"They consume medical care" sounds a lot like the broken window fallacy: If you smash a bunch of windows, you're increasing GDP and creating jobs when they get

"They consume medical care" sounds a lot like the broken window fallacy: If you smash a bunch of windows, you're increasing GDP and creating jobs when they get repaired. To a ruthless cold-blooded optimizer, deleting the elderly should be good for the economy because you save on their maintenance costs and their resources get redistributed to more active investors. This might decrease GDP, but that only reflects on GDP being a problematic metric. I guess it's true that smashing windows or providing medical care to the elderly would increase the "size of the economy", because it adds entries to the implicit "market's bid/ask order book". And you could measure the size of the economy by the size of that data structure.