuring their societies and economies to cope without ever increasing population will be in a far better position than those continuing to push unsustainable growth to defer the inevitable.
I have heard many more ludicrous things. Japan is already heavily indebted and as relative per capita productivity will decrease significantly while while taxes increase there won’t be necessarily that many incentives for young people to stay in the country further exacerbating the problem.
> their pyramid scheme isn't the only way to do things.
Any suggestions?
> better position than those continuing to push unsustainable growth to defer the inevitable.
Or far worse.
> without ever increasing population
Who said anything about ever increasing population? Why are you even saying that?
The problem is a severe decrease in population accompanied by a similarly severe increase in average age.