> Civilization isn't a Ponzi scheme But it is, by the technical definition. New entrants are continually needed (able bodied ~20-60 year olds) to take care of

> Civilization isn't a Ponzi scheme But it is, by the technical definition. New entrants are continually needed (able bodied ~20-60 year olds) to take care of the earlier entrants (~70+). That's the concrete reality of any society where people over ~70 don't just walk out into the wild to starve. > where we borrow from the future to pay for today might be This statement is still immersed in the abstractions of the financial paradigm. There is no "borrowing from the future". Every loan has a counterparty in the now. This is what we need to focus on, as one thing really putting the squeeze on people having kids is the growing debt bubble that vacuums real wealth away from the edges and funnels ever-more of it towards the zero-sum [0] banking sector. If housing was unaffordable merely because Scrooge McDuck's vaults kept getting bigger, this might at least be understandable. But rich individuals don't really squander resources at scale (misallocating, sure. But not wholly wasting them). Rather the real waste is all of the fake jobs that have been created in the FIRE sector, essentially paying people to create ever-growing heaps of paperwork. [0] "inelastic-sum", more accurately. Banking/investment certainly does support production by allocating capital more optimally. But there is a limit to how well this can be performed, meaning diminishing returns on the resources spent. And we're well past that point.