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But the thing is: This is not a wealth problem. In every society where some people are working ("the young") and some people are not ("the old"), and everybody

• alexbouchard 7y ago
  Well that's if you don't increase efficacy which we are well on our way of doing. This doesn't strike me as such a large issue since "the old" are still consuming and therefore spending capital. Automation and efficacy increase (through tech) will more then make up for the population discrepancies as long as there is enough capital to warrant the investment.
  • ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    Forget about money for a moment, think of just physical world. The point is, the young would have a higher quality of life if they did not have to support the old. If one young person has to support two old, their quality of life will decline no matter what the fiscal arrangements are. Sure, technology improves efficiency, but not 300%
    • danaris 7y ago
      That assumes each person produces only enough for a small, fixed number of people to prosper. And, um...I don't wish to worry you, but efficiency has improved a whole hell of a lot more than 300% over the last 40 years or so. The problem is that the gains have gone almost entirely to the people at the very top of the pyramid.
      • ClumsyPilot 7y ago
        That's a bold claim, which industrial process apart from computing and lighting has efficiency improving anywhere near 300%? Gains have been marginal in air travel,, oil extraction, heating, steel, food and concrete production. Many of these are near the physical limits of possible efficiency.
        • danaris 7y ago
          I apologize; I was misremembering the graphs. It's actually not quite a 300% increase: https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/15/40-years-of-economic-policy-in-one-chart/ https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/15/40-years-of-economic... It's just over 250% increase in productivity since 1979, while real wages have risen a fraction of that.
          • imtringued 7y ago
            I can't eat productivity improvements and neither can my parents. I know that this sounds absurd but that is the reality we live in.
            • danaris 7y ago
              No, obviously not. But the point is that there is plenty of productivity to go around—the benefits of it just aren't available to most people. So, if we were to reduce the ability of the people at the very top to siphon away 99% of the productivity gains we've seen over the past 40 years, we would have more than enough food, clothing, and shelter for everyone, with enough margin that people could also work shorter hours without losing the ability to provide for everyone. The cost of that is that a very small percentage of the population can no longer have massively extravagant lifestyles.
              • manthedudeguy 7y ago
                Think about the progress we'd make bringing that many people out of poverty and into productive lifestyles, creating, spending, researching...
    • diN0bot 7y ago
      some might say that caring for others and being cared for (emotionally, not physically or financially) is the primary measure of quality of life. i miss my grandmother a great deal.
    • coldtea 7y ago
      >The point is, the young would have a higher quality of life if they did not have to support the old. The older two, if they didn't have to support the young, e.g. not have babies, or just send them to work on farms at 6 years old... Are the "young" supposed to get raised for free from 0 to 18 or even 0-25 or more in these days, and then coast along, with no responsibility of paying back to society for that?
      • ClumsyPilot 7y ago
        This is not a moral statement, it's a matter of physical difficulty: If you have 4 siblings, supporting your ageing parents is quite easy If you are a single child, supporting two ageing parents can be challenging If you alone had to support 4 ageing people (like someone who decided not to have kids), while also having to meet your work commitments, that would probably be very difficult.
  • chongli 7y ago
    They are consuming, but nowhere near enough to spread the wealth around. And the wealthy vote themselves laws that let them keep more of their unearned wealth. Look at what’s happened to California under prop 13 [1]. What was supposed to protect little old ladies from losing their homes due to rising property taxes has turned into a commercial real estate bonanza. People are making money hand over fist renting rooms at exorbitant prices to young people, and paying next to nothing in property taxes for the privilege. Meanwhile, a young person needs a large six to seven figure income just to afford a home in the Bay Area, and then their property taxes are insanely high, forcing them to subsidize their commercial real estate neighbours. It’s ridiculously unfair. [1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-14/california-proposition-13-business-taxes-split-roll https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-14/californ...
    • chrisweekly 7y ago
      To be fair, the Bay Area is an anomaly... but IMHO your points are valid.
      • ohazi 7y ago
        The same is true in Los Angeles and San Diego (and basically anywhere that has a meaningful concentration of people who are willing and able to work).
    • zepto 7y ago
      Speaking as someone who recently was finally able to buy in the Bay Area, repealing prop 13 would screw everyone in my position and do nothing to make real estate more available. I agree that it is ‘unfair’ but making it more ‘fair’ would just harm all the people who have actually made it work for them. Most people who own property in the Bay Area are not predatory landlords.
      • bsanr2 7y ago
        Corrections are part of any economy with a boom/bust cycle. Things are good for you, bad for us now. Repealing P13 would reverse that dynamic. Hopefully we regress to a livable and sustainable mean.
• MiroF 7y ago
  > But the thing is: This is not a wealth problem. Citation needed. Productivity has been rising decade after decade - the younger generation produces more than enough to sustain even a larger older generation. Much of that wealth production is re-routed to those at the top of the wealth pyramid. Moving even some of that back downwards would do a lot to resolve these problems.
  • tlholaday 7y ago
    Wealth governs the distribution of product, not the quantity of product. Reassign 100% of the wealth of the infirm to the able, and discover that the labor of the able does not change. “Dependency Ratio” is an iron law.
    • njarboe 7y ago
      But have a system that reassigns 100% of the production from the able to the infirm and you will quickly have little production.
  • nostrademons 7y ago
    This is a consequence of an increasing labor force. If productivity rises but there are more workers available than are necessary to produce the goods demanded, the price for labor will fall, and all of the gains of this productivity will be accrued by capital. If there are fewer workers available than are needed to man the machines, the wages paid to those workers will increase, and all the productivity gains will be captured by labor. The plight of the American worker tracks very well with how many of them there are (modulo globalization, which makes the plight of the worker track with how many there are globally). The golden years of the 1950s coincided with the depopulation and destruction of capital stock following WW2; this made America the only country that still had productive industry, which brought in a good deal of global money that could be shared with the G.I. and Silent generations. 70s stagflation and 80s malaise coincided with the entry of baby boomers into the workforce and household-forming years: with more laborers, wages fell, and with more consumers for a fixed number of goods, prices rose. The late 80s recovery and 90s boom coincided with Gen-X and the retirement of the G.I. Generation: with few incoming workers and lots of outgoing ones, wages rose. The post-2000 malaise coincides with the entry of Millenials into the workforce: the world population has grown from 4.5 billion in the early 80s to 7.7 billion today, and all those young people are entering the workforce now. It's likely that as the Boomers die off and the Homelander generation (post-2001 & tiny) enters the workforce, wages will rise naturally and capital prices will fall significantly.
• coldtea 7y ago
  >but in the end of the day, some are working, some are not and the young always have to do the work for the old. Well, we're forgetting the very young (0-18) who the older work for them, to house, nurture, feed, educate, and usually spoil them... So there's that. It's not like the young come from nowhere and suddenly have some responsibility to work for the old when nobody never did anything for them...
  • seppel 7y ago
    > Well, we're forgetting the very young (0-18) Of course somebody has to work for them as well. But does not really change anything, this is why I left it out. > It's not like the young come from nowhere and suddenly have some responsibility to work for the old when nobody never did anything for them... This is not about responsibility or morale, but just about the pure economics of life.
    • coldtea 7y ago
      >This is not about responsibility or morale, but just about the pure economics of life. Well, the "pure economics of life" for humans include that for human life to be sustainable, we should tend to the young (for a culturally adjusted 18 years or so), and that we should tend to the older (65+) too. Being framed as a "ponzi scheme" targeting the young at the point they enter the workplace, hides that fact that a lots of money and parental energy (and even more time unaccounted for as money) were given to said young before that point... It's not exactly a "ponzi scheme" if Ponzi and his money, time, and effort is the only reason you're alive and working now...
  • dredmorbius 7y ago
    That only exacerbates the fundamental problem: smaller working cohort, larger dependant cohort. Resource consumption per capita of youth is less than elderly (especially healthcare), and generally reduces with time (excepting education). Youth lasts only 15-20 years before gainful employment can begin. Old age stretches from 65 onwards. Early retirees may spend 50 years or more "retired".
• notacoward 7y ago
  > There are not much goods or services that you can store for more than a year. That argument might have seemed less ridiculous before the invention of money. It's this amazing thing: a medium of exchange that can be stored indefinitely and then used to purchase almost any good or service. Quite a few people even tout money as the solution to every problem of incentives or matching supply to demand, though I think that's taking the idea a bit too far.
  • ACow_Adonis 7y ago
    Actually, it's the idea that money solves the problem that is the deceptively ridiculous idea. It confuses the monetary economy for the real economy, which is, confusingly, one of the most widespread popular illusions and false popular beliefs in a modern economy.
    • 6510 7y ago
      Its a religion complete with large structures to worship. In stead of observing links in a chain we pretend it is only finance that makes things happen. The idea seems that if one has coupons there will always be a sucker to do the work for you, in exchange for the coupons. There will eventually be a final sucker holding onto the coupons: No fiat-currency ever survived.
  • candybar 7y ago
    Money, or for that matter nearly all wealth, are claims on future production - for these claims to be worth something, others have to work. Money and other financial assets can solve a problem for yourself because the rest of the society would then effectively owe you part of what it produces but the value of these claims is contingent on the production. In the real economy, what matters is production, investment and consumption - money is just a social construct designed to incentivize people to do consume/invest/produce the right amounts of the right things.
    • notacoward 7y ago
      That's all well and good, but it's also a complete diversion from the original "not much goods or services that you can store for more than a year" point. If I wanted to get into a more general discussion of the efficient market hypothesis, I wouldn't do it on HN.
• littlestymaar 7y ago
  > In every society where some people are working ("the young") and some people are not ("the old"), and everybody is consuming, the young people have to work for the old. You are missing one big thing: productivity increasing. Since I'm born in 1988, the GDP of my country (France) doubled (adjusted for inflation), assuming GDP is not totally meaninglessness, that means that we need much less «young» to sustain the entire society with the standard of living we had in 1988 (which was a pretty decent one by all standards).