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It will be "fixed" by just killing off old people in large numbers through some combination of high pressure euthanasia campaigns and denial of healthcare subsi

It will be "fixed" by just killing off old people in large numbers through some combination of high pressure euthanasia campaigns and denial of healthcare subsidies. Just no one wants to be honest about it. Our political culture is not a high integrity, high honesty culture but one that relies on a lot of indirect communication and symbolism. In this the west has become a lot more like east Asian stereotype. So in my view this crisis will be solved, just not in a way that people want to acknowledge. A lot of the nonserious "attempts" to address the issues are just performances to make it look like the facially palatable policies have been tried before they inevitably fail.

ANewFormation 2y ago
It's not the most intuitive thing, but how long we live has no long term impact on population levels. Think about a fertility rate of one - this means each successive generation will be half the size of the one prior. This makes simplified population sims very simple because it's simply powers of 2. If you start with a population of 1 then the generation before was 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. So when you remove the biggest group, the oldest, it will always be about 50% of the total population regardless of how many other generations happen to be alive. And a 'generation' is proportional not to our life expectancy, but to our practical fertility window - so about 20 years. You would substantially mitigate many of the economic problems but your Logan's Run would also need to be a dictatorship (and a rather less than benevolent one) because the skewed age ratios mean with a collapsing fertility rate the elderly will exclusively control any democracy, even if 100% of people vote. And all of this just to make it more comfortable to sleep walk into extinction. I'm fully on board with you about saying the unspoken parts out loud, but I don't see this idea as a solution.
- lazide 2y ago
  Or just cut all the socialized medical programs old folks disproportionally rely on while telling everyone in the group that you aren’t. Hmm, which is what the current plan for the next US president seems to be….
- ashoeafoot 2y ago
  It has. If you are born into work camp slave status, doomed to starve to keep the gerontocropolis warm, your motivation to put kids into that labour camp will be below zero.
seabass-labrax 2y ago
This is very topical in the UK at the moment, as Parliament has just voted in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill at its second reading in the Commons. What that means is that it will probably soon be possible for individuals who are slowly dying to request their own euthanasia. There has been a lot of debate in the press and online (and no doubt also in private across the whole country). The arguments range from the risks of potential cooercion to the morality of a 'coup de grâce'. Yet your point is also pertinent, as 'quality of life' often has as much to do with the quality of care as it does with the affliction itself, and quality of care is largely down to how much society pays for it.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  There's also many old people that are so demented they're just sitting in a chair drooling, totally unaware of their surroundings. They receive as much care as they can get but it's not really improving their quality of life. They basically exist only as a reminder for the people that knew them. I do think that euthanasia would make sense in these cases. The real person, their mind, has died a long time ago, it's just their body that lives on. Of course the decision should be up to these people (while they're still capacitated) and their family. It shouldn't be imposed on them. But personally I wouldn't want to "live" like that.
  - seabass-labrax 2y ago
    > But personally I wouldn't want to "live" like that. In such a situation I'd be inclined to agree. I think my question is rather how many of the candidates for humane euthanasia would be in that condition if preventative healthcare was better. Clearly there will be some people whose conditions could not be prevented by any medical intervention, but cuts to healthcare funding would probably result in more people getting terminal illnesses in total. Witnessing the suffering of patients is a big part of reminding people why healthcare is important (which of course is why medical charities advertise in this way). Thus, personally, my chief concern is that compassionate euthanasia could end up hiding fixable problems in our healthcare system.

ANewFormation 2y ago

It's not the most intuitive thing, but how long we live has no long term impact on population levels. Think about a fertility rate of one - this means each successive generation will be half the size of the one prior. This makes simplified population sims very simple because it's simply powers of 2. If you start with a population of 1 then the generation before was 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. So when you remove the biggest group, the oldest, it will always be about 50% of the total population regardless of how many other generations happen to be alive. And a 'generation' is proportional not to our life expectancy, but to our practical fertility window - so about 20 years. You would substantially mitigate many of the economic problems but your Logan's Run would also need to be a dictatorship (and a rather less than benevolent one) because the skewed age ratios mean with a collapsing fertility rate the elderly will exclusively control any democracy, even if 100% of people vote. And all of this just to make it more comfortable to sleep walk into extinction. I'm fully on board with you about saying the unspoken parts out loud, but I don't see this idea as a solution.

lazide 2y ago
Or just cut all the socialized medical programs old folks disproportionally rely on while telling everyone in the group that you aren’t. Hmm, which is what the current plan for the next US president seems to be….
ashoeafoot 2y ago
It has. If you are born into work camp slave status, doomed to starve to keep the gerontocropolis warm, your motivation to put kids into that labour camp will be below zero.

seabass-labrax 2y ago

This is very topical in the UK at the moment, as Parliament has just voted in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill at its second reading in the Commons. What that means is that it will probably soon be possible for individuals who are slowly dying to request their own euthanasia. There has been a lot of debate in the press and online (and no doubt also in private across the whole country). The arguments range from the risks of potential cooercion to the morality of a 'coup de grâce'. Yet your point is also pertinent, as 'quality of life' often has as much to do with the quality of care as it does with the affliction itself, and quality of care is largely down to how much society pays for it.

wkat4242 2y ago
There's also many old people that are so demented they're just sitting in a chair drooling, totally unaware of their surroundings. They receive as much care as they can get but it's not really improving their quality of life. They basically exist only as a reminder for the people that knew them. I do think that euthanasia would make sense in these cases. The real person, their mind, has died a long time ago, it's just their body that lives on. Of course the decision should be up to these people (while they're still capacitated) and their family. It shouldn't be imposed on them. But personally I wouldn't want to "live" like that.
- seabass-labrax 2y ago
  > But personally I wouldn't want to "live" like that. In such a situation I'd be inclined to agree. I think my question is rather how many of the candidates for humane euthanasia would be in that condition if preventative healthcare was better. Clearly there will be some people whose conditions could not be prevented by any medical intervention, but cuts to healthcare funding would probably result in more people getting terminal illnesses in total. Witnessing the suffering of patients is a big part of reminding people why healthcare is important (which of course is why medical charities advertise in this way). Thus, personally, my chief concern is that compassionate euthanasia could end up hiding fixable problems in our healthcare system.