16 ms·

Life Is a Ponzi Scheme (2009)

330 points by NilsIRL 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
baxtr 7y ago
A very good read in the Journal Genome Biology explaining in simple words how Ponzi and Madoff made millions, and then, describing his idea: Now, the reason you're reading about this here, is that I just realized that life itself is basically a gigantic Ponzi scheme, and the pyramid is dangerously close to collapsing. In the developed world, we have evolved a society in which a relatively small number of old people have many of their needs cared for through the financial contributions of a larger number of much younger people. And that made sense, because for over 12,000 years the age distribution of the human population was, in fact, in the shape of a pyramid, with a huge base of young children rising to a smaller number of teenagers and a still smaller number of young adults, and so on up to a tiny tip of the elderly. But sometime in the 1950s, as the birthrate declined and life expectancy continued to increase, the pyramid started to be shaped more like a column. Within the next 40 years it will become one, and then it will slowly invert. I can recommend a full read, it’s worth the time.
- cpplinuxdude 7y ago
  Probably the most well-written piece i’ve read via HN.
  - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    Well written in the sense of artful rhetoric perhaps. But it makes no sense at all to talk about demographic issues without accounting for productivity growth and technological progress. This is pure scare mongering. Imagine what you could have written around 1700 when the share of farmers dropped below 50% if you had ignored productivity growth.
- IkmoIkmo 7y ago
  If the young people's contributions can be largely replaced (or rather, supplemented to the necessary aggregate contribution) by technology, does it really matter? There'd be no question of a ponzi scheme. You can sort of already see it happening. Productivity is greater than ever. But wages have decoupled from productivity, because it's not human labour, but rather technological inputs that have become the drivers of productivity. I won't sit here and predict that we'll have healthcare, food & beverage and cleaning robots within a decade and we'll only have leisure left. But we're definitely moving in many small ways to singular superpowered humans, who use tech, that can replace entire shifts of employees. Take machines like these: https://www.tennantco.com/content/dam/tennant/tennantco/products/machines/scrubber%20walk-behinds/t600-t600e/images/t600e-orbital-env-hospital.jpg https://www.tennantco.com/content/dam/tennant/tennantco/prod... Replacing half a dozen people doing the same manually. I mean who am I kidding, there's a billion examples like this. Yes, we still have to do our laundry clean, but we have washing machines that do 95% of the work. We still have to drive our busses, but 95% of bus ticket sales are now automated. At some point we'll probably get to that last 5%, too. I'm pretty confident that the demographic age inversion will not be as catastrophic as a ponzi scheme falling apart. Because we the productivity of young (and hell, old) people has a technology multiplier that's ever increasing.
  - martin_drapeau 7y ago
    I believe you are right. Tech evolution has always been our saving grace, from the discovery of fire, to the invention of agriculture, ships to conquer new worlds, etc. I don't see the end of the world - I see opportunity, lots of it.
rathel 7y ago
Slightly off-topic, but how should I as a person in late 20s deal with the fear that every piece of evidence suggests my generation (and subsequent ones) will be totally screwed in the future? Global warming, economic inequality (like property prices), post-truth era, surveillance state and unsustainable social welfare (as explained in OP)? It really can't get out of my mind.
- enkid 7y ago
  Gain some perspective. It's historically a very pretty common idea. People have been writing about how the world is going to shit since they could write, and yet most people's lives have been getting better most of the time. Why do you think you are better equipped at predicting the future than those folks?
  - behindsight 7y ago
    Although a good sentiment, the information age coupled with more advanced climate models makes us much better at predicting. Additionally, it's only been within the last century where we've been technologically capable of causing a mass-extinction level event via nuclear weapons. Here's a fun list of close-calls [0] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
    - dwighttk 7y ago
      >much better at predicting Citation needed
      - darth_skywalker 7y ago
        This is a fair point - it's hard to predict the future with our current technology given the difficulty of envisioning future technology.
  - dlkf 7y ago
    > Frank Kermode, in his famous book The Sense of an Ending, elaborated on Cohn’s masterwork by suggesting that actually it’s very common for all of us – especially artists – to feel that we live at the end of times, and that our own demise means all the more to us because we’re not simply dying in the middle of the plot, in medias res. Our lives take on significance because as we decline we notice our society is declining all around us. It’s part of a yearning for narrative significance. As Kermode said, no one can hear a clock saying, as it does, tick tick. What we hear is tick tock. A beginning and an end. We impose this order. - Ian McEwan
netfl0 7y ago
Interesting read. This hardens the argument we need continue to rapidly develop automation technology. If the productivity of robots were considered, the pyramid would look very different.
- davidwihl 7y ago
  Another factor is that the aging population is generally healthier and can work longer than prior generations. I have no desire to stop working at a specific age. Working keep me mentally sharp, while contributing to solving problems as opposed to being a burden on society.
  - yulaow 7y ago
    I think most people would prefer to retire and work in project which interest themselves which often have no financial sense or would not be financially viable unless you already have an income which can maintain yourself. Eg: I have zero interest to work for megacorporation for the next crud tool, but I would "work" even 10hours a day for a lot of open source projects I like which would never be capable of paying me, so I look forward to retirement and I wish I could, already today, not work just to keep me and the economy afloat
    - agumonkey 7y ago
      How many retirees found it hard to abandon their field even though the pressure was too tiring for them ? Maybe full retirement is too strong, and should be obvious only in physically tough jobs, but for others a semi retirement, as a wise/consultant in their company could be a good compromise.
- jfk13 7y ago
  > we need continue to rapidly develop... No, "rapidly develop[ing]" anything is not a solution. We need to get humans as a species to shift our (subconscious) thinking away from the goal of an ever-increasing number of humans with an ever-increasing "standard of living", enabled by ever-rising "productivity". We're living in what is essentially a closed system with limited resources and carrying capacity. If we think we can always overcome the limits of one resource by more development of another, we're deluding ourselves and likely on track to make the crash worse when it finally comes. Exactly what the long-term, sustainable capacity of the Earth may be is of course unknown, but I think there's a strong possibility that we are currently exceeding it.
rshnotsecure 7y ago
I suggest looking into the work of Peter Turchin. Turchin, following up on many precious writers who’ve noticed certain cycles or repeating themes in history, has posited that there is an ebb-flow to history that is about 80 years, about the lifespan of a human. What drives this flow, in this theory, is majority one force. The rise in birth rates during good times, followed by the trouble of environments and economies to absorb the new individuals, eventually leading to some sort of new adjustment among all players.
- elymar 7y ago
  I took a class on biological and cultural evolution with Peter Turchin as one of the lecturers (for the cultural half). Definitely one of the most insightful courses I took in college.
- imafish 7y ago
  Great news for me as a european. I’ve heard the 1940’s were a blast.
eecc 7y ago
Some assumptions going on here: 1. That older people won’t be productive and there won’t be any appetite in the market for this continued production. 2. That current health costs are justified and that won’t diminish with progress. 3. That future lifestyles will require current level of individual consumption. There are scenarios - albeit on the Trekkie optimistic side - where we will achieve longer, healthy, productive, sustainable and fulfilling lives through technical and social ingenuity.
- Razengan 7y ago
  > social ingenuity Implying lots of messy politics for which we as a species really haven't shown to have a good handling of, historically and currently.
  - MiroF 7y ago
    It's only going to get crazier once the boomers are gone.
lordnacho 7y ago
This being a biology journal, I was kinda expecting an even larger perspective. If you look at how biological ecosystems work, just about every creature reproduces way more than what is sustainable. Someone did a calculation that if the first cell had kept splitting at the rate it had, there'd be a ball the size of the solar system by now or something crazy like that. The reason it doesn't happen of course is that you run into resource crises. Any species that keeps doubling at their natural rate will run out of food, or it becomes food for others. Coming back to society, it's as if we just aren't prepared for a shrinking population. It's hard to make preditions against a variable that's always gone one way, but is showing sign of turning. How much of the economy is really just size? What's gonna happen when that reverses? This will probably be a major political theme that lingers in many advanced nations. Fewer young people to work, but also fewer votes than the people who benefit. Immigration as a potential cure, but for how long, and at what cost? I tend to think it's already a kind of underlying dynamic, just not the one that appears in the headlines so often.
- Felz 7y ago
  > Someone did a calculation that if the first cell had kept splitting at the rate it had, there'd be a ball the size of the solar system by now or something crazy like that. What? That makes no sense as an exponential process. It'd be at least unfathomably larger than the universe by now, not just solar system sized. Or were they assuming it'd expand constantly only from the surface in all directions?
  - Simon_says 7y ago
    The grandfather post is probably misremembering something like "it will become a sphere expanding at greater than the speed of light" around the time it is Solar-System-sized. (Pro Physics Tip: This is not allowed.)
    - largbae 7y ago
      Depending on how you measure it could be allowed... the diameter of the sphere could grow faster than the speed of light without any component exceeding c because you can grow at near light speeds in two directions.
miltondts 7y ago
"We could, of course, handle this cost imbalance by draconian decisions about life and death, but that is probably a political (and maybe ethical) non-starter.." Well at least giving people the choice to terminate their lives in those circumstances should be permitted and doesn't seem too problematic. "I believe that it is pointless to increase the human lifespan unless the quality of life for the elderly is also increased." This is not very worrying because people working on these approaches seem convinced that it's not possible to increase lifespan without increasing quality.
- Merrill 7y ago
  As a result of political processes in the USSR and following its collapse, the life expectancy of Russians decreased significantly. Substantial numbers of elderly Russians, including WW II veterans, died early. I don't think ethics had any influence on the outcome.
QuesnayJr 7y ago
This is a well-known concern in demography. See, for example, the Wikpedia page on dependency ratio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_ratio
EugeneOZ 7y ago
> And the population pyramid would change dramatically if we had a global thermonuclear war or a planet-wide plague, but we probably won't be so lucky. It was very interesting to read, thanks for sharing!
luxuryballs 7y ago
This makes me think of those articles where they talk about people retiring from the US to places like Chile where their retirement dollars take them much further. Will be interesting to see if this trend increases and what impact “exporting your elderly” will have on the places importing them.
- chalst 7y ago
  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is not exactly a plausible answer to your question, but it has some relevant wry humour. E.g., the entrepreneur's business plan: "And it is not just for the British, there are many other countries where they don't like old people too!"
nabla9 7y ago
Aging population has huge consequences for the economy. For example, product innovation may slow down because older people adopt new technology slower.
- MiroF 7y ago
  All of our insights about "older people" have to be kept in the context of "this generation of older people."
dmurray 7y ago
Productivity gains can increase faster than demographics change. Keynes predicted that we could move to a fifteen-hour working week and keep living at 1930s standards. He was right, but collectively we decided to work about the same and consume more instead. In the next fifty years, perhaps our standard of living won't increase as much, but it won't crash purely because of demographic changes. And focusing more on preventative healthcare doesn't address the problem, either. As the author points out, 50% of healthcare spending is spent on people with less than 30 days to live. If you "prevent liver failure" or whatever, people live a year longer and die of heart failure instead. There isn't a realistic direction for medical research that prevents all diseases requiring care, and leaves everyone 100% healthy until one day they are dead.
- Dumblydorr 7y ago
  I think we can still do a lot, as some diseases of the elderly are chronic and kill them very slowly and expensively, ie neurodegenerative disorders. Others like heart failure or an infection might kill a very old person somewhat more quickly. So, if we prevent the long, drag out, very service intensive illnesses, it may lighten the load.
- jraby3 7y ago
  I think we’re starting to see changes in allowing people the right to die on their own terms. This may be a consequence of the decline of religion. In any case, this may have a significant effect on the last months of healthcare costs. However I still agree with the premise of the article, but it may slow the inevitable.
wadkar 7y ago
[2009] /ping dang
qwerty456127 7y ago
That's what I always say: increasing the human lifespan is absolutely pointless (if not completely wrong) without improving health and ability of the ageing people. Invent a way to keep me physiologically and mentally young for longer and I'm totally in it, but don't spend resources on inventing ways to just prolong my miserable existence when I become old. That's why I (not old yet) already invest a lot of time and money in physical and mental fitness and "biohacking" to increase my chances to maintain functional self-sufficiency and resourcefulness until I die. So I suggest people should mainly invest in research on how to keep people young and functional as they age and let lifespan prolongation emerge just as a bonus.
eyeball 7y ago
“the population pyramid would change dramatically if we had a global thermonuclear war or a planet-wide plague, but we probably won't be so lucky.“ You first buddy.
mogadsheu 7y ago
It seems like the author is mostly talking about social security, rather than life itself. He also seems to be taking the stance of rerouting funding from other govt health spending such as disease research to social security. While I don’t disagree with the author’s intentions, I do find his rhetoric and writing style pretty disappointing. Mentioning a general 12,000 year old trend of population growth as a supporting argument, and using a title that vague feels clickbaitey and loses credibility in the message to me.
Invictus0 7y ago
1. Predictable for a bio journal to conclude that biomedical technology is our last hope, but the better solution to me would appear to be a sociopolitical one. 2. The author assumes in his calculus that each human produces approximately the same productive output with his labor; with automation, that is not the case. 3. The pyramid inversion is a transient phenomenon in that, eventually, we can expect the age population graph will even out to become columnar or only slightly inverted. It will not be a problem forever.
lazylizard 7y ago
I think global warming will fix that. No problem.
tim333 7y ago
>Our only hope as a species lies with biomedical research. That'll just have people live longer. The big thing which may help a lot is AI. It's quite possible we'll have robocarers by the time I go gaga.
nopinsight 7y ago
This is a key reason why technological advances in automation will be seriously needed. Robots with commonsense that can help support the elderly's everyday and healthcare needs, AI & office automation that meaningfully reduces the time spent at work so people can contribute more to their community, better remote collaboration tools to reduce commute time, etc. We need to make the pie bigger, or at least retain its size, with fewer people working. A silver lining is that most people's strengths tend to be complementary to robot's and software's.
a3n 7y ago
> it's always more expensive to treat an illness than it is to prevent it. It's also more profitable to treat a long term condition than to cure or prevent it. Just sayin'.
spodek 7y ago
> I just realized that life itself is basically a gigantic Ponzi scheme, and the pyramid is dangerously close to collapsing. In the developed world, we have evolved a society in which a relatively small number of old people have many of their needs cared for through the financial contributions of a larger number of much younger people. He's not describing a property of life or even human life, but of an economic system shortsightedly based on economic and population growth and externalizing costs. Human societies have lived without growth in many places and times for hundreds of thousands of years (and collapsed after growth many places and times). Change the system's underlying goals and you change the outcomes. I'm working to replace the beliefs from growth to enjoying what you have and from externalizing costs to stewardship. We can change those goals. If we don't, we're only forestalling the inevitable result of any Ponzi scheme.
- harryh 7y ago
  This has nothing to do with growth, but a change in the ratio of working age people to retired age people.
1000units 7y ago
* Life is an emotional Ponzi scheme. We enter adulthood and realize that life is without meaning or worth, but remain in emotional debt to those who raised us, our families, our friends, or anyone else who made an emotional investment in us, and who would feel sorrow if we were to kill ourselves. Thus we cannot kill ourselves if we wish to bring no sorrow upon those who invested in us, even if we think life not worth it for ourselves – we must live to repay our emotional debts, and to justify and satisfy others’ investments. Most then address their emotional debt by starting families and having children in whom to make emotional investments of their own. They make themselves emotionally solvent by creating emotional equity in another human being, who will in time come to realize the meaninglessness of his own life, but who will himself be indebted to his parents. Individuals thus satisfy their emotional debt by drawing down on the emotional debt of their children, who must then address their own emotional debts in turn. And the process repeats itself. It may be Pareto optimal to escape the continual process of debt repayment and painlessly destroy the human race.
- pdfernhout 7y ago
  In the book "On Caring", philosopher Milton Mayeroff wrote: "Through caring for certain others, by serving them through caring, a man lives the meaning of his own life. In the sense in which a man can ever be said to be at home in the world, he is at home not through dominating, or explaining, or appreciating, but through caring and being cared for." Given you acted to write something, what does it show you care about? In "thinking about thinking", it is very easy to drift from observations to speculations and from insights to overgeneralizations. A variation on that is something Bertrand Russel suggested, that every philosopher at some point makes an (usually unacknowledged) assumption and then proceeds from there. Your observation (generalized) that a person's feelings about other people's feelings affect our behavior seems true (especially for parents and children). That is perhaps a variation of the theme in "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain" by Antonio Damasio that all reason rests on emotion (with emotion giving us a reason to reason)? Albert Einstein says something similar in "Religion and Science": https://sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm https://sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm "For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capable, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence. But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly." Depending on feelings and assumptions about the possibility of moral progress and the nature of the universe, were the human race to vanish, perhaps a long process of growth would just begin all over again for it or something like it eventually? And would such a possibility change the presumed optimum you outline? Also, on reducing suffering as an optimization criterion, always remember the motivation triad (as explained well by Douglas J. Lisle such as in "The Pleasure Trap") of maximizing pleasure, minimizing pain, and minimizing effort -- where our brains try to optimize all three simultaneously (along with other objectives). On the general topic of suicide prevention, you may find of interest some resources I collected here: https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations-Reading-List https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations... Especially the point here from David Conroy: "Suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain. That's all it's about. You are not a bad person, or crazy, or weak, or flawed, because you feel suicidal. It doesn't even mean that you really want to die - it only means that you have more pain than you can cope with right now. If I start piling weights on your shoulders, you will eventually collapse if I add enough weights... no matter how much you want to remain standing. Willpower has nothing to do with it. Of course you would cheer yourself up, if you could. Don't accept it if someone tells you, "That's not enough to be suicidal about." There are many kinds of pain that may lead to suicide. Whether or not the pain is bearable may differ from person to person. What might be bearable to someone else, may not be bearable to you. The point at which the pain becomes unbearable depends on what kinds of coping resources you have. Individuals vary greatly in their capacity to withstand pain. When pain exceeds pain-coping resources, suicidal feelings are the result. Suicide is neither wrong nor right; it is not a defect of character; it is morally neutral. It is simply an imbalance of pain versus coping resources. You can survive suicidal feelings if you do either of two things: (1) find a way to reduce your pain, or (2) find a way to increase your coping resources. Both are possible." Here is a summary of key ideas from Mayeroff's book in more blunt language: https://thoughtcatalog.com/kyle-eschenroeder/2016/11/this-is-the-magic-of-giving-a-shit-and-how-it-makes-your-life-more-meaningful/ https://thoughtcatalog.com/kyle-eschenroeder/2016/11/this-is... "In 1971 a philosopher named Milton Mayeroff wrote the manifesto on giving a shit. It’s titled On Caring (for us, On Giving a Shit) and we’ll pull from it to help understand how giving a shit can change our lives and how we might learn to give higher quality shits." As mentioned there, Mayeroff also wrote: "No one else can give me the meaning of my life; it is something I alone can make. The meaning is not something predetermined which simply unfolds; I help both to create it and to discover it, and this is a continuing process, not a once-and-for-all. " Also related: https://www.wikihow.com/Find-Meaning-in-Life https://www.wikihow.com/Find-Meaning-in-Life Or, as Richard P. Feynman said: "Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all." For example, your post shows you care about philosophy as well as reducing suffering -- and there are a lot more ideas and actions you can explore starting from those two areas. If you do so, please keep in mind the extra complexity of the motivational triad and other possible human objectives. And along with "The Pleasure Trap", please also perhaps reflect on the book "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose" by Deirdre Barrett and the essay "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" by Paul Graham as they explore the dark side of modern society and technology relative to human inclinations adapted for a more tribal culture within an environment with different abundances and scarcities. As Stephen Ilardi writes about in "The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs": "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life." All the best in discovering and/or making meanings in your life -- including from loving caring.
foxhop 7y ago
It's not just health care, the house market is the _same_ way. Houses are built and sold to people who occupy them and then sell them to younger generations for more and more money. The assumption is that you will always find a person below you to sell to. This strategy has worked for a long time.
- buboard 7y ago
  Yes exactly, and the fact that the boomer generation has a lot of votes has led to gridlock internationally: they promote regulations that keep the prices artificially skyrocketed or prevent house auctions from happening as is happening in many european countries.
  - Dumblydorr 7y ago
    Not to mention they have these huge 4500 sqft McMansions built and are then shocked millenials arent interested I'm them, relative to the modest and older and more affordable houses nearby.
- mrep 7y ago
  If by more and more money you mean due to inflation, then yes. Otherwise, no, pretty much all returns to real estate are in the form of rent and thus if you are using it yourself, you aren't going to get a lot more back for on average after adjusting for inflation [0, 1]. [0 The rate of return on everything, 1870-2015]: https://economics.harvard.edu/files/economics/files/ms28533.pdf https://economics.harvard.edu/files/economics/files/ms28533.... [1 HN discussion of it]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817584
RickJWagner 7y ago
Yes, but the smaller number of workers will be vastly more productive. They have automation, and the accumulated knowledge of those before them.
Dumblydorr 7y ago
I often think about the massive changes the US will experience when the Boomers die off. They are more religious, more Republican, likely to be climate deniers and conspiracy theorists...but they also contain an immeasurable amount of knowledge and skill. In the Irish folk music world, 2/3 of the musicians I play with will be gone within 20 years. We as the younger generations must inherit and pass on their knowledge and skills, lest we lose many things of beauty and tradition. Thankfully, we have YT and audio recorders and books upon books, but we also must keep the face to face, aural tradition alive.
- madengr 7y ago
  In the 60’s, the boomers were socialist hippies, and now they are conservative Republicans? The millennials now complaining about inequality, will become conservatives as they age and acquire wealth. As a gen-X (who’s generation just put their nose down and worked), I hope the millennials grow out of their mentality of victim hood, as they have a larger voting block.
  - MiroF 7y ago
    > The millennials now complaining about inequality, will become conservatives as they age and acquire wealth. Wealth acquisition among millenials is not tracking the rate of boomers in the 60s. The trend today has been towards increased consolidation of large companies and an associated decrease in economic mobility, decrease in wealth share of those not in the top echelons, the repeal of common-sense regulatory frameworks like Glass–Steagall. It seems short-sighted to say that all generations are bound to follow the same path as the boomers, when economic conditions today are radically different from those in the 60s.
nappy-doo 7y ago
Sigh. This guy's a Rhodes Scholar, but gets it all wrong. Social Security and Medicare are not Ponzi schemes or pyramid schemes (There's a difference between Ponzi and pyramid schemes, but for the sake of argument, let's pretend they're the same.) Medicare and Social Security are just a tax. Collectively we've decided we'll all take care of our old and infirm. We spend the money we take in every year, and besides the occasional Congress deciding to raid the Social Security trust fund, we just take care of people. As a percentage, are the number of people paying in decreasing, sure, but there's a number of quick solutions: either move the age at which you can collect, or keep the benefits fixed (or even shrink them). Solvency returned. HN: Don't fall in to the trap. People are trying to convince you that SS and Medicare are insolvent, doomed to fail, etc. They are not. They are some of the most successful, and helpful programs the US has ever created. They are a simple wealth distribution model, where we've decided there's a basic level of livability that humans can't fall beneath. Don't fall into the trap of believing oligarchs and libertarians. The two programs have ushered in the boom since the great depression, and allowed access to healthcare for people who otherwise would just die.
- ikeboy 7y ago
  They mainly redistribute wealth from those with low life expectancy to those with high life expectancy. It's been calculated that for certain groups with particularly low life expectancies (for instance, African American men), social security is actually a net loss for them, as they pay in more to the system than they take out, on average.
  - nappy-doo 7y ago
    That's a specious argument. For example, I might not have children, does that mean I shouldn't pay school tax? No, we all pay the tax, whether I directly benefit from them or not. It's a social contract. Allowing for special classes is the problem, not a solution. It is the collective good we are striving for. Otherwise, we end up in a situation of the tragedy of the commons, and no one wins. Perhaps, instead, we should also focus on extending life expectancies for African American men, rather than allowing them to not contribute to Social Security.
ikeboy 7y ago
If you assume lifespan keeps increasing but productivity stays flat then sure. If productivity increases at least as fast as the ratio of workers to retirees, then a smaller number of workers can easily cover a larger number of retirees.
dash2 7y ago
How the hell did this get published in Genome Biology? Is it a scam journal or something? This isn't biology. It's economics - amateur economics. There's a whole field on the public economics of social security systems. The amazing insight this guy is touting has been common knowledge for, oh, twenty years. You don't even need to be an academic. Just read The Economist once in a while. Sheesh.
- Gunax 7y ago
  Yes. It's more like a blog post.
- buboard 7y ago
  It's in their 'comment' section. Perhaps they had a special issue or something with opinion piees
mannykannot 7y ago
There is a possible way out, in that wealth is not a fixed resource. A ponzi scheme treats it as if it is at best that, in that it does nothing to grow it. Economies can grow it, however, as shown by the history of the last six centuries, in which global wealth grew even on a per-capita basis, dispite all the dumb things we did during that time to destroy it. What we need to do is to give people more wealth-generating and wealth-preserving work to do (which includes educating them to their full potential at sociey's cost.) There's plenty of scope for that just in ameliorating and preparing for the coming climate crisis. The biggest obstacles to this (and they are very big) are the difficulty of doing this without having projects subverted to enrich a tiny minority, and the unwillingness of those with some wealth to support such projects on the grounds that they will take away what little they have.
nyxtom 7y ago
Add in the other variable that the workforce is increasingly being automated out. Fewer people actually looking for a job (total non working adults). One “hope” is that maybe we get something like the autodoc from that movie “Passenger”?
breck 7y ago
> " I believe that it is pointless to increase the human lifespan unless the quality of life for the elderly is also increased." The relevant industry term used more frequently lately is "healthspan".
stevespang 7y ago
Key paragraph from the article: . . . Consider healthcare. Total healthcare costs in the United States now exceed $1 trillion, 14% of the gross domestic product. Of this total, a disproportionate share is spent on the care of elderly patients shortly before their deaths. Most elderly people have the bulk of their medical care paid for by Medicare, a state-supported program. Workers pay into it during their years of peak employment, and as retirees they then draw down from it as they age. However, the 5% of Medicare recipients 65 years of age and older who die in any one year account for around 30% of all costs of the Medicare program. Seventy-seven percent of the Medicare decedents' total healthcare expenditures occur in their last year of life, a staggering 52% in the last 2 months, and 40% in the last month. We are basically spending a fortune as a society for healthcare for very old, very sick people that does not increase the lifespan of the individual by more than 30 days, if at all.
gamesbrainiac 7y ago
I just love how the author snuck in this little story about arbitrage: > (For those of you thinking of funding your research this way, forget it: the cost of collecting and transporting the cans eliminates the profit. However, about $10 million worth of empty bottles and cans do get smuggled into Michigan from neighboring Ohio and Indiana, which do not require a deposit on beverage containers. Returning those out-of-state bottles and cans in Michigan does make a small profit. Michigan lawmakers have proposed requiring that beverage manufacturers put a code on all bottles and cans that are sold in Michigan, and that automated bottle return machines be programmed to read the code so they accept only containers originally sold in Michigan.)
jeffrallen 7y ago
This needs a 2009 tag.
coldtea 7y ago
Young people get raised (for free if I'm not mistaken) from age 0 to age 18 (or more in modern society). That's on top of taxes, savings, etc, their parents pay. And raising a modern kid is far more expensive than in the 1900s or 1950s, not to mention also paying for college (which happens in many ways). Not to mention the eventual wealth inheriting (house, land, etc) which also happens in many cases. Are they then supposed to coast along with no responsibility to helping support anyone but their own? With a retirement age at 65, 65+18 = 83 or around the life expectancy (and in many cases lower). Shouldn't that be in the calculations? Or young people just came from Mars and never had anyone do anything for them? Yes, animals don't have to help their parent animals. But animals are ready to walk in a few days, and sent off to their own in a couple of months or so...
- mikem170 7y ago
  As a thought experiment: What happens if a society stops having children? Eventually all of the adults become too old to work. They might have money in the bank, but there's nobody to grow food, pick up the trash, etc. The concern in this conversation is that with declining birth rates and increased life expectancy there either needs to be an increase in worker productivity or a drop in living standards. In 1950 there were 16+ workers contributing to social security per beneficiary, in 2013 there are less than 3 [1]. I'm not sure what to think about measures of our productivity gains in that time. Is worker productivity measured based on GDP? Does that account for the difference between food and entertainment? Maybe young people in the future will not have the money for as many toys. What about crumbling infrastructure? And increased government debt? The young of today live in an world that is economically and demographically quite different than a couple of generations ago. Your argument that everyone got a free ride for their first 18 years doesn't account for the above concerns. [1] https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html
HashThis 7y ago
The ROOT PROBLEM comes from the insight that I've seen. The GOOD NEWS: The healthy part of our economy: * GDP grows 5.5% YoY (Yay! for population and productity growth) * US Government revenues grow 5.5% YoY THE PROBLEM: * US National Debt increases 8.5% YoY (average over the last 40 years) * US Money printing increases 8.5% YoY (averaged over the last 40 years. by Monetary base) 8.5% problem increases YoY > 5.5% growth of health
- thebigspacefuck 7y ago
  Something I’ve wondered, is there an amount of money that can’t be spent without changing the meaning of money? If I have $1 I can spend it right away on something tangible, like a can of Coca Cola. If I have $1 Trillion, it would be hard to spend on tangible products. I could probably buy the Coca Cola company and the secret recipe but not a Trillion cans of Coke. The value of money exists on a spectrum. The spending habits of the wealthy and poorest of us reflect this. The wealthy invest and save, but the poorest live paycheck to paycheck. The time spent owning the value of the dollars changes the more of them you have. You may own stocks, but the value can change wildly based on public sentiment, unlike my can of Coke. So where on the spectrum does this printed money go? If it goes to the poorest, it would be spent right away and directly likely leads to inflation of the price of consumer goods. If it goes to wealthiest, it may trickle down in the form of stock prices or investment capital that allows businesses and jobs to be created which at some point may lead to the price of a Coke going up. An 8.5% increase in printed money hasn’t led to 8.5% increase in inflation, so what’s the equation that explains this? I’m also not sure how it makes sense to do this math in percentages.
pcurve 7y ago
"Seventy-seven percent of the Medicare decedents' total healthcare expenditures occur in their last year of life, a staggering 52% in the last 2 months, and 40% in the last month." That's a lot worse than I thought. The inverted pyramid age distribution mentioned in his article is already happening in some countries
- shantly 7y ago
  AFAIK this distribution of expenses is why "Medicare for all" isn't that much more expensive than just "Medicare + Medicaid" (which is to say, public health care spending as it exists already). Consider also how many of the most expensive younger folks, being the ones with major chronic illnesses, are already unable to work and on Medicaid. Everyone else is relatively healthy, on average, and so pretty cheap to cover. I'd bet by far the largest remaining expenses among that mostly-healthy-and-not-already-covered-by-public-programs segment are pregnancy, births, and first month or two of care for sick or premature newborns.
  - pcurve 7y ago
    You are right. I did some digging. Cost of premature birth cost 26 billion per year. Last 6 month end of life care 170 billion. We are so desensitized to figures in billions because we regularly hear about companies market cap approaching 1 trillion and people with wealth of 100 billion. But entire tax revenue is only 3.3 tril.
- glofish 7y ago
  But is it true? The numbers feel awfully skewed - common sense tells me can't be right. Then I did a Google search, found this: "The Myth Regarding the High Cost of End-of-Life Care" from 2015 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4638261/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4638261/ they report that 13% is spent during the last year(!) of life. Also, just like with retirement benefits, the real question, did beneficiary paid for it nor not? Frequently these numbers are tossed around as these were "free handouts" - but we do pay for these all the time - and of course since it is insurance there will be people that get out more of it than others. That makes either neither unfair nor something that should be fixed. It is working as intended.
ilaksh 7y ago
https://sens.org https://sens.org
tyzerdak 7y ago
If old people will buy goods that young people produce money will cycle
jackcosgrove 7y ago
Life seems to have evolved on Earth to expand greedily, because leaving resources on the table just means another organism will use them. Life on Earth also seems to have solved this problem with predation, where the greedily growing organism becomes a resource for another, newer organism. If life on Earth were a pyramid scheme, then blue-green algae would be the rulers of the world because they were the early adopters in the scheme. Except there is no legal system that would consider the blue-green algae first in line for payout. It's a free-for-all. Instead a very late entrant, humans, are the apex predator and are taking resources from every other organism that came before. It's the opposite of a pyramid scheme. Our social systems make a noble effort to recognize the contributions of those who came before and support them, and increasingly we are extending this support to the larger biome upon which our civilization is built. However that's a fragile conceit of the current age, and will go away if the civilization itself is threatened. Who is enforcing the laws which transfer wealth from the young to the old? Elderly police officers? Life will find a way.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
falcor84 7y ago
> Seventy-seven percent of the Medicare decedents' total healthcare expenditures occur in their last year of life, a staggering 52% in the last 2 months, and 40% in the last month. We are basically spending a fortune as a society for healthcare for very old, very sick people that does not increase the lifespan of the individual by more than 30 days, if at all. That's almost a tautology, right? Pretty much the inverse of the survivorship bias. Life-saving procedures are expensive because they are difficult and risky and almost by definition likely to fail, since once medical science is able to "manage" one kind of medical challenge, they immediately have to deal with the next one that would kill the person who was saved. In that sense, it should be obvious that most money is spent just ahead of people finally dying. It's almost that cliche of how you always find your keys in the last place you looked.

330 points by NilsIRL 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

A very good read in the Journal Genome Biology explaining in simple words how Ponzi and Madoff made millions, and then, describing his idea: Now, the reason you're reading about this here, is that I just realized that life itself is basically a gigantic Ponzi scheme, and the pyramid is dangerously close to collapsing. In the developed world, we have evolved a society in which a relatively small number of old people have many of their needs cared for through the financial contributions of a larger number of much younger people. And that made sense, because for over 12,000 years the age distribution of the human population was, in fact, in the shape of a pyramid, with a huge base of young children rising to a smaller number of teenagers and a still smaller number of young adults, and so on up to a tiny tip of the elderly. But sometime in the 1950s, as the birthrate declined and life expectancy continued to increase, the pyramid started to be shaped more like a column. Within the next 40 years it will become one, and then it will slowly invert. I can recommend a full read, it’s worth the time.

cpplinuxdude 7y ago
Probably the most well-written piece i’ve read via HN.
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  Well written in the sense of artful rhetoric perhaps. But it makes no sense at all to talk about demographic issues without accounting for productivity growth and technological progress. This is pure scare mongering. Imagine what you could have written around 1700 when the share of farmers dropped below 50% if you had ignored productivity growth.
IkmoIkmo 7y ago
If the young people's contributions can be largely replaced (or rather, supplemented to the necessary aggregate contribution) by technology, does it really matter? There'd be no question of a ponzi scheme. You can sort of already see it happening. Productivity is greater than ever. But wages have decoupled from productivity, because it's not human labour, but rather technological inputs that have become the drivers of productivity. I won't sit here and predict that we'll have healthcare, food & beverage and cleaning robots within a decade and we'll only have leisure left. But we're definitely moving in many small ways to singular superpowered humans, who use tech, that can replace entire shifts of employees. Take machines like these: https://www.tennantco.com/content/dam/tennant/tennantco/products/machines/scrubber%20walk-behinds/t600-t600e/images/t600e-orbital-env-hospital.jpg https://www.tennantco.com/content/dam/tennant/tennantco/prod... Replacing half a dozen people doing the same manually. I mean who am I kidding, there's a billion examples like this. Yes, we still have to do our laundry clean, but we have washing machines that do 95% of the work. We still have to drive our busses, but 95% of bus ticket sales are now automated. At some point we'll probably get to that last 5%, too. I'm pretty confident that the demographic age inversion will not be as catastrophic as a ponzi scheme falling apart. Because we the productivity of young (and hell, old) people has a technology multiplier that's ever increasing.
- martin_drapeau 7y ago
  I believe you are right. Tech evolution has always been our saving grace, from the discovery of fire, to the invention of agriculture, ships to conquer new worlds, etc. I don't see the end of the world - I see opportunity, lots of it.

rathel 7y ago

Slightly off-topic, but how should I as a person in late 20s deal with the fear that every piece of evidence suggests my generation (and subsequent ones) will be totally screwed in the future? Global warming, economic inequality (like property prices), post-truth era, surveillance state and unsustainable social welfare (as explained in OP)? It really can't get out of my mind.

enkid 7y ago
Gain some perspective. It's historically a very pretty common idea. People have been writing about how the world is going to shit since they could write, and yet most people's lives have been getting better most of the time. Why do you think you are better equipped at predicting the future than those folks?
- behindsight 7y ago
  Although a good sentiment, the information age coupled with more advanced climate models makes us much better at predicting. Additionally, it's only been within the last century where we've been technologically capable of causing a mass-extinction level event via nuclear weapons. Here's a fun list of close-calls [0] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
  - dwighttk 7y ago
    >much better at predicting Citation needed
    - darth_skywalker 7y ago
      This is a fair point - it's hard to predict the future with our current technology given the difficulty of envisioning future technology.
- dlkf 7y ago
  > Frank Kermode, in his famous book The Sense of an Ending, elaborated on Cohn’s masterwork by suggesting that actually it’s very common for all of us – especially artists – to feel that we live at the end of times, and that our own demise means all the more to us because we’re not simply dying in the middle of the plot, in medias res. Our lives take on significance because as we decline we notice our society is declining all around us. It’s part of a yearning for narrative significance. As Kermode said, no one can hear a clock saying, as it does, tick tick. What we hear is tick tock. A beginning and an end. We impose this order. - Ian McEwan

netfl0 7y ago

Interesting read. This hardens the argument we need continue to rapidly develop automation technology. If the productivity of robots were considered, the pyramid would look very different.

davidwihl 7y ago
Another factor is that the aging population is generally healthier and can work longer than prior generations. I have no desire to stop working at a specific age. Working keep me mentally sharp, while contributing to solving problems as opposed to being a burden on society.
- yulaow 7y ago
  I think most people would prefer to retire and work in project which interest themselves which often have no financial sense or would not be financially viable unless you already have an income which can maintain yourself. Eg: I have zero interest to work for megacorporation for the next crud tool, but I would "work" even 10hours a day for a lot of open source projects I like which would never be capable of paying me, so I look forward to retirement and I wish I could, already today, not work just to keep me and the economy afloat
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    How many retirees found it hard to abandon their field even though the pressure was too tiring for them ? Maybe full retirement is too strong, and should be obvious only in physically tough jobs, but for others a semi retirement, as a wise/consultant in their company could be a good compromise.
jfk13 7y ago
> we need continue to rapidly develop... No, "rapidly develop[ing]" anything is not a solution. We need to get humans as a species to shift our (subconscious) thinking away from the goal of an ever-increasing number of humans with an ever-increasing "standard of living", enabled by ever-rising "productivity". We're living in what is essentially a closed system with limited resources and carrying capacity. If we think we can always overcome the limits of one resource by more development of another, we're deluding ourselves and likely on track to make the crash worse when it finally comes. Exactly what the long-term, sustainable capacity of the Earth may be is of course unknown, but I think there's a strong possibility that we are currently exceeding it.

rshnotsecure 7y ago

I suggest looking into the work of Peter Turchin. Turchin, following up on many precious writers who’ve noticed certain cycles or repeating themes in history, has posited that there is an ebb-flow to history that is about 80 years, about the lifespan of a human. What drives this flow, in this theory, is majority one force. The rise in birth rates during good times, followed by the trouble of environments and economies to absorb the new individuals, eventually leading to some sort of new adjustment among all players.

elymar 7y ago
I took a class on biological and cultural evolution with Peter Turchin as one of the lecturers (for the cultural half). Definitely one of the most insightful courses I took in college.
imafish 7y ago
Great news for me as a european. I’ve heard the 1940’s were a blast.

eecc 7y ago

Some assumptions going on here: 1. That older people won’t be productive and there won’t be any appetite in the market for this continued production. 2. That current health costs are justified and that won’t diminish with progress. 3. That future lifestyles will require current level of individual consumption. There are scenarios - albeit on the Trekkie optimistic side - where we will achieve longer, healthy, productive, sustainable and fulfilling lives through technical and social ingenuity.

Razengan 7y ago
> social ingenuity Implying lots of messy politics for which we as a species really haven't shown to have a good handling of, historically and currently.
- MiroF 7y ago
  It's only going to get crazier once the boomers are gone.

lordnacho 7y ago

This being a biology journal, I was kinda expecting an even larger perspective. If you look at how biological ecosystems work, just about every creature reproduces way more than what is sustainable. Someone did a calculation that if the first cell had kept splitting at the rate it had, there'd be a ball the size of the solar system by now or something crazy like that. The reason it doesn't happen of course is that you run into resource crises. Any species that keeps doubling at their natural rate will run out of food, or it becomes food for others. Coming back to society, it's as if we just aren't prepared for a shrinking population. It's hard to make preditions against a variable that's always gone one way, but is showing sign of turning. How much of the economy is really just size? What's gonna happen when that reverses? This will probably be a major political theme that lingers in many advanced nations. Fewer young people to work, but also fewer votes than the people who benefit. Immigration as a potential cure, but for how long, and at what cost? I tend to think it's already a kind of underlying dynamic, just not the one that appears in the headlines so often.

Felz 7y ago
> Someone did a calculation that if the first cell had kept splitting at the rate it had, there'd be a ball the size of the solar system by now or something crazy like that. What? That makes no sense as an exponential process. It'd be at least unfathomably larger than the universe by now, not just solar system sized. Or were they assuming it'd expand constantly only from the surface in all directions?
- Simon_says 7y ago
  The grandfather post is probably misremembering something like "it will become a sphere expanding at greater than the speed of light" around the time it is Solar-System-sized. (Pro Physics Tip: This is not allowed.)
  - largbae 7y ago
    Depending on how you measure it could be allowed... the diameter of the sphere could grow faster than the speed of light without any component exceeding c because you can grow at near light speeds in two directions.

miltondts 7y ago

"We could, of course, handle this cost imbalance by draconian decisions about life and death, but that is probably a political (and maybe ethical) non-starter.." Well at least giving people the choice to terminate their lives in those circumstances should be permitted and doesn't seem too problematic. "I believe that it is pointless to increase the human lifespan unless the quality of life for the elderly is also increased." This is not very worrying because people working on these approaches seem convinced that it's not possible to increase lifespan without increasing quality.

Merrill 7y ago
As a result of political processes in the USSR and following its collapse, the life expectancy of Russians decreased significantly. Substantial numbers of elderly Russians, including WW II veterans, died early. I don't think ethics had any influence on the outcome.

QuesnayJr 7y ago

This is a well-known concern in demography. See, for example, the Wikpedia page on dependency ratio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_ratio

EugeneOZ 7y ago

> And the population pyramid would change dramatically if we had a global thermonuclear war or a planet-wide plague, but we probably won't be so lucky. It was very interesting to read, thanks for sharing!

luxuryballs 7y ago

This makes me think of those articles where they talk about people retiring from the US to places like Chile where their retirement dollars take them much further. Will be interesting to see if this trend increases and what impact “exporting your elderly” will have on the places importing them.

chalst 7y ago
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is not exactly a plausible answer to your question, but it has some relevant wry humour. E.g., the entrepreneur's business plan: "And it is not just for the British, there are many other countries where they don't like old people too!"

nabla9 7y ago

Aging population has huge consequences for the economy. For example, product innovation may slow down because older people adopt new technology slower.

MiroF 7y ago
All of our insights about "older people" have to be kept in the context of "this generation of older people."

dmurray 7y ago

Productivity gains can increase faster than demographics change. Keynes predicted that we could move to a fifteen-hour working week and keep living at 1930s standards. He was right, but collectively we decided to work about the same and consume more instead. In the next fifty years, perhaps our standard of living won't increase as much, but it won't crash purely because of demographic changes. And focusing more on preventative healthcare doesn't address the problem, either. As the author points out, 50% of healthcare spending is spent on people with less than 30 days to live. If you "prevent liver failure" or whatever, people live a year longer and die of heart failure instead. There isn't a realistic direction for medical research that prevents all diseases requiring care, and leaves everyone 100% healthy until one day they are dead.

Dumblydorr 7y ago
I think we can still do a lot, as some diseases of the elderly are chronic and kill them very slowly and expensively, ie neurodegenerative disorders. Others like heart failure or an infection might kill a very old person somewhat more quickly. So, if we prevent the long, drag out, very service intensive illnesses, it may lighten the load.
jraby3 7y ago
I think we’re starting to see changes in allowing people the right to die on their own terms. This may be a consequence of the decline of religion. In any case, this may have a significant effect on the last months of healthcare costs. However I still agree with the premise of the article, but it may slow the inevitable.

wadkar 7y ago

[2009] /ping dang

qwerty456127 7y ago

That's what I always say: increasing the human lifespan is absolutely pointless (if not completely wrong) without improving health and ability of the ageing people. Invent a way to keep me physiologically and mentally young for longer and I'm totally in it, but don't spend resources on inventing ways to just prolong my miserable existence when I become old. That's why I (not old yet) already invest a lot of time and money in physical and mental fitness and "biohacking" to increase my chances to maintain functional self-sufficiency and resourcefulness until I die. So I suggest people should mainly invest in research on how to keep people young and functional as they age and let lifespan prolongation emerge just as a bonus.

eyeball 7y ago

“the population pyramid would change dramatically if we had a global thermonuclear war or a planet-wide plague, but we probably won't be so lucky.“ You first buddy.

mogadsheu 7y ago

It seems like the author is mostly talking about social security, rather than life itself. He also seems to be taking the stance of rerouting funding from other govt health spending such as disease research to social security. While I don’t disagree with the author’s intentions, I do find his rhetoric and writing style pretty disappointing. Mentioning a general 12,000 year old trend of population growth as a supporting argument, and using a title that vague feels clickbaitey and loses credibility in the message to me.

Invictus0 7y ago

1. Predictable for a bio journal to conclude that biomedical technology is our last hope, but the better solution to me would appear to be a sociopolitical one. 2. The author assumes in his calculus that each human produces approximately the same productive output with his labor; with automation, that is not the case. 3. The pyramid inversion is a transient phenomenon in that, eventually, we can expect the age population graph will even out to become columnar or only slightly inverted. It will not be a problem forever.

lazylizard 7y ago

I think global warming will fix that. No problem.

tim333 7y ago

>Our only hope as a species lies with biomedical research. That'll just have people live longer. The big thing which may help a lot is AI. It's quite possible we'll have robocarers by the time I go gaga.

nopinsight 7y ago

This is a key reason why technological advances in automation will be seriously needed. Robots with commonsense that can help support the elderly's everyday and healthcare needs, AI & office automation that meaningfully reduces the time spent at work so people can contribute more to their community, better remote collaboration tools to reduce commute time, etc. We need to make the pie bigger, or at least retain its size, with fewer people working. A silver lining is that most people's strengths tend to be complementary to robot's and software's.

a3n 7y ago

> it's always more expensive to treat an illness than it is to prevent it. It's also more profitable to treat a long term condition than to cure or prevent it. Just sayin'.

spodek 7y ago

> I just realized that life itself is basically a gigantic Ponzi scheme, and the pyramid is dangerously close to collapsing. In the developed world, we have evolved a society in which a relatively small number of old people have many of their needs cared for through the financial contributions of a larger number of much younger people. He's not describing a property of life or even human life, but of an economic system shortsightedly based on economic and population growth and externalizing costs. Human societies have lived without growth in many places and times for hundreds of thousands of years (and collapsed after growth many places and times). Change the system's underlying goals and you change the outcomes. I'm working to replace the beliefs from growth to enjoying what you have and from externalizing costs to stewardship. We can change those goals. If we don't, we're only forestalling the inevitable result of any Ponzi scheme.

harryh 7y ago
This has nothing to do with growth, but a change in the ratio of working age people to retired age people.

1000units 7y ago

* Life is an emotional Ponzi scheme. We enter adulthood and realize that life is without meaning or worth, but remain in emotional debt to those who raised us, our families, our friends, or anyone else who made an emotional investment in us, and who would feel sorrow if we were to kill ourselves. Thus we cannot kill ourselves if we wish to bring no sorrow upon those who invested in us, even if we think life not worth it for ourselves – we must live to repay our emotional debts, and to justify and satisfy others’ investments. Most then address their emotional debt by starting families and having children in whom to make emotional investments of their own. They make themselves emotionally solvent by creating emotional equity in another human being, who will in time come to realize the meaninglessness of his own life, but who will himself be indebted to his parents. Individuals thus satisfy their emotional debt by drawing down on the emotional debt of their children, who must then address their own emotional debts in turn. And the process repeats itself. It may be Pareto optimal to escape the continual process of debt repayment and painlessly destroy the human race.

pdfernhout 7y ago
In the book "On Caring", philosopher Milton Mayeroff wrote: "Through caring for certain others, by serving them through caring, a man lives the meaning of his own life. In the sense in which a man can ever be said to be at home in the world, he is at home not through dominating, or explaining, or appreciating, but through caring and being cared for." Given you acted to write something, what does it show you care about? In "thinking about thinking", it is very easy to drift from observations to speculations and from insights to overgeneralizations. A variation on that is something Bertrand Russel suggested, that every philosopher at some point makes an (usually unacknowledged) assumption and then proceeds from there. Your observation (generalized) that a person's feelings about other people's feelings affect our behavior seems true (especially for parents and children). That is perhaps a variation of the theme in "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain" by Antonio Damasio that all reason rests on emotion (with emotion giving us a reason to reason)? Albert Einstein says something similar in "Religion and Science": https://sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm https://sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm "For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capable, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence. But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly." Depending on feelings and assumptions about the possibility of moral progress and the nature of the universe, were the human race to vanish, perhaps a long process of growth would just begin all over again for it or something like it eventually? And would such a possibility change the presumed optimum you outline? Also, on reducing suffering as an optimization criterion, always remember the motivation triad (as explained well by Douglas J. Lisle such as in "The Pleasure Trap") of maximizing pleasure, minimizing pain, and minimizing effort -- where our brains try to optimize all three simultaneously (along with other objectives). On the general topic of suicide prevention, you may find of interest some resources I collected here: https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations-Reading-List https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations... Especially the point here from David Conroy: "Suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain. That's all it's about. You are not a bad person, or crazy, or weak, or flawed, because you feel suicidal. It doesn't even mean that you really want to die - it only means that you have more pain than you can cope with right now. If I start piling weights on your shoulders, you will eventually collapse if I add enough weights... no matter how much you want to remain standing. Willpower has nothing to do with it. Of course you would cheer yourself up, if you could. Don't accept it if someone tells you, "That's not enough to be suicidal about." There are many kinds of pain that may lead to suicide. Whether or not the pain is bearable may differ from person to person. What might be bearable to someone else, may not be bearable to you. The point at which the pain becomes unbearable depends on what kinds of coping resources you have. Individuals vary greatly in their capacity to withstand pain. When pain exceeds pain-coping resources, suicidal feelings are the result. Suicide is neither wrong nor right; it is not a defect of character; it is morally neutral. It is simply an imbalance of pain versus coping resources. You can survive suicidal feelings if you do either of two things: (1) find a way to reduce your pain, or (2) find a way to increase your coping resources. Both are possible." Here is a summary of key ideas from Mayeroff's book in more blunt language: https://thoughtcatalog.com/kyle-eschenroeder/2016/11/this-is-the-magic-of-giving-a-shit-and-how-it-makes-your-life-more-meaningful/ https://thoughtcatalog.com/kyle-eschenroeder/2016/11/this-is... "In 1971 a philosopher named Milton Mayeroff wrote the manifesto on giving a shit. It’s titled On Caring (for us, On Giving a Shit) and we’ll pull from it to help understand how giving a shit can change our lives and how we might learn to give higher quality shits." As mentioned there, Mayeroff also wrote: "No one else can give me the meaning of my life; it is something I alone can make. The meaning is not something predetermined which simply unfolds; I help both to create it and to discover it, and this is a continuing process, not a once-and-for-all. " Also related: https://www.wikihow.com/Find-Meaning-in-Life https://www.wikihow.com/Find-Meaning-in-Life Or, as Richard P. Feynman said: "Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all." For example, your post shows you care about philosophy as well as reducing suffering -- and there are a lot more ideas and actions you can explore starting from those two areas. If you do so, please keep in mind the extra complexity of the motivational triad and other possible human objectives. And along with "The Pleasure Trap", please also perhaps reflect on the book "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose" by Deirdre Barrett and the essay "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" by Paul Graham as they explore the dark side of modern society and technology relative to human inclinations adapted for a more tribal culture within an environment with different abundances and scarcities. As Stephen Ilardi writes about in "The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs": "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life." All the best in discovering and/or making meanings in your life -- including from loving caring.

foxhop 7y ago

It's not just health care, the house market is the _same_ way. Houses are built and sold to people who occupy them and then sell them to younger generations for more and more money. The assumption is that you will always find a person below you to sell to. This strategy has worked for a long time.

buboard 7y ago
Yes exactly, and the fact that the boomer generation has a lot of votes has led to gridlock internationally: they promote regulations that keep the prices artificially skyrocketed or prevent house auctions from happening as is happening in many european countries.
- Dumblydorr 7y ago
  Not to mention they have these huge 4500 sqft McMansions built and are then shocked millenials arent interested I'm them, relative to the modest and older and more affordable houses nearby.
mrep 7y ago
If by more and more money you mean due to inflation, then yes. Otherwise, no, pretty much all returns to real estate are in the form of rent and thus if you are using it yourself, you aren't going to get a lot more back for on average after adjusting for inflation [0, 1]. [0 The rate of return on everything, 1870-2015]: https://economics.harvard.edu/files/economics/files/ms28533.pdf https://economics.harvard.edu/files/economics/files/ms28533.... [1 HN discussion of it]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817584

RickJWagner 7y ago

Yes, but the smaller number of workers will be vastly more productive. They have automation, and the accumulated knowledge of those before them.

Dumblydorr 7y ago

I often think about the massive changes the US will experience when the Boomers die off. They are more religious, more Republican, likely to be climate deniers and conspiracy theorists...but they also contain an immeasurable amount of knowledge and skill. In the Irish folk music world, 2/3 of the musicians I play with will be gone within 20 years. We as the younger generations must inherit and pass on their knowledge and skills, lest we lose many things of beauty and tradition. Thankfully, we have YT and audio recorders and books upon books, but we also must keep the face to face, aural tradition alive.

madengr 7y ago
In the 60’s, the boomers were socialist hippies, and now they are conservative Republicans? The millennials now complaining about inequality, will become conservatives as they age and acquire wealth. As a gen-X (who’s generation just put their nose down and worked), I hope the millennials grow out of their mentality of victim hood, as they have a larger voting block.
- MiroF 7y ago
  > The millennials now complaining about inequality, will become conservatives as they age and acquire wealth. Wealth acquisition among millenials is not tracking the rate of boomers in the 60s. The trend today has been towards increased consolidation of large companies and an associated decrease in economic mobility, decrease in wealth share of those not in the top echelons, the repeal of common-sense regulatory frameworks like Glass–Steagall. It seems short-sighted to say that all generations are bound to follow the same path as the boomers, when economic conditions today are radically different from those in the 60s.

nappy-doo 7y ago

Sigh. This guy's a Rhodes Scholar, but gets it all wrong. Social Security and Medicare are not Ponzi schemes or pyramid schemes (There's a difference between Ponzi and pyramid schemes, but for the sake of argument, let's pretend they're the same.) Medicare and Social Security are just a tax. Collectively we've decided we'll all take care of our old and infirm. We spend the money we take in every year, and besides the occasional Congress deciding to raid the Social Security trust fund, we just take care of people. As a percentage, are the number of people paying in decreasing, sure, but there's a number of quick solutions: either move the age at which you can collect, or keep the benefits fixed (or even shrink them). Solvency returned. HN: Don't fall in to the trap. People are trying to convince you that SS and Medicare are insolvent, doomed to fail, etc. They are not. They are some of the most successful, and helpful programs the US has ever created. They are a simple wealth distribution model, where we've decided there's a basic level of livability that humans can't fall beneath. Don't fall into the trap of believing oligarchs and libertarians. The two programs have ushered in the boom since the great depression, and allowed access to healthcare for people who otherwise would just die.

ikeboy 7y ago
They mainly redistribute wealth from those with low life expectancy to those with high life expectancy. It's been calculated that for certain groups with particularly low life expectancies (for instance, African American men), social security is actually a net loss for them, as they pay in more to the system than they take out, on average.
- nappy-doo 7y ago
  That's a specious argument. For example, I might not have children, does that mean I shouldn't pay school tax? No, we all pay the tax, whether I directly benefit from them or not. It's a social contract. Allowing for special classes is the problem, not a solution. It is the collective good we are striving for. Otherwise, we end up in a situation of the tragedy of the commons, and no one wins. Perhaps, instead, we should also focus on extending life expectancies for African American men, rather than allowing them to not contribute to Social Security.

ikeboy 7y ago

If you assume lifespan keeps increasing but productivity stays flat then sure. If productivity increases at least as fast as the ratio of workers to retirees, then a smaller number of workers can easily cover a larger number of retirees.

dash2 7y ago

How the hell did this get published in Genome Biology? Is it a scam journal or something? This isn't biology. It's economics - amateur economics. There's a whole field on the public economics of social security systems. The amazing insight this guy is touting has been common knowledge for, oh, twenty years. You don't even need to be an academic. Just read The Economist once in a while. Sheesh.

Gunax 7y ago
Yes. It's more like a blog post.
buboard 7y ago
It's in their 'comment' section. Perhaps they had a special issue or something with opinion piees

mannykannot 7y ago

There is a possible way out, in that wealth is not a fixed resource. A ponzi scheme treats it as if it is at best that, in that it does nothing to grow it. Economies can grow it, however, as shown by the history of the last six centuries, in which global wealth grew even on a per-capita basis, dispite all the dumb things we did during that time to destroy it. What we need to do is to give people more wealth-generating and wealth-preserving work to do (which includes educating them to their full potential at sociey's cost.) There's plenty of scope for that just in ameliorating and preparing for the coming climate crisis. The biggest obstacles to this (and they are very big) are the difficulty of doing this without having projects subverted to enrich a tiny minority, and the unwillingness of those with some wealth to support such projects on the grounds that they will take away what little they have.

nyxtom 7y ago

Add in the other variable that the workforce is increasingly being automated out. Fewer people actually looking for a job (total non working adults). One “hope” is that maybe we get something like the autodoc from that movie “Passenger”?

breck 7y ago

> " I believe that it is pointless to increase the human lifespan unless the quality of life for the elderly is also increased." The relevant industry term used more frequently lately is "healthspan".

stevespang 7y ago

Key paragraph from the article: . . . Consider healthcare. Total healthcare costs in the United States now exceed $1 trillion, 14% of the gross domestic product. Of this total, a disproportionate share is spent on the care of elderly patients shortly before their deaths. Most elderly people have the bulk of their medical care paid for by Medicare, a state-supported program. Workers pay into it during their years of peak employment, and as retirees they then draw down from it as they age. However, the 5% of Medicare recipients 65 years of age and older who die in any one year account for around 30% of all costs of the Medicare program. Seventy-seven percent of the Medicare decedents' total healthcare expenditures occur in their last year of life, a staggering 52% in the last 2 months, and 40% in the last month. We are basically spending a fortune as a society for healthcare for very old, very sick people that does not increase the lifespan of the individual by more than 30 days, if at all.

gamesbrainiac 7y ago

I just love how the author snuck in this little story about arbitrage: > (For those of you thinking of funding your research this way, forget it: the cost of collecting and transporting the cans eliminates the profit. However, about $10 million worth of empty bottles and cans do get smuggled into Michigan from neighboring Ohio and Indiana, which do not require a deposit on beverage containers. Returning those out-of-state bottles and cans in Michigan does make a small profit. Michigan lawmakers have proposed requiring that beverage manufacturers put a code on all bottles and cans that are sold in Michigan, and that automated bottle return machines be programmed to read the code so they accept only containers originally sold in Michigan.)

jeffrallen 7y ago

This needs a 2009 tag.

coldtea 7y ago

Young people get raised (for free if I'm not mistaken) from age 0 to age 18 (or more in modern society). That's on top of taxes, savings, etc, their parents pay. And raising a modern kid is far more expensive than in the 1900s or 1950s, not to mention also paying for college (which happens in many ways). Not to mention the eventual wealth inheriting (house, land, etc) which also happens in many cases. Are they then supposed to coast along with no responsibility to helping support anyone but their own? With a retirement age at 65, 65+18 = 83 or around the life expectancy (and in many cases lower). Shouldn't that be in the calculations? Or young people just came from Mars and never had anyone do anything for them? Yes, animals don't have to help their parent animals. But animals are ready to walk in a few days, and sent off to their own in a couple of months or so...

mikem170 7y ago
As a thought experiment: What happens if a society stops having children? Eventually all of the adults become too old to work. They might have money in the bank, but there's nobody to grow food, pick up the trash, etc. The concern in this conversation is that with declining birth rates and increased life expectancy there either needs to be an increase in worker productivity or a drop in living standards. In 1950 there were 16+ workers contributing to social security per beneficiary, in 2013 there are less than 3 [1]. I'm not sure what to think about measures of our productivity gains in that time. Is worker productivity measured based on GDP? Does that account for the difference between food and entertainment? Maybe young people in the future will not have the money for as many toys. What about crumbling infrastructure? And increased government debt? The young of today live in an world that is economically and demographically quite different than a couple of generations ago. Your argument that everyone got a free ride for their first 18 years doesn't account for the above concerns. [1] https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html

HashThis 7y ago

The ROOT PROBLEM comes from the insight that I've seen. The GOOD NEWS: The healthy part of our economy: * GDP grows 5.5% YoY (Yay! for population and productity growth) * US Government revenues grow 5.5% YoY THE PROBLEM: * US National Debt increases 8.5% YoY (average over the last 40 years) * US Money printing increases 8.5% YoY (averaged over the last 40 years. by Monetary base) 8.5% problem increases YoY > 5.5% growth of health

thebigspacefuck 7y ago
Something I’ve wondered, is there an amount of money that can’t be spent without changing the meaning of money? If I have $1 I can spend it right away on something tangible, like a can of Coca Cola. If I have $1 Trillion, it would be hard to spend on tangible products. I could probably buy the Coca Cola company and the secret recipe but not a Trillion cans of Coke. The value of money exists on a spectrum. The spending habits of the wealthy and poorest of us reflect this. The wealthy invest and save, but the poorest live paycheck to paycheck. The time spent owning the value of the dollars changes the more of them you have. You may own stocks, but the value can change wildly based on public sentiment, unlike my can of Coke. So where on the spectrum does this printed money go? If it goes to the poorest, it would be spent right away and directly likely leads to inflation of the price of consumer goods. If it goes to wealthiest, it may trickle down in the form of stock prices or investment capital that allows businesses and jobs to be created which at some point may lead to the price of a Coke going up. An 8.5% increase in printed money hasn’t led to 8.5% increase in inflation, so what’s the equation that explains this? I’m also not sure how it makes sense to do this math in percentages.

pcurve 7y ago

"Seventy-seven percent of the Medicare decedents' total healthcare expenditures occur in their last year of life, a staggering 52% in the last 2 months, and 40% in the last month." That's a lot worse than I thought. The inverted pyramid age distribution mentioned in his article is already happening in some countries

shantly 7y ago
AFAIK this distribution of expenses is why "Medicare for all" isn't that much more expensive than just "Medicare + Medicaid" (which is to say, public health care spending as it exists already). Consider also how many of the most expensive younger folks, being the ones with major chronic illnesses, are already unable to work and on Medicaid. Everyone else is relatively healthy, on average, and so pretty cheap to cover. I'd bet by far the largest remaining expenses among that mostly-healthy-and-not-already-covered-by-public-programs segment are pregnancy, births, and first month or two of care for sick or premature newborns.
- pcurve 7y ago
  You are right. I did some digging. Cost of premature birth cost 26 billion per year. Last 6 month end of life care 170 billion. We are so desensitized to figures in billions because we regularly hear about companies market cap approaching 1 trillion and people with wealth of 100 billion. But entire tax revenue is only 3.3 tril.
glofish 7y ago
But is it true? The numbers feel awfully skewed - common sense tells me can't be right. Then I did a Google search, found this: "The Myth Regarding the High Cost of End-of-Life Care" from 2015 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4638261/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4638261/ they report that 13% is spent during the last year(!) of life. Also, just like with retirement benefits, the real question, did beneficiary paid for it nor not? Frequently these numbers are tossed around as these were "free handouts" - but we do pay for these all the time - and of course since it is insurance there will be people that get out more of it than others. That makes either neither unfair nor something that should be fixed. It is working as intended.

ilaksh 7y ago

https://sens.org https://sens.org

tyzerdak 7y ago

If old people will buy goods that young people produce money will cycle

jackcosgrove 7y ago

Life seems to have evolved on Earth to expand greedily, because leaving resources on the table just means another organism will use them. Life on Earth also seems to have solved this problem with predation, where the greedily growing organism becomes a resource for another, newer organism. If life on Earth were a pyramid scheme, then blue-green algae would be the rulers of the world because they were the early adopters in the scheme. Except there is no legal system that would consider the blue-green algae first in line for payout. It's a free-for-all. Instead a very late entrant, humans, are the apex predator and are taking resources from every other organism that came before. It's the opposite of a pyramid scheme. Our social systems make a noble effort to recognize the contributions of those who came before and support them, and increasingly we are extending this support to the larger biome upon which our civilization is built. However that's a fragile conceit of the current age, and will go away if the civilization itself is threatened. Who is enforcing the laws which transfer wealth from the young to the old? Elderly police officers? Life will find a way.

deleted 7y ago

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falcor84 7y ago

> Seventy-seven percent of the Medicare decedents' total healthcare expenditures occur in their last year of life, a staggering 52% in the last 2 months, and 40% in the last month. We are basically spending a fortune as a society for healthcare for very old, very sick people that does not increase the lifespan of the individual by more than 30 days, if at all. That's almost a tautology, right? Pretty much the inverse of the survivorship bias. Life-saving procedures are expensive because they are difficult and risky and almost by definition likely to fail, since once medical science is able to "manage" one kind of medical challenge, they immediately have to deal with the next one that would kill the person who was saved. In that sense, it should be obvious that most money is spent just ahead of people finally dying. It's almost that cliche of how you always find your keys in the last place you looked.