Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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There are more fundamental questions here of whether we want population growth. There seems to be a de-facto equilibrium springing up where wealthy countries quietly drop below replacement rate fertility and then migration from poorer regions happens.

It isn't immediately clear why this is a bad thing either. It seems intuitively fair, sustainable for the forseeable future, nobody is being forced to do anything against their will. Might be a good outcome. We can't all have growing populations; given the failures of manufacturing and energy policy in the west that would just lead to war and not having enough stuff to maintain a good lifestyle. We're already having trouble treading water when it comes to lifestyles, the last thing we need is more people.

It causes lots of problems because many of our systems have been set up in times of growth and won't function without it. Take for example "pay-as-you-go" pension systems in much of Europe. Here, you don't fund your own retirement, but the current working population funds the retirement of the current retirement population. This works great when you have population growth, because you can have e.g. five working people fund one person's retirement. If the ratio moves closer to 1:1 or worse, this becomes a lot more challenging.

Of course, population growth cannot continue forever, so we will have to figure this out anyway. Still, for any individual country, the smart move seems to be to stave it off for as long as possible, observe how other countries deal with it, and then implement the solutions that have actually worked for others yourself.

> Take for example "pay-as-you-go" pension systems in much of Europe.

Money by itself is worthless if you can't exchange it for actually useful goods and services. So non-"pay-as-you-go" pensions cannot circumvent demography, either – if too many retirees with their accumulated capital would be chasing too little working-age people providing goods and services, you'd just get inflation and all your accumulated capital became worth less.

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