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Study: Aging population could be a drag on economic growth
- voisin 3y agoI’ve seen the argument for 2-3% inflation targets that this is the population growth rate, and so if economic growth doesn’t match, people would be relatively poorer. But then when we talk about the population aging, stagnating, or shrinking, we still seem obsessed with maintaining economic growth. The desperate need for continuous growth will be the downfall of our species.
- midasuni 3y agoInflation is nothing to do with growth, and if gdp per capita is increasing that’s growth even if population is decreasing
- 11235813213455 3y agocontinuous growth is simply impossible in a bounded place
- voisin 3y agoAnd yet we’ve based our entire world economy on it and destroyed the environment and our psychological stability in attempting to subvert this immutable law.
- dukeyukey 3y agoNo growth functionally means your material life won't improve. Individual lots might improve, but only at the expense of others.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y ago> Individual lots might improve, but only at the expense of others. This is already true, we’re seeing the worst wealth inequality since the gilded age. The benefits of growth are increasingly being captured by the wealthy.
- logicchains 3y agoWealth equality is completely orthogonal to increasing standards of living. If you get 2x wealthier and everyone else gets 10x wealthier, wealth inequality has increased but your standard of living is still better than before, unless the sole thing you value in life is envy.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y agoThis is not true. To follow your example, if everyone around me is 10x wealthier, then the market adjusts and everything around me rises in price accordingly. This is the essence of gentrification. To your point, if the minimum wage in a lot of areas is $15, then why aren’t there any decent houses selling for $30k anymore like they were back in the 50’s? $15/hr is quite wealthy by those standards but it is becoming pretty poor nowadays. The problem with wealth is that we tend to measure it by the concrete dollar amount in our bank account and not the purchasing power it represents.
- arrosenberg 3y agoWrong. The person who got 2x wealthier will effectively be priced out of any market with limited supply. Maybe the odd person values TVs more highly than land and property, but for the rest of us, it would definitely feel poorer.
- harimau777 3y agoThat's only true in situations where relative wealth doesn't determine standard of living. For example, if someone is able to outbid me and buy up more than their fair share of the finite housing supply leaving me without a home, if a wealthy people can afford better schooling and therefore can outcompete me for desirable jobs, or if a wealthy person gets a greater say in government due to being able to donate to politicians.
- dukeyukey 3y agoIn that case we need plentiful supplies of all those things - build _lots_ of houses everywhere, easily accessible education, and a political system that dilutes the power of donations.
- tsimionescu 3y agoGiven that most of the world's wealth is in the hands of less than a thousand people or thereabouts, and that these are the same people who keep benefitting most from economic growth, there is plenty of room to improve everyone's lot in life while not even materially hurting the richest of the rich (most of whom could still live a life of unimaginable luxury with only a thousandth or a few hundredths of their current wealth).
- dukeyukey 3y agoAbsolutely, but a world without growth is also a world where there are zero possible challengers to those thousand people or so. I don't see this leading to economic egalitarianism.
- ta1243 3y agonot really. If you had a society where people worked 80 hour weeks to produce X amount of economic activity, and you moved that to a society working 20 hour weeks with the same productivity, that's an improvement in everyones individual lot.
- logicchains 3y ago> If you had a society where people worked 80 hour weeks to produce X amount of economic activity, and you moved that to a society working 20 hour weeks with the same productivity, that's an improvement in everyones individual lot. And that would show up as an improvement in GDP growth, because unless you banned private businesses, there's always going to be some people (business owners, independent contractors) working more than 20 hours, so they'd produce more than before, which would show up in GDP.
- schemescape 3y agoOnly if you ignore technology/productivity improvements.
- logicchains 3y agoNo GDP growth means no technology/productivity improvements, because such things are counted in GDP growth.
- schemescape 3y agoI think I was mistaken, but I thought they were talking about population growth.
- dukeyukey 3y agoA world without growth is necessarily one without technological improvements.
- schemescape 3y agoI thought you meant population growth.
- Tarq0n 3y agoInflation + growth is what makes a pensions system possible in the first place. Devaluing debt and growing capital allows for a period of no productivity at old age, otherwise it would be unaffordable.
- tcfhgj 3y agoIt = wealth distributed extremely unevenly and lots of unnecessary luxuries
- harimau777 3y agoHow do you define a necessary versus unnecessary luxury? Aren't all luxuries by definition unnecessary?
- tcfhgj 3y agoYes
- harimau777 3y agoSo what are you advocating? That everyone live in a non-descript gray apartment block, eat unflavored nutrient paste, wear identical undyed clothing, etc.?
- tcfhgj 3y agoPrioritizing what really matters
- Apes 3y agoThat's not true - Inflation + growth is what makes a pension fund designed for generating votes possible. Any system that intentionally pays out significantly more than people pay in is going to have sustainability problems. It's so bad with the California pension systems that they're facing immenant collapse, despite being in an economy with the highest growth rate in human history.
- barbariangrunge 3y agoIf Covid was as deadly as everyone thought, we'd have lost about 1% of humans and still seen population numbers grow that year. That's nuts. Also, population growth rates vary a lot by country. Many countries have a negative growth rate, whether due to birth rates or immigration rates. I think Canada's birth rate is almost as low as Japan's, but Canada allows a lot of immigration and Japan allows less.
- tcfhgj 3y agoDead people cost less than ill people
- onos 3y agoI’m pro growth and I don’t see any reason why that has to be done badly. Eg I also care about the environment being healthy, but think we can switch to solar and be smarter about other sorts of pollution etc and achieve both ends.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y agoI think Gresham’s Law applies here. The main problem is that caring about the environment becomes a competitive disadvantage to your business when your competitor doesn’t care and is willing to do anything to get ahead. Sometimes it’s fine if you’re a luxury brand trying incorporate sustainability into your brand, but that matters less in a B2B context. The “bad” money inevitably beats the “good” money.
- sologoub 3y agoWhile it starts out as an ethical choice, it is ultimately up to the society to define the minimum acceptable standard and prevent the “bad” money from “winning”. Unfortunately, that societal will requires greater societal and ethical cohesion.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y agoThe problem is that “bad” money eventually accumulates to undermine the political system. We see this now with dark money in US politics. “Bad” money works to circumvent society altogether and is not interesting in participating in a societally-driven dialogue about what’s ethical and what’s not. If it did, there would be no dark money or influencing-peddling in the system.
- sologoub 3y agoThat position assumes that society is relatively dumb and can be dupped into anything given enough money is spent. While in short term some of this might work, long term people tend to “wake up”, sometimes too late. This is where various checks and balances are vital and society needs to constantly remind its young people that ends do not justify the means. Something we are definitely losing these days.
- ianai 3y agoThis “degrowth” stuff probably makes sense if we were all at the carrying capacity of an interstellar generational ship. But simply housing, clothing, and feeding the disadvantaged humans would provide rocket growth for decades to centuries. India just passed China as most populous and only something like 60 million of their population participates in their elections. The rest are living very resource starved. That’s a huge potential for growth-simply choose sustainable ways to grow. And, great thing, they’re already largely vegetarian. And that’s just one of many populations.
- rmbyrro 3y agoThis article could be read in the future like we read this one today [1] > "it is an analogy for supposedly insuperable extrapolated problems being rendered moot by the introduction of new technologies" [1] Great horse manure crisis of 1894 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1894 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of...
- throwaway6734 3y agoI have no idea what the plan is for Italy, Portugal, Spain, and South Korea. They're all aging incredibly rapidly and the first three have generous pension systems that are going to be impossible to reduce
- ipaddr 3y agoGermany citizens end up paying same as Greece
- silverquiet 3y agoI assume it's the same plan to deal with climate change or any of the other intractable problems facing humanity; hope.
- forinti 3y agoPortugal has relaxed its citizenship requirements and there are tons of Brazilians who could ramp up its workforce. The thing is that it's not that cheap a country anymore and salaries are still quite low compared to the larger EU economies. Housing is a lot cheaper in Italy (another country with a large diaspora in the Americas).
- tenpies 3y agoThe plan is financial repression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_repression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_repression
- midasuni 3y agoSounds good. What’s the down side?
- midasuni 3y agoThe first three have issues that they don’t have independent currencies
- 11235813213455 3y agoGreat news, in terms of environment, we should seek for economic degrowth, particularly on tourism, that is devastating
- ta1243 3y agoGrowth doesn't have to be bad for the environment, indeed it can be good. For example producing $1000 worth of economic activity by burning oil to heat a building is far worse than producing $2000 worth of economic activity by using a solar powered heat pump. What we don't do is record the negative externalities of production and that means gdp is a bit of a poor measure.
- tcfhgj 3y agoLess bad = good?
- ta1243 3y agoWell the best thing you can personally do for the environment is probably to kill yourself, that would reduce the environmental damage you cause in future to near-zero More grandiose plans would be somehow triggering a nuclear war - making mankind extinct would be great for the environment in the long run. Not many people can do that, but I guess if you work hard you might get into such a position. Assuming you don't want to do that, reducing human impact on the environment is of course good.
- tcfhgj 3y agoWhat if it isn't reducing the human impact? Jevons paradox
- 11235813213455 3y agoor make a food forest, permaculture, that's one of the rare non-destructive activities or minimize your impact, for example my footprint is about 1/20th of average, if more people lived like that, global warming wouldn't be an issue at all there are many possibilities between 0 (no human) and 1 (many homo consumericus)
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- ta1243 3y agoIf the not-working : working ratio increases, that leads to work being more valuable. A billionaire can have a pile of gold to make Smaug envious, but if you have 10 billionaires and just 1 person willing to wipe their ass, then they're going to be outbidding each other. That itself drives wage inflation, and it's great, it moves money to those doing useful work. What you're saying with inflation is basically "the value of an hour of work 20 years ago is less than the value of an hour of work now". That could be because of improved productivity, or could be because of a reduction in supply. It's the only thing that's going to save western society from the scourge of the concentration of wealth in the handful of a few.
- FollowingTheDao 3y agoYes, exactly, see my other comment. "economic growth" is a code word for profit that makes it all sound less greedy. They do not want labor to have power. And all this can be linked in with AI. They love AI because it takes power away from a lot of labor, including code jockeys.
- ta1243 3y agoYou should see what computers did to take the power away from a lot of labour. Or before that you'd never guess what the tractor did. Remember when the Ox started ploughing a field rather than people? Increasing productivity is a great thing. In the US post war environment people shared that increased productivity fairly evenly. It was only once the Regan years arrived that workers in general stopped participating in the boom.
- FollowingTheDao 3y ago> You should see what computers did to take the power away from a lot of labour. Or before that you'd never guess what the tractor did. Remember when the Ox started ploughing a field rather than people? Why do you think I do not agree that those were also bad. Maybe not as bad, but they all led us here. > Increasing productivity is a great thing. In the US post war environment people shared that increased productivity fairly evenly. It was only once the Regan years arrived that workers in general stopped participating in the boom. What make you think that where we are now is not because we "increased productivity? Have you ever question the need for increased productivity? Who is telling you you need to be more productive? (Let me help you, the people who profit off your labor are telling you to be more productive.)
- FollowingTheDao 3y agoThe only reason there is a need for "economic growth" is for profit. Prove me wrong, please! The statement that an "aging population could be a drag on economic growth" is really saying that capitalism cannot profit off of the elderly and that is a bad thing for stock holders.
- amelius 3y agoThe aging population keeps a hold on housing which they don't need. Edit: as in, their houses are outgrowing them.
- newswasboring 3y ago... elderly need houses too. I don't think you expressed yourself clearly.
- dukeyukey 3y agoWhat they probably meant is that elderly people often stay in their large, 5-bedroom family houses once their children have grown up and left. This takes family-sized housing off the market, making it harder for young families to buy big-enough houses.
- logicchains 3y ago> The only reason there is a need for "economic growth" is for profit. Prove me wrong, please! How about you try visiting somewhere like North Korea, or some country in Sub-Saharan Africa, the countries which have had the least economic growth, and try to say with a straight face that economic growth doesn't make a difference. >The statement that an "aging population could be a drag on economic growth" is really saying that capitalism cannot profit off of the elderly and that is a bad thing for stock holders. To put it in simple terms, compare two situations: in one you're working to support just yourself and your father, in the second you're working to support both your parents and two grandparents. Obviously in the second one your standard of living is going to be worse, and as a society that's what it likes when the ratio of working to non-working people decreases.
- bannedbybros 3y ago[dead]
- DAMP 3y ago[dead]
- stavros 3y agoHear me out: Can we not simply kill all citizens over a certain age (say 50), so the 1% can hoard more money?
- logicchains 3y agoIt's not the one percent that are hurt by an aging population, it's the working people. Because each working person has a greater number of non-working (retired) people to support from what they produce, so they get to keep less themselves.
- stavros 3y agoRicher people (are supposed to) disproportionately pay more taxes than the working people, so they (are supposed to) support more of the aging population than the working people.
- midasuni 3y agoRicher people don’t pay more taxes. If you have $200b by the time you are 50 years old you have somehow acquired $4b a year post tax. To acquire $400,000 a year - one ten thousandth of that - you would have to pay about 300k a year in tax, or about $15m, before you even spent a penny. Have Musk and Bezos paid $150b in tax over their lifetime?
- stavros 3y agoWell, hence the "(supposed to)" bits.
- Balgair 3y agoWhy kill them? Just turn them into food. Call it ... I dunno... Soylent Green. Logan? Why are you running Logan?
- ianai 3y agoPopulations respond to resource availability. If you could interview individual salmon where their population is diminishing they may or may not actually point at the problem, say a newly constructed dam. But the actual problem is access to resources. The inverse of course happened post-WWII. The soldiers were coming home and needed places to live and raise children. WWII was the thing that actually pulled the US out of the long term effects of the Great Depression. Mind, the Great Depression is identified with starting in 1929. It’s access to resources, stupid. If you want your populations to grow then incentivize your populations growth. Things that push back look like: bailing out banks and forcing individuals out of their homes in the Great Recession, leaving the minimum wage so low that labor markets fail, failing to police labor employee/employer relationships (see the concept of “wagery”), etc. If you tell your workers to simply “make better choices” you’re not supporting them. You’re telling them to become their own labor dispute lawyers. But of course no average individual worker is going to have the money and time to actually push back legally even if they are wronged. Hence, wagery-your boss becomes something more like a personal tyrant and less of bargaining partner. Things like NIMBYISM and BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone) contribute to this. They were also largely not present during the post-WWII period. I mean modern day Las Vegas owes its existence to infrastructure and technological progress. The Hoover dam took a lot of planning and building and the US has a lot of growth over the last century thanks to it. Similar to the highway and road system. NIMBYISM and BANANA point to the stagnation problem in government and a general lack of the US citizen of being informed and performing basic civic duties like voting. Not going to flesh out those points for lack of time. In short, my hot take would be: “if you want your populations to grow then stop worrying about what people are or aren’t doing with their genitals and start asking what you can do to make people feel secure enough to think having a kid or at least bumping uglies is a good idea.” Corporations don’t have genitals.