Surely this is a good thing? We (as a species) have been growing exponentially in an unsustainable manner. It'll be tough as we transition into looking after more elderly with less of a young population to support them - but in the long run it's for the best.
Exactly what i thought. In light of us living unsustainably, we can either decrease consumption, or decrease amount of people living on the planet. Or little bit of both.
And if that happens organically, without special policies, the better still.
Population control with the right to children is a very delicate subject and hard sell.
My thoughts on the matter was always that nature itself will eventually take care of the numbers if we keep going the way we are without some form of measure to keep control - every population explosion has had it's eventual decline - sharp or smooth. We seem to believe that we're different but we're not.
If we self regulate by choice - whether it's the lack of income, lifestyle or a lack of want to have children that has brought us here it's always going to be preferable. As unsavoury as it may be in some regards.
> nature itself will eventually take care of the numbers
I don't think most people would disagree. It's just that nature isn't very merciful, and the way it enacts it's policies could lead to a lot of suffering. It'd be much more pleasant if we self-regulated so that nature didn't have to.
The only way that works, without exponential growth, in this day of modern medicine is if you start "Logan's Run"ing off the old people. Which, I'm going to go out on a wild limb here, is probably not an acceptable solution...
In the current economic climate, it is not a good thing. Due to the past 50+ years of policy making, a large part of the able-bodied workforce is excluded from contributing to the GDP. And as long as economic policy (both business and government) is still driven by the myopic vision that GDP is all that matters, all those "old people" are a burden, not an asset.
In itself, having a more reasonably distributed age distribution is neutral (in my view). But it is a consequence of two good things: the population boom is leveling off, and healthcare has improved tremendously around the globe.
> a large part of the able-bodied workforce is excluded from contributing to the GDP
Could you explain? Recent policy seems to have been about pushing everyone possible into the workforce, even the not-able-bodied. By every means short of actually putting up wages.
I was referring to pensions and early retirement mainly. Yes, there have been recent efforts to shift the retirement age upwards, and I'm certainly not saying that people shouldn't be allowed to retire at all. But a population-wide cutoff at a certain age seems arbitrary, and I've seen plenty of examples around me of people starting self-employment in their 60s, simply because employers could no longer legally hire them.
Of course, the other side of that coin is that there needs to be enough jobs available to employ everyone, and forcing retirement is one way to reduce a labour surplus...
One huge downside would be that older people tend to skew to the more conservative end of the political spectrum, and can end up drowning out the voices of the young.
See the age breakdown of the recent Brexit vote for one example. I also remember with the Irish referendum on gay marriage in 2015, there was much worry that the older generations would swing the overall vote to "No", despite the legislation having no impact on them.
Worth thinking about: How many Brexit "Leave" voters have simply died of old age in the two months between then and now?
You are correct if everyone gets to vote. If the elderly with little to do all day have an easier time getting to the polls than the working class single mom supporting them, then you have a problem. I say make election day a national holiday. The AARP likely disagrees.
You don't even have to do that, I'd make July 4th election day in the states for example.
While I don't particularly like the AARP, they haven't said anything against making voting day a national holiday. And with voting by mail it's totally unnecessary anyway. In CA now even postage is free so there are zero obstacles preventing the working class from voting.
Except there are issues with it. For example, I ordered my ballot and never received it. Fortunately I work somewhere with a flexible enough schedule that I could vote in person, but it isn't reliable enough for me.
There is really no compelling argument I can think of for why there shouldn't be a federal holiday to vote, unless you are arguing about lost productivity as a business owner or policy changes from more people of different demographics voting. Neither are compelling arguments.
When there's polarization in a society where a majority of population out-vote a minority on every proposal, said minority has all motivation to withdraw from public politics and secede.
Imagine a country with 60% big-endians and 40% little-endians. Big-endians own every president, every senate and every vote they care to win. Little-endians have no sensible choice but to split into their own country where they'll be a majority, perhaps with civil war and ethnic cleansings in the process.
This situation has been engineered in many countries: the gerrymander (great etymology btw). Combined with other techniques to disenfranchise voters (making it difficult to register to vote, voter ID charades, not enforcing that employers give time to vote) it is very effective in making the minority believe it is 'pointless' for them to vote.
The first past the post system strongly encourages this sort of manipulation. If electorates were made larger and multiple candidates elected for each then this problem would disappear, but established parties would never allow that to occur.
Edit: it has become evident recently that the HN downvote system cannot cope with political discussions, as evidenced by your post being killed. I would suggest that posts with political content have up and down votes shown, rather than the sum being applied to modify visibility. As it is, the downvotes are just "I don't want you to be able to express your ideas."
Trouble is the elderly have pensions, often backed by the state, and therefore are (or at least feel) immune to the financial consequences of their decisions.
Congratulations on equating being conservative with being wrong. (In saying conservative voting = downside)
I think I am fairly liberal, but in being objective I know I could very well be wrong.
Just to put the counter point. If conservative ideals are correct, then older people voting more would be a huge UPSIDE.
I agree that the older voting bloc causes a problem, but it's not because they are conservative, it's because they're retired and will continue to try to vote more benefits for themselves while removing benefits from others.
But to say it's a problem because they are conservative? You're just saying people that agree with you are right and people who disagree are wrong. It's closeminded.
>One huge downside would be that older people tend to skew to the more conservative end of the political spectrum, and can end up drowning out the voices of the young.
" At any given time older people are likely to be more conservative than contemporaneous young people. But relative to themselves as young people, today’s older folks have generally become more liberal than they once were."
It seems your thinking of the latter half of that quote, but the claim was regarding the first half.
Demographic shifts like this and the ensuing competition for limited resources are the kind of things that fuel major wars. It may be the transition that is needed long-term, but we should be very mindful of the way it is actually achieved.
The thing is we don't have less people right now. The population is still growing rapidly, just getting older overall. That is going to lead to a massive grab for limited resources(not just physical like food and basic goods, but time for caretakers, medical services, etc.) that could be massively destabilizing. We've already seen rising food prices recently lead to unrest in poorer regions of the world, that could be only the beginning.
I'd just like to remind people that at the beginning of the 20th century many were predicting the doom of Mankind once we would reach one billion folks. Needless to say it did not happen and we went much further than one billion and took care of starvation along the way. Of course there are many reasons for this, but let's not underestimate the resources of mankind to solve its problems.
I completely agree, I don't think it will end up being a massive disaster in the long-run, precisely because people will be thinking about how to solve them. Quick dismissal of the potential problems that could result does not help us solve them.
Sounds like what many politicians have been saying about global warming for 20 years or so. The scientists will figure something out. We haven't figured out much so far (yet we have worked out how to extract more fossil fuels via fracking).
So far society seems to deal with long-term (multi a generational) problems poorly. This is fine up until it starts to cause significant damage and can't be reversed in a short timespan. Global warming may be this problem.
Elon Musk may be having success changing those huge incentives, but relying on revolutionaries like that isn't ideal and might not work.
More resources split among fewer people only really works well if your economy is capital-bound in almost all lines of work. If there was anything where you really needed labor, you're fucked.
Every year labor is becoming less and less necessary for economic production and capital is becoming a better and better substitute for labor, so our economies /are/ capital-bound.
Judging by prices, we have gluts of both labor and capital, a systemic shortage of aggregate private and public demand, and yet consistently increasing employment and rock-bottom productivity growth. To me it seems like cheap labor is being used to substitute for capital.
Not at the point where you have one worker for two retirees. "Ultimately" you're talking about might never be reached as every government in the world scrambles to cover its own ass by any means necessary.
Wouldn't the /lack/ of a demographic shift fuel major wars? After all, it's a lot easier and more likely to have a war with populations full of young people than one full of old people. Besides, unlike oil or water, healthcare and services isn't something you can just steal.
> Surely this is a good thing? We (as a species) have been growing exponentially in an unsustainable manner.
Population growth has been slowing due to increases in quality of living, and is set to peak around 2050. Then we'll experience population deflation, which may be even more problematic than inflation.
It would be a good thing if not for a policy of covering losses by importing large number of people from struggling societies that many affected countries have adopted.
Which BTW makes no sense when you look closer at demographics, since most depopulating areas are rural, but immigrants usually live compactly in countries' largest cities (where also existing youth flocks to), increasing population imbalance in fact.
Yes they get total head count stable but at cost of getting everything else wrong.
I think its a valid way to solve that problem. In Canada, the STEM programs are filled with 2nd/3rd generation immigrants that were labourers, servers, restaurent workers, etc. These guys/gals go on to get 40-80k salary jobs after uni/college and pay significant taxes WHICH help pay for medical/state pension for the aging populaion
I would tend to agree. Of course having fewer young people to contribute to taking care of old people and such is going to be tough, but governments will need to adapt and find ways to deal with it. The problem of not enough young people to contribute to our worker churn system to me seems far preferable to population growth that our planet cannot sustain.
I was thinking the same thing. From an environmental point of view, less damage. From an economic point of view, more capital and wealth per person. The only downside is people will need to live longer.
> We (as a species) have been growing exponentially in an unsustainable manner.
This is a myth.
In fact birth rates are decelerating at an alarming rate and actually starting to decrease in some parts of the world. In a couple of decades, population is projected to begin decreasing worldwide. Many governments are creating programs to encourage procreation to try to hold off the inevitable death spiral most countries will experience.
When I read things like this, I can't help but feel like we're approaching The Behavioral Sink. When I first read about John B. Calhoun's work, I thought it was interesting but sort of moved on. For some reason, it stuck in my mind though, and it rises to the surface often when I read news about the world.
For those who don't know, Calhoun's research was around the impact of population growth. He found that mice in a closed environment, among other behaviors, became anti-social, violent, strangely obsessed with grooming and stopped breeding once the population reached a certain size, even disregarding the wellbeing of the young that are born.
Obviously we're not in a situation as bad as all that, but it's an interesting light to view today's world in.
Would you mind elaborating? My great grandmother used to laugh at the moral majority's antics---she said that people have been complaining about the moral degeneration of society since she was a small child---in the 1890s.
"Newer generations born in the now dysfunctional mouse utopia became withdrawn, spending their days grooming obsessively and dedicating their time solely to eating , drinking and sleeping. This generation, for all the emphasis they placed on grooming, would not reproduce. Moreover, these mice were noted to be unintelligent compared to previous generations."
Intelligence has surely risen in our population, obesity is becoming a real problem in successful populations. The "selfie" self absorbed cultural shift we're seeing at the moment is another parallel.
Whilst we're not cannibalising each other or becoming any more aggressive than we have been in the past (although we are still plenty aggressive), I think we are starting to see some of symptoms for lack of a better term that are highlighted above to some degree or another.
Edit - perhaps there are also similarities between the hikikomori NEET lifestyle that's arisen in Japan as well.
This is purely an opinion without any statistics to back it up though, I'd be interested to hear counter arguments.
Getting obese seems like the opposite of excessive grooming. Most of the tendencies you're talking about are not happening in the overpopulated areas. The selfie thing is hugely overblown, a lot of people may be self-absorbed, but what says that's new, and a lot of people are also depressed.
The mice thing is not a utopia, it's an extremely artificial situation that only fits a very banal and shallow definition of "utopia". And that is not and probably never will be a situation humans will find themselves in since it requires a third party to engineer. None of us right now are in a closed environment, and we're definitely not in a no scarcity situation, since people are still worried about holding a job. The NEET thing is, too, related to the whole job thing.
I think you're reading into the term "utopia" too much. The experiment was a utopia of the body perhaps where there are no biological needs that aren't satisfied with no external forces of nature acting to reduce population aside from the size of the habitat that the rats lived in - as you mention we do not live in a utopia as people do grow hungry and are lacking jobs.
It also was not a utopia because the rats clearly where not happy.
I'd disagree and say that in overpopulated areas there is a higher rate of depression, obesity and psychological problems than in places with lower populations - but I haven't provided numbers there and neither have you - so both of our arguments are anecdotal.
As an aside I was more referencing the hikikomori phenomenon when I mentioned NEET's - whilst they are NEET, they are extreme cases of social withdrawl and other mental problems.
But do words not matter? The word "utopia" has a specific connotation in the minds of many people, and such experiments continue to drive the narrative that humans cannot be happy unless the conditions are bad.
> I'd disagree and say that in overpopulated areas there is a higher rate of depression, obesity and psychological problems than in places with lower populations - but I haven't provided numbers there and neither have you - so both of our arguments are anecdotal.
I'm honestly not sure what you are referring to. Obesity is much higher in the US, by a wide margin, than, say, India, and India is definitely much more populated. I don't know if I really need to provide numbers for that.
The NEET issue could easily have been caused by bleak job prospects.
My point is, the rat experiment and the current situation don't seem to be even remotely related. Our population growth is not the same, and our population growth is very uneven. We have external forces acting to limit how people live still. There are just so many variables not accounted for that trying to find any connections is more dangerous than it is helpful.
It's an interesting point about India, but I'd say there is much more of a focus on getting enough food to survive there than in overpopulated first world cities - which is closer to the subject matter.
By no means do I think the situation we are in are comparable - nature does play a role for us unlike in the experiment and there are hardships for some.
But I think examining extreme overpopulation and it's effects on individuals is important - and is relative to a lesser degree to problems we have the potential to face, and may be facing in diluted forms in certain areas. Maybe not as much today, but who knows where we could be tomorrow.
The other glaring difference is the difference in behaviour between people and rodents - you can't draw conclusions and act upon them, but you can at least study the connections.
I wouldn't call that dangerous at all, I'd say it was dangerous to ignore.
> I'd disagree and say that in overpopulated areas there is a higher rate of depression, obesity and psychological problems than in places with lower populations
What scope and scale are you looking at though? Because within first world countries such as the USA, psychological problems doesn't correlate much and obesity correlates negatively with population density. The problems you mention correlate much more with social and economic opportunities (or lack thereof) than population density itself.
I think calling that a utopia is quite a stretch. We humans still have some definitions to work out if we think that a utopia out of ignorance and lack of power is valid.
We can level the human population off--and ultimately shrink it--long before that point, simply by growing the percentage of women with access to education, contraceptives, and equal legal rights.
We don't know what the "natural" human population is. By that, I mean the human population that would exist if every human had free choice of whether or not to have kids.
What we have now (globally) is still largely the "accidental" human population--the population we got because the pleasure of sex leads unexpectedly to reproduction.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, and I wouldn't trust most countries to enact it properly but...
I wish we had a "reverse-able sterilization at birth" method. It would be reversed at no cost to the individual, but if we could somehow set the default to "no kids", and give individuals the choice to turn it on, I think we would see a lot less of a population issue.
I'm not sure why "contraception by default from birth with free reversibility" would be an unpopular opinion. People who don't want kids would be happy, people who want kids but want control over timing would be happy, even people who want kids to be an unexpected gift would be happy...
I've spent a lot of time with religious people. Many of them think that our current birth-control methods are immoral. Many states in the US still have abstinence-only education.
Mostly because it has echoes of eugenics. I agree this would not only control growth but pause our use of natural resources and would allow people in poor countries to do better economically as resources would not have to be shared among a growing pop.
Alternatives to contraception, form a pop growth perspective are delayed reproduction (say at 35) or more same sex pairing.
At age 35? I know you were just throwing a number out, but at age 35, about 10% of women are completely infertile, and the odds of successfully conceiving are significantly decreased, meaning that even in that 90% who are fertile, they may not be able to get pregnant quickly enough to take advantage of their fertility before becoming infertile, even if they're ready to go and start reproducing right on their 35th birthday. And, on top of THAT, the rate of birth defects and chromosomal abnormalities dramatically increases after 35 (with another inflection point after roughly 40).
So, yes, while it would significantly decrease the population, you'd be dramatically increasing the number of people, mostly women, who simply aren't able to have children at all.
They also have a table there, outlining the theoretical "percent of women who will fail to have a live birth" if they start trying to conceive at a certain age. Not the same thing as infertility -- they may be fertile, just unlucky up until the point that they're actually infertile. The numbers are a little all over the place, but for 35 year old women, it's somewhere between 13 and 22%
The main issue here for me is, "who turns it back on", and in what circumstances will they/won't they do it?
People have a right to make their own reproductive choices, but there's a huge human, social, and economic cost when people have children at ill-advised points in their life (either too young, when sick, when poor), and it seems that relying on others to enable your reproductive rights is a hazard where the government or medical profession can remove that right from people.
I don't really consider this strictly eugenics, as it's not done with the same intention of improving the global genepool, but instead it attacks it from a more shortsighted and "pragmatic" (economic/social) point of view, but in any case it would be a horrible future.
I completely agree, that's why I said I wouldn't trust most countries to enact it properly. I think if done right it could be a good solution, I just don't think it would be a good solution. There's too much potential for abuse.
I think we should let people do that currently. My issue with the current way things are, though, is that the default is fertility. I know many people who had kids before they were ready, because it was unplanned. I'd argue that it's more moral to prevent unplanned pregnancies, but give people the choice to become fertile whenever they want.
> Why force them to partake, and open up the easiest route for a government to screw with probably our most basic right.
If you read my above comments: That's why, even though I wish we could implement it, I probably wouldn't support it if it was an available option. I don't trust any government to do it correctly.
You sterilize at birth, and then once a child reaches the age of majority they are allowed to get it reversed at zero cost simply be requesting it be done.
This removes the moral hazard, and requires a positive action and conscious choice to have a child. At that point you can start making moral judgements and holding people accountable.
I don't think that sounds unreasonable at all. I think most people that dislike that do out of implementation concerns, not because they are actually opposed.
Well it doesn't matter before puberty, and access to long-term contraceptives like "the pill," depo-privera, diaphragms, IUDs, etc. starting at puberty can create the same effect of defaulting to no pregnancies (or at least extremely unlikely).
I would also like to emphasize the importance of accurate, timely sex education so kids learn how their bodies work and what their options are. The combination of contraceptives + education has had a dramatic effect in Colorado on teen pregnancies.
And although it's less of an issue in the U.S. and Europe, legal equality for women (right to own property, conduct a business, drive cars, hold political office, etc.) frees them from dependency on a husband.
Even the basics help: marital rape is not yet a crime in every country today. In fact it wasn't a crime in all 50 states until 1993!
My point here is that we don't need to imagine some sort of draconian program like universal reversible sterilization at birth. All we need to do is promote and make progress with the tools we already have. That can be just as effective, AND more moral as well.
> He found that mice in a closed environment, among other behaviors, became anti-social, violent, strangely obsessed with grooming ...
You haven't mentioned the very important fact that the experiment was designed to be a mice "utopia" with everything mice could desire provided to them for free. (meaning: no effort needed)
In an environment where no effort is needed to survive and procreate it makes sense to me that the offspring will be less intelligent and less social over time as they do not need any of these social traits to survive.
We haven't reached human utopia yet but I believe the welfare state goes into that direction and will eventually produce similar results. (it already does in some respects - see birth rates in Western countries)
The next decades will be very interesting times (and possibly frightening) as we might see our civilisation first being dominated economically by others and likely also militarily after that. (and this wont be pretty for us, because hatred towards our culture is mainstream in most other cultures - and sadly also internally)
Or alternatively we will see chaotic internal revolutions that will undo this development.
But I doubt that we will see these changes happen in an ordered democratic way as the establishment will fight changes by all means imaginable. (it is obvious when seeing the medias bias)
The only problem is probably the many funding models that assume otherwise, therefore rely on an uneven age distribution with a bigger share of younger participants (like many western pension funds, etc.)
While I can imagine that it's not easy to redesign pension funds, but keeping the current systems at all costs is probably ideological by definition.
Whenever I read things like this. I am reminded of Hans Rosling's "Global population growth, box by box"[1].
The only question is, how to transition to a "steady state economy"[2][3] or "non growth economies", when population really reaches some kind of equilibrium. As growth is the only concept humans for the last tens of thousands of years knew, this transition, while absolutely necessary, will be hard and hurt lots of people I believe.
A steady state economy will never, ever happen. We'll sooner extinguish our planet. The reason is simple: technological progress is a national security matter. It can't be stopped. Even coordinated treatise would be subverted. With technological progress more and more output for the same amount of input is possible.
Now you could argue for a steady state population. Or at least for a period of time where we have a steady state population (before starships are prevalent) and I could start to see that happening, but as long as there is intelligence and peace the economy will continue to grow.
Knowledge will most likely grow, but with a steady population the only true GDP growth can come from moving people out of poverty and into the higher income brackets. Once everyone is there, what real growth is there?
It's interesting that economists' notions of "steady-state" differ so much from engineers'. I think of a "steady-state" as being cyclical rather than static, and I think this is probably more realistic for human populations as well. Instead of population completely flattening out, I see cultural shifts, climate change, and wars driving continued fluctuation. Hopefully our poles are in the left half of the plane.
Continuous economic growth is a relatively recent phenomenon closely coupled to continuous technological and scientific innovation. Economic growth for much of the premodern era average out pretty close to zero (and on a per-capita basis, negative), since once you have put all feasible lands under cultivation and built up all possible cities, with a stagnant technological base no further growth is possible.
There can be a lot of psychological, emotional, and health benefits to continuing to work in some capacity throughout old age. It gives people a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives. I'm a long way from retirement but I hope to have the kind of career where I work in at least a lightweight way well into old age (my grandfather didn't stop working completely until he was 93).
One thing that would probably help would be much shorter work weeks.
Another idiocy from EU bureaucrats, vast majority of people are physically and mentally not capable of working past 75 and nothing in the foreseeable future will change it. Another social issue is that they're simply unemployable - what kind of an employer would hire a 75 year old? A 75 year old doctor or lawyer might keep their practice, but they're in the realm of the small business owner.
You're downvoted but absolutely correct, even though you offended the easily-triggered HN crowd.
3 of my 4 grandparents are now passed, and there is absolutely no way they would have been able to be a net asset in any actual profit driven and competitive enterprise while that age these days.
Sure they might have been able to do something 'helpful' like read to young children or some other volunteer-like job, but these types of pseudo employment require more time and energy from actual workers for coordination than the worth of the labor itself.
By mid 70's none of my grandparents had the technical abilities to perform adequately in a non-physical office position, nor the physical tenacity to work a more demanding service job. Very few 75 year olds I've met would be any different.
Of course this all is a moot point since we now have competition between millenials and 45 year olds in some industries. what makes anyone think there are jobs available for the very old, even if they could be productful?
It's humanity correcting the growth rate - it's been well overdue, it's just going to be tough for a little while but we'll manage. If anything, robots could make this a lot better for us. People are relatively content in the West and the rise in living costs are putting people off kids.
I think our robots that do manufacturing or driving are more sophisticated than the ones that vacuum.
AI has hit a boom and is producing a lot of potentially useful achievements (that it hadn't before). It wouldn't surprise me if they become more prevelant.
Of course, we still need the resources to build them...
Exactly, people take for granted the AI that drives Siri and Google talk - these are amazing advances. It's enabled family members who are dislexic to completely transform their ability to engage in technology and the world.
Of course driverless cars are s massive feat and I see more robots entering the house soon in less subtle ways.
I am curios, a lot of people talk about Siri on here, yet I have never seen anyone use it in real life (I see plenty of iPhones). Does it only work well with American style English (I am Scottish and am pretty sure the accent would cause it problems).
Not sure, a lot of my family is London-ish area English and it works well for them.
I think the detection algorithm will look past accent and probably do some deep-learning based technique. Google are probably smart enough to tailor the voice recognition algorithms geographically - if you spend time in Scotland it will probably use the Scottish trained net to detect what you want.
Because all house robots so far don't really incorporate the more advanced aspects of AI, such as neural networks / deep learning, empowerment and general research done into social robotics. Even with what we have, they still have the potential to really wow the world.
Title was changed to "More Old Than Young: A Demographic Shock Sweeps the Globe". Guess someone realized that calling old people a plague wasn't the best choice of words.
can't these countries just import young people from India where more than 50% of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65% below the age of 35.
But will 65 always be a meaningful cut-off for "old" - if it even is today? What would the balance look like if you made the cut-off 75, or 80, or 90?
Obviously current pension and retirement policy defines "old" at various ages in the 50s or 60s, and 65 is a reasonable cut-off in light of current laws. But the trend is generally longer lives and later retirements.
I would be willing to bet that the 65-year-olds of the 2030s will be much less of a "burden" on society than, say, the 65-year-olds of the 1930s were.
65+ across the board is most definitely a burden -- those entering old age between now and 2030 are universally poor, underemployed, and in poor health, and there is no sign of it slowing down or getting better. They will rely on the young more than ever.
That said, 65 isn't a hard number. Many exit regular employment permanently at 50, for example.
A century ago and now are incomparable for a variety of reasons, one of them being a burgeoning middle class. The birth of a middle class brings incalculable improvements but many nations haven't ever adapted to that massive middle class approaching old age, but thankfully this will be staggered so we can respond to it gradually.
> those entering old age between now and 2030 are universally poor, underemployed, and in poor health, and there is no sign of it slowing down or getting better. They will rely on the young more than ever.
Could you elaborate on this? My impression is the exact opposite - that people are generally healthier and/or living longer than they have previously. Obviously things vary tremendously from country to country - and obesity in the US complicates the picture - but is general health and life expectancy around the world going down?
>a shrinking work force cannot foot the pension bill [...]
>the political choices are unsavory — increase taxes or cut benefits
Those are not solutions, those would both exacerbate the problems. A shrinking workforce, which has seen wages stagnating for decades while cost of living continues to increase, and which is increasingly being automated out resulting in high unemployment, cannot pay more taxes. That would result in even more working people needing benefits (or dropping out of the workforce because it's a net loss to work) and lower tax revenues. Cutting benefits would, of course, directly increase the problems that occur when there already aren't enough benefits to go around. And both of those 'solutions' would cause things to get increasingly worse as the population ages and automation continues.
A possible solution would be increasing wages so that the workers, though fewer in number, could pay more taxes and support more retirees and benefits. Another would be decreasing the workweek, so that more people would have to be hired, resulting in lower unemployment and more people paying taxes instead of living on benefits. Both of those are also scalable, as the population ages and automation increases, wages can be increased and hours decreased to compensate. As a side benefit, workers with higher wages and more free time, in addition to paying more taxes, could buy more, stimulating the economy, resulting in even more tax revenues.
120 comments
[ 324 ms ] story [ 2513 ms ] threadThere seems to be whole businesses building around milking elderly people's retirement money. I'm thinking about highly polluting cruise ships etc.
Interesting times ahead.
And if that happens organically, without special policies, the better still.
My thoughts on the matter was always that nature itself will eventually take care of the numbers if we keep going the way we are without some form of measure to keep control - every population explosion has had it's eventual decline - sharp or smooth. We seem to believe that we're different but we're not.
If we self regulate by choice - whether it's the lack of income, lifestyle or a lack of want to have children that has brought us here it's always going to be preferable. As unsavoury as it may be in some regards.
I don't think most people would disagree. It's just that nature isn't very merciful, and the way it enacts it's policies could lead to a lot of suffering. It'd be much more pleasant if we self-regulated so that nature didn't have to.
In itself, having a more reasonably distributed age distribution is neutral (in my view). But it is a consequence of two good things: the population boom is leveling off, and healthcare has improved tremendously around the globe.
Could you explain? Recent policy seems to have been about pushing everyone possible into the workforce, even the not-able-bodied. By every means short of actually putting up wages.
[1] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/americans-not-...
It can also be pushed into meaning that young people are mostly barred from effectively investing and creating successful business.
Of course, the other side of that coin is that there needs to be enough jobs available to employ everyone, and forcing retirement is one way to reduce a labour surplus...
See the age breakdown of the recent Brexit vote for one example. I also remember with the Irish referendum on gay marriage in 2015, there was much worry that the older generations would swing the overall vote to "No", despite the legislation having no impact on them.
Worth thinking about: How many Brexit "Leave" voters have simply died of old age in the two months between then and now?
Only a downside if you (a) disagree with them; (b) for whatever reason, feel they are not entitled to their beliefs
> and can end up drowning out the voices of the young.
Funny how when your opinions are the majority it's democracy, and when they're not it's "voices being drowned out."
> Worth thinking about: How many Brexit "Leave" voters have simply died of old age in the two months between then and now?
It's not.
You don't even have to do that, I'd make July 4th election day in the states for example.
There is really no compelling argument I can think of for why there shouldn't be a federal holiday to vote, unless you are arguing about lost productivity as a business owner or policy changes from more people of different demographics voting. Neither are compelling arguments.
When there's polarization in a society where a majority of population out-vote a minority on every proposal, said minority has all motivation to withdraw from public politics and secede.
Imagine a country with 60% big-endians and 40% little-endians. Big-endians own every president, every senate and every vote they care to win. Little-endians have no sensible choice but to split into their own country where they'll be a majority, perhaps with civil war and ethnic cleansings in the process.
The first past the post system strongly encourages this sort of manipulation. If electorates were made larger and multiple candidates elected for each then this problem would disappear, but established parties would never allow that to occur.
Edit: it has become evident recently that the HN downvote system cannot cope with political discussions, as evidenced by your post being killed. I would suggest that posts with political content have up and down votes shown, rather than the sum being applied to modify visibility. As it is, the downvotes are just "I don't want you to be able to express your ideas."
I think I am fairly liberal, but in being objective I know I could very well be wrong.
Just to put the counter point. If conservative ideals are correct, then older people voting more would be a huge UPSIDE.
I agree that the older voting bloc causes a problem, but it's not because they are conservative, it's because they're retired and will continue to try to vote more benefits for themselves while removing benefits from others.
But to say it's a problem because they are conservative? You're just saying people that agree with you are right and people who disagree are wrong. It's closeminded.
This is actually not true [0]
[0]http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/getting-more-li...
" At any given time older people are likely to be more conservative than contemporaneous young people. But relative to themselves as young people, today’s older folks have generally become more liberal than they once were."
It seems your thinking of the latter half of that quote, but the claim was regarding the first half.
Less resources are needed if you have less people. Ultimately everyone will benefit from it.
Elon Musk may be having success changing those huge incentives, but relying on revolutionaries like that isn't ideal and might not work.
Population growth has been slowing due to increases in quality of living, and is set to peak around 2050. Then we'll experience population deflation, which may be even more problematic than inflation.
Which BTW makes no sense when you look closer at demographics, since most depopulating areas are rural, but immigrants usually live compactly in countries' largest cities (where also existing youth flocks to), increasing population imbalance in fact.
Yes they get total head count stable but at cost of getting everything else wrong.
1: First people argue there's no problem with low birth rate, and then people tell that they're solving the problem. Pick one.
This is a myth.
In fact birth rates are decelerating at an alarming rate and actually starting to decrease in some parts of the world. In a couple of decades, population is projected to begin decreasing worldwide. Many governments are creating programs to encourage procreation to try to hold off the inevitable death spiral most countries will experience.
For those who don't know, Calhoun's research was around the impact of population growth. He found that mice in a closed environment, among other behaviors, became anti-social, violent, strangely obsessed with grooming and stopped breeding once the population reached a certain size, even disregarding the wellbeing of the young that are born.
Obviously we're not in a situation as bad as all that, but it's an interesting light to view today's world in.
Interesting thought.
Intelligence has surely risen in our population, obesity is becoming a real problem in successful populations. The "selfie" self absorbed cultural shift we're seeing at the moment is another parallel.
Whilst we're not cannibalising each other or becoming any more aggressive than we have been in the past (although we are still plenty aggressive), I think we are starting to see some of symptoms for lack of a better term that are highlighted above to some degree or another.
Edit - perhaps there are also similarities between the hikikomori NEET lifestyle that's arisen in Japan as well.
This is purely an opinion without any statistics to back it up though, I'd be interested to hear counter arguments.
The mice thing is not a utopia, it's an extremely artificial situation that only fits a very banal and shallow definition of "utopia". And that is not and probably never will be a situation humans will find themselves in since it requires a third party to engineer. None of us right now are in a closed environment, and we're definitely not in a no scarcity situation, since people are still worried about holding a job. The NEET thing is, too, related to the whole job thing.
In what way are these situations at all related?
It also was not a utopia because the rats clearly where not happy.
I'd disagree and say that in overpopulated areas there is a higher rate of depression, obesity and psychological problems than in places with lower populations - but I haven't provided numbers there and neither have you - so both of our arguments are anecdotal.
As an aside I was more referencing the hikikomori phenomenon when I mentioned NEET's - whilst they are NEET, they are extreme cases of social withdrawl and other mental problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
> I'd disagree and say that in overpopulated areas there is a higher rate of depression, obesity and psychological problems than in places with lower populations - but I haven't provided numbers there and neither have you - so both of our arguments are anecdotal.
I'm honestly not sure what you are referring to. Obesity is much higher in the US, by a wide margin, than, say, India, and India is definitely much more populated. I don't know if I really need to provide numbers for that.
The NEET issue could easily have been caused by bleak job prospects.
My point is, the rat experiment and the current situation don't seem to be even remotely related. Our population growth is not the same, and our population growth is very uneven. We have external forces acting to limit how people live still. There are just so many variables not accounted for that trying to find any connections is more dangerous than it is helpful.
By no means do I think the situation we are in are comparable - nature does play a role for us unlike in the experiment and there are hardships for some.
But I think examining extreme overpopulation and it's effects on individuals is important - and is relative to a lesser degree to problems we have the potential to face, and may be facing in diluted forms in certain areas. Maybe not as much today, but who knows where we could be tomorrow.
The other glaring difference is the difference in behaviour between people and rodents - you can't draw conclusions and act upon them, but you can at least study the connections.
I wouldn't call that dangerous at all, I'd say it was dangerous to ignore.
What scope and scale are you looking at though? Because within first world countries such as the USA, psychological problems doesn't correlate much and obesity correlates negatively with population density. The problems you mention correlate much more with social and economic opportunities (or lack thereof) than population density itself.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3481194/
We don't know what the "natural" human population is. By that, I mean the human population that would exist if every human had free choice of whether or not to have kids.
What we have now (globally) is still largely the "accidental" human population--the population we got because the pleasure of sex leads unexpectedly to reproduction.
I wish we had a "reverse-able sterilization at birth" method. It would be reversed at no cost to the individual, but if we could somehow set the default to "no kids", and give individuals the choice to turn it on, I think we would see a lot less of a population issue.
Alternatives to contraception, form a pop growth perspective are delayed reproduction (say at 35) or more same sex pairing.
So, yes, while it would significantly decrease the population, you'd be dramatically increasing the number of people, mostly women, who simply aren't able to have children at all.
They also have a table there, outlining the theoretical "percent of women who will fail to have a live birth" if they start trying to conceive at a certain age. Not the same thing as infertility -- they may be fertile, just unlucky up until the point that they're actually infertile. The numbers are a little all over the place, but for 35 year old women, it's somewhere between 13 and 22%
People have a right to make their own reproductive choices, but there's a huge human, social, and economic cost when people have children at ill-advised points in their life (either too young, when sick, when poor), and it seems that relying on others to enable your reproductive rights is a hazard where the government or medical profession can remove that right from people.
I don't really consider this strictly eugenics, as it's not done with the same intention of improving the global genepool, but instead it attacks it from a more shortsighted and "pragmatic" (economic/social) point of view, but in any case it would be a horrible future.
Why force them to partake, and open up the easiest route for a government to screw with probably our most basic right.
> Why force them to partake, and open up the easiest route for a government to screw with probably our most basic right.
If you read my above comments: That's why, even though I wish we could implement it, I probably wouldn't support it if it was an available option. I don't trust any government to do it correctly.
You sterilize at birth, and then once a child reaches the age of majority they are allowed to get it reversed at zero cost simply be requesting it be done.
This removes the moral hazard, and requires a positive action and conscious choice to have a child. At that point you can start making moral judgements and holding people accountable.
I would also like to emphasize the importance of accurate, timely sex education so kids learn how their bodies work and what their options are. The combination of contraceptives + education has had a dramatic effect in Colorado on teen pregnancies.
And although it's less of an issue in the U.S. and Europe, legal equality for women (right to own property, conduct a business, drive cars, hold political office, etc.) frees them from dependency on a husband.
Even the basics help: marital rape is not yet a crime in every country today. In fact it wasn't a crime in all 50 states until 1993!
My point here is that we don't need to imagine some sort of draconian program like universal reversible sterilization at birth. All we need to do is promote and make progress with the tools we already have. That can be just as effective, AND more moral as well.
You haven't mentioned the very important fact that the experiment was designed to be a mice "utopia" with everything mice could desire provided to them for free. (meaning: no effort needed)
In an environment where no effort is needed to survive and procreate it makes sense to me that the offspring will be less intelligent and less social over time as they do not need any of these social traits to survive.
We haven't reached human utopia yet but I believe the welfare state goes into that direction and will eventually produce similar results. (it already does in some respects - see birth rates in Western countries)
The next decades will be very interesting times (and possibly frightening) as we might see our civilisation first being dominated economically by others and likely also militarily after that. (and this wont be pretty for us, because hatred towards our culture is mainstream in most other cultures - and sadly also internally)
Or alternatively we will see chaotic internal revolutions that will undo this development.
But I doubt that we will see these changes happen in an ordered democratic way as the establishment will fight changes by all means imaginable. (it is obvious when seeing the medias bias)
While I can imagine that it's not easy to redesign pension funds, but keeping the current systems at all costs is probably ideological by definition.
The only question is, how to transition to a "steady state economy"[2][3] or "non growth economies", when population really reaches some kind of equilibrium. As growth is the only concept humans for the last tens of thousands of years knew, this transition, while absolutely necessary, will be hard and hurt lots of people I believe.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrality_of_money
Now you could argue for a steady state population. Or at least for a period of time where we have a steady state population (before starships are prevalent) and I could start to see that happening, but as long as there is intelligence and peace the economy will continue to grow.
I don't know what you mean by "true" GDP growth. It feels like you're making some non-standard distinction but not explaining it.
Not true.
In EU the retirement age is moving as population gets older. By 2040 retirement age could be around 75 years.
Work almost all your life.
No more grandparents taking care of children while parents work, decreasing the number of families that might have children.
Less open positions for young people.
Edit: An informative graph for the bleak jobs picture for young people this shift is creating in the US: http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/im...
One thing that would probably help would be much shorter work weeks.
3 of my 4 grandparents are now passed, and there is absolutely no way they would have been able to be a net asset in any actual profit driven and competitive enterprise while that age these days.
Sure they might have been able to do something 'helpful' like read to young children or some other volunteer-like job, but these types of pseudo employment require more time and energy from actual workers for coordination than the worth of the labor itself.
By mid 70's none of my grandparents had the technical abilities to perform adequately in a non-physical office position, nor the physical tenacity to work a more demanding service job. Very few 75 year olds I've met would be any different.
Of course this all is a moot point since we now have competition between millenials and 45 year olds in some industries. what makes anyone think there are jobs available for the very old, even if they could be productful?
AI has hit a boom and is producing a lot of potentially useful achievements (that it hadn't before). It wouldn't surprise me if they become more prevelant.
Of course, we still need the resources to build them...
Of course driverless cars are s massive feat and I see more robots entering the house soon in less subtle ways.
I think the detection algorithm will look past accent and probably do some deep-learning based technique. Google are probably smart enough to tailor the voice recognition algorithms geographically - if you spend time in Scotland it will probably use the Scottish trained net to detect what you want.
He underestimates the power of automation and the inevitable rise of a basic universal income.
I'm not sure where anyone said otherwise. I'm just saying that automation doesn't solve all of the problems here.
Obviously current pension and retirement policy defines "old" at various ages in the 50s or 60s, and 65 is a reasonable cut-off in light of current laws. But the trend is generally longer lives and later retirements.
I would be willing to bet that the 65-year-olds of the 2030s will be much less of a "burden" on society than, say, the 65-year-olds of the 1930s were.
That said, 65 isn't a hard number. Many exit regular employment permanently at 50, for example.
A century ago and now are incomparable for a variety of reasons, one of them being a burgeoning middle class. The birth of a middle class brings incalculable improvements but many nations haven't ever adapted to that massive middle class approaching old age, but thankfully this will be staggered so we can respond to it gradually.
Could you elaborate on this? My impression is the exact opposite - that people are generally healthier and/or living longer than they have previously. Obviously things vary tremendously from country to country - and obesity in the US complicates the picture - but is general health and life expectancy around the world going down?
>the political choices are unsavory — increase taxes or cut benefits
Those are not solutions, those would both exacerbate the problems. A shrinking workforce, which has seen wages stagnating for decades while cost of living continues to increase, and which is increasingly being automated out resulting in high unemployment, cannot pay more taxes. That would result in even more working people needing benefits (or dropping out of the workforce because it's a net loss to work) and lower tax revenues. Cutting benefits would, of course, directly increase the problems that occur when there already aren't enough benefits to go around. And both of those 'solutions' would cause things to get increasingly worse as the population ages and automation continues.
A possible solution would be increasing wages so that the workers, though fewer in number, could pay more taxes and support more retirees and benefits. Another would be decreasing the workweek, so that more people would have to be hired, resulting in lower unemployment and more people paying taxes instead of living on benefits. Both of those are also scalable, as the population ages and automation increases, wages can be increased and hours decreased to compensate. As a side benefit, workers with higher wages and more free time, in addition to paying more taxes, could buy more, stimulating the economy, resulting in even more tax revenues.
You get what you pay for.