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> That number of children surviving to adulthood* Agreed > Only if the elderly continue to consume pensions. Well no, unless you literally starve them to dea

> That number of children surviving to adulthood* Agreed > Only if the elderly continue to consume pensions. Well no, unless you literally starve them to death. State pensions or money in general is just a redistribution mechanism which doesn't change average available resources. What really matters on a higher level is the fact that a big part of population (elderly and youth) consumes but doesn't produce. Whatever they consume is either directly produced by the working part of the population or comes from the foreign exchange of the same said produce. So if the state pensions system collapses it just means that instead of feeding your parents through taxes you now do it directly, which on average is almost the same (difference coming from elderly who don't have kids to feed them). Which still means you have less resources to spend on your kids.

ben_w 2y ago
> Well no, unless you literally starve them to death. State pensions or money in general is just a redistribution mechanism which doesn't change average available resources. The way this is currently playing out in the UK, is that pension ages are increasing. At the extreme case, there's no more state pension: if you don't have a private pension, you're working until just before you die. I was thinking more of heating (and, increasingly, cooling) rather than starvation: Food specifically isn't the main concern here, unlike in the 1800s, because of how few farmers we need to feed the entire population. (And this whole thing may be inverted at short notice in a whole bunch of different ways; UBI is basically a pension age of zero, but I'm only expecting that when AI gets good enough, and IMO that's "at least five years after self driving cars, whenever that is".