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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

The growing population of economically non-productive people requires a growing population of economically productive people to support them. At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al.

At the limit, not growing the productive population puts younger generations in a position of existing solely for the purpose of serving the non-productive population. At some point, they will simply choose to opt out and the whole thing collapses.

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But infinite population growth is unsustainable so it had to come to an equilibrium eventually. Maybe we overshot the maximum comfortable population by a bit and we are going to rebound for awhile.

Also an economy that requires an infinitely growing population feels like a pyramid scheme which is also an unsustainable system.

> But infinite population growth is unsustainable so it had to come to an equilibrium eventually.

Or not. It could be oscillatory and humanity could cyclically reverse-decimate itself while the descendants of the survivors get to enjoy millennia of the fun part of the pyramid scheme.

The big losers are whoever is part of the "perish in a holocaust" generations, and probably the first couple bootstrapper generations afterwards.

> But infinite population growth is unsustainable

Only if we don't explore and colonize the stars. From what we know, the universe is infinite.

How many years/generations are you willing to spend on a ship in the middle of space? Remember, Biodome didn't work. Are you going to join that prison for the off chance of your progeny occupying a land that we haven't even discovered yet?

And, before you suggest it, no, there will never be faster-than-light travel, and even relativistic travel is super unlikely.

The generation ship genre of science fiction is very interesting to me, but I've never read one that didn't seem absolutely horrifying. I don't think it is a realistic option. Especially if we aren't even capable of stabilizing our "closed system" known as Earth. A generation ship would be the same problem but 100 times more difficult.

I think it's inevitable, the model is unsustainable and going to fail. In a finite world we can't have social models that rely on infinite growth. I'm sure the changing demographic is going to cause pain (probably right when I'm getting ready to retire), but historically pain is the real catalyst for change so maybe some good will come out of it.

> The growing population of economically non-productive people requires a growing population of economically productive people to support them. At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al.

Economic growth is the result of productivity, which is the product of the number of people working, times their per-capita productivity. If each successive generation is more productive per capita than the last, then each generation can support successively more non-productive people.

But future generations won’t need to support as many non-productive people as we do now, because the Baby Boom will die off. In the U.S., the peak of non-productive populace is only the next decade or so.

> In the U.S., the peak of non-productive populace is only the next decade or so.

for a contrast, look at South Korea - https://www.populationpyramid.net/republic-of-korea/2025/

That tells a quite grim story, with an outcome thats totally inevitable but will take 20 years to play out. the die is already cast, and I cant see how the country survives.

What does it mean for a country to not survive? There will be people there. There will be a system of governance. Sure, there will be hardship and suffering, but I don't see how this equates to extinction.

Yes, probably not people extinction. But economic extinction - the tiny amount of young supporting 10x the amount of elderly will lead to economic collapse. On top of the collapse in raw productivity. It’s not hard to imagine that level of disruption leading to a failed state scenario.

> At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al.

But productivity for productive people is increasing. Is there an assumption that retiree spending is also going to increase to match?

Realistic solutions look something like: - we increase productivity of the working population - we lock or decrease the per-year, per-person spending on retirees - we decrease the % of their lives that people spend retired

Or decrease handouts to the non-working population. Maybe we cannot afford to keep seniors in their SFHs driving everywhere.

Cool where do I sign to opt out?

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