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Comment by timschmidt | Hacker News Reader

> Pension is a Ponzi scheme. Explained in terms of economic theory, if everybody works and saves in time period 1, and retires and receives pension in time period 2, then... their pension is worthless, because there's infinite inflation, because no more goods and services get produced.

You've created an impossible situation which will never exist and then offered it as an example of why taking care of the elderly, something humans have done since before recorded history, is flawed.

As Bill and Ted would say: Bogus!

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> why taking care of the elderly, something humans have done since before recorded history

Well yeah, but before government-organised pension, it was your kids taking care of you when you get older, so the system was much more balanced (or rather, only imbalanced on the micro scale, not at a mega scale we see now...)

This is missing the elderly with no young to support them for whatever reason, so some level of government support is necessary. You can’t just have old people dying in the streets of course.

Sometimes you gotta know when the parties over and it's time to leave.

Those people literally dug their own graves.

NIH / WHO put infertility at somewhere between 10% and 17.5%.

You've condemned a sixth of the world's population through no fault of their own.

Adopt some orphans.

George Washington chose to found a country instead.

Beethoven and Chopin wrote some music.

Queen Anne united a Kingdom, and Queen Mary II assented to the 1689 Bill of Rights.

Frida Kahlo painted some art.

Virginia Woolf wrote some literature.

Helen Geisel edited Dr. Seuss.

Rosalind Franklin helped discover DNA.

Jean Purdy helped develop IVF.

All infertile due to no fault of their own.

Perhaps you should consider moving out of the country, avoiding classical music, literature, and art, foregoing all DNA-related medical developments and IVF, and meditating on empathy as you do so.

These people were outliers and they could pursue their passions and contribute to the societies because vast majority of adults were rearing a bunch of kids.

The problem is that for the last few generations in the Western societies, everyone wanted to be a George Washington or Rosalind Franklin and decided to pursue their passion. Not enough people were willing to do boring work of raising kids. That is definitely not sustainable.

> These people were outliers

What part of 1/6 the population don't you understand? Is this ignorance willful?

> The problem is that for the last few generations in the Western societies... Not enough people were willing to do boring work of raising kids. That is definitely not sustainable.

Biology seems to have incentivized reproduction heavily enough that we're sitting at 8.2 Billion humans worldwide.

"The human population has experienced continuous growth following the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the end of the Black Death in 1350, when it was nearly 370,000,000." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

Wake me up when it actually starts shrinking.

Alternatively, if you think there's something you can do to incentivize reproduction more than sex, let me know, I'd like to be a first-round investor.

> What part of 1/6 the population don't you understand? Is this ignorance willful?

The 1/6 number is made up. Here's an example source: https://www.who.int/news/item/04-04-2023-1-in-6-people-globa...

The first red flag is they use the Newspeak "experience infertility".

If you look at the data sources, they're calling women (and men) with children "infertile": https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/i-keystat.htm

Obviously there's a sense in which a woman who's had children and now can't is "infertile" (though FAR more than one-sixth of women experience menopause). But it's not the sense being used by you and your parent commenter in this thread.

> The first red flag is they use the Newspeak "experience infertility".

It's this very new language from approximately the 17th century. And if you think real hard, you might find that you're a person who's experienced things too. Wow.

> If you look at the data sources, they're calling women (and men) with children "infertile"

The phrase that particular source uses is "impaired fecundity" which makes perfect sense. No clue what you're on about. If someone is born with two legs and through some "experience" loses one, we might refer to that person as having "impaired mobility". Crazy.

What causes you to post such insanity? Isn't it embarrassing?

The page I linked to has a top-level section called "Infertility". It has a table with a column called "1 or more births". The data in the table say that a positive proportion of those women are infertile.

As I said the first time, there's a sense in which such a woman can be infertile and it is NOT the sense your parent commenter means.

> As I said the first time, there's a sense in which such a woman can be infertile and it is NOT the sense your parent commenter means.

I understand you feel that way. Perhaps you are just a person who is experiencing dissatisfaction.

The research seems clear and sensible to me. And wholly relevant to OP. You may want to mail your criticism to the authors.

But it's not like birthrate falling has been mainly because of infertility?

They would work until they couldn’t, and then die?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088316

> it was your kids taking care of you when you get older

This oversimplification has never been true. Humans evolved in extended family groups generally between 30 - 300 people. And humans are far more promiscuous and willing to adopt chosen family than most will admit.

The nuclear family is a shockingly recent invention.

It doesn't negate the claim that parent made though. "Your kids" had a wider meaning (and still has in a lot of places) but the principle remains: an adult had to provide, and protect a limited number of (usually related) kids to be cared by those of them who survived later in life.

No. You've failed to get the point.

"An adult" didn't provide. All adults did.

That's not how it works unless you try to say that adults in general are interested in kids survival. This would be true but it's not what drives larger efforts, and resources allocation. For that there are always related kids which get the most of one's resources, and other kids which may get something sometimes. And there are your elders and others' elders as well. Actually, there are plenty of countries where pensions either not a thing, or too small even for basics. I lived in some of them and I dare to say I know what I'm talking about.

> Actually, there are plenty of countries where pensions either not a thing, or too small even for basics. I lived in some of them

And you left them for places with a stronger social safety net. Interesting.

Word. I haven seen so many misconceptions about our state here in these comments, planted in our consciousness by our capitalist system to justify its existence. This, that we don't naturally rely on mutually supporting each other, is one of them. That our elderly are useless and unproductive, is another one. That it will take people working until they are 70 and utterly worn out to provide the pitifully inadequate support our society provides our elderly and our poor, is yet another one. Such inhumane beliefs persist all while a tiny minority skim off a sizeable proportion of the the wealth our labor produces for themselves.

I think nearly all of it is starting with people not wanting to pay taxes (who blames them?) and reasoning backward from there. It doesn't seem like an attempt to have a consistent non-hypocritical worldview so much as an attempt to justify wealth hoarding which capitalism encourages and happily provides ideological tools for. Nevermind that by allowing ourselves to be split from each other and our extended family support structures, we are all becoming more vulnerable and in need of the very societal support some would rather withhold.

It's all incredibly short sighted and selfish.

>something humans have done since before recorded history

Inuits would leave their old out in the snow, and walk away. Just saying.

I looked for references. Found the following which cites three references across 5 decades. It indicates that this practice was 1) rare even before it ended in 1939 2) considered repugnant by many Inuit 3) an alternative to starvation when there was no other choice.

https://www.straightdope.com/21343302/did-eskimos-put-their-...

I'm not sure what you meant to communicate by sharing this thought. That 100 years ago hunter gatherers in the harshest inhabited climate on the planet made some unfathomably hard decisions and did horrifying things to survive?

I don't see how that has any relevancy to what we do today in the richest most industrialized society in the world.

Some tribes in Papua New Guinea prior to 1960 practiced occasional cannibalism. Doesn't mean we should be eating our neighbors today.

Wild that I should have to say so.

Steve is 75 and retiring. Quick! Barbecue him!

> You've created an impossible situation which will never exist

It can and does, albeit in slower motion (ie Japan, South Korea)

> why taking care of the elderly, something humans have done since before recorded history, is flawed.

Humans took care of THEIR elderly. The system was made to take care of THE elderly. Pretty sure most people don't want to see old people begging for food on the street but also prefer not to pay much to have it resolved (varies by country and culture)

> It can and does, albeit in slower motion (ie Japan, South Korea)

Read what he wrote again. The scenario he created (everyone works, then everyone retires) has never and will never happen. Humanity is more likely to be wiped out by a meteor.

> Humans took care of THEIR elderly.

Point me toward the non-human elderly being supported by the social safety net. We're all related. You just have to look back far enough.

> Pretty sure most people don't want to see old people begging for food on the street but also prefer not to pay much to have it resolved (varies by country and culture)

I agree with you here. People don't want to help others, and don't want to suffer the consequences of not helping others. People are conflicted creatures who suffer from a long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

> The scenario he created (everyone works, then everyone retires) has never and will never happen.

It can happen in a generation, if all of that generation decides to have zero offspring. This is why it is happening in slow motion. There are still people having kids but not enough for sustaining the current population levels.

> We're all related.

We are also related to bugs. Humans generally care for their very close relatives (kids -> parents -> cousins...) and emotionally care for the rest of humans.

> It can happen in a generation, if all of that generation decides to have zero offspring.

All of humanity has never decided to do the same thing ever. Society follows a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution , and there will always be folks who decide to do other than everyone else. Oppositional defiant disorder is a thing. You're living in imaginary land.

> We are also related to bugs.

Yes. And many very intelligent people besides myself think that we should be taking better care of the environment and all the other creatures in it besides ourselves as well.

I mean, I literally said "economic theory", the basic idea is that you simplify the assumptions to make a point. That's literally what most of economics is!

In the real world, the assumptions are weaker and the dynamics are much more complicated than a toy model, but you can still transfer the same conclusions - in this example, that pension requires making babies and that without a good negative feedback mechanism, the system eventually collapses.

> In the real world, the assumptions are weaker and the dynamics are much more complicated than a toy model

1: Correct.

> but you can still transfer the same conclusions

2: Incorrect, see 1.

I think what they missed is that people typically work for much longer than they are retired.

If the periods were of equal length, I think the Ponzi scheme thing would be true.

As is its sort of a modified fractionated ponzi.

Ponzi, or no Ponzi, it's still an illusion: let's assume that we all generate enough money saved in those funds during our productive years to sustain ourselves in senior periods, even counting in the almighty inflation. The problem is it's not money you need when old, and frail, you want somebody doing work for that money. So the whole scheme still requires enough young workers entering the market, and them be willing to perpetuate it. Which is kinda not guaranteed if each gen is smaller then the previous one.

> Ponzi, or no Ponzi, it's still an illusion

What do you think money is?

> you want somebody doing work

This is one reason why the robotics work going on right now is so exciting. Without the demand for elder care, it wouldn't attract as much investment or development.

>What do you think money is?

Money is basically a coupon for labor. If there are no vending machines (read young workers) for labor coupons, then you won't get labor, no matter how many coupons you accumulate.

Holding money does not teleport people into the future. (= the store of value myth)

Seniors are also really expensive. By some estimates you spend half of your lifetime healthcare cost in the last five years of your life. It typically takes multiple working people to support a single senior on government benefits.

Do they?

0-25 education, 25-67 work, 67-82 pension, it's almost equivalent (42 working, 40 not working)

Education isn't work?

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