8 ms·

> Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution. They haven't, imo. I am from India, and I have been hearing for the

> Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution. They haven't, imo. I am from India, and I have been hearing for the last two decades how we have avoided same mistakes as China and the latter is headed for a demographic collapse. China is only marching forward, and focusing more on automation to hedge its bets. While overpopulation in India has choked almost every city in India. I honestly don't know what will happen as more people migrate from rural to urban areas. India's population will peak in 2065, while China's already has. It's depressing to imagine that 250-300M more people are left to be added before we finally see a decline. Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated, the modern idea that “a large population is a blessing” feels equally misguided.

unglaublich 1y ago
The nice thing about being a growing, underpopulated country, is that you're very attractive to immigrants. China can just fill the demographic gap with migration policies.
GolfPopper 1y ago
>Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated <looks at the world today> Seems to me like that prediction is pretty on track.
- shubhamjain 1y ago
  Partially, yes! Population is #1 strain on resources. However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever. We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem.
  - catmanjan 1y ago
    >food is largely a solved problem It really isn't...
    - samarthr1 1y ago
      *logistics of food is not solved?
      - jl6 1y ago
        Neither production nor logistics is solved at all. We have bought ourselves time, largely by racking up environmental debt on our planetary credit card. Food is still massively dependent on fossil fuel consumption (machinery, transport, fertilizer). The good news is that the answer is to reduce the cost and carbon impact of energy production, and we’re making great progress here, but we cannot afford to take our foot off the gas, because although Ehrlich was wrong about the timing, he wasn’t wrong in his fundamental observation that the Earth has a finite carrying capacity.
        rat87 1y ago
        The idea that he was off on the timing is wrong. He was wrong and continued to be wrong even as he insisted his predictions would come any day now
    - adrianN 1y ago
      Production of calories is a solved problem. Distribution of food to people in need on the other hand…
      - matheusmoreira 1y ago
        There's more to nutrition than calories. Generally speaking: the more nutritive, the more expensive.
      - tsimionescu 1y ago
        It's not really a solved problem, we're depleting many extremely slow to recover resources in order to produce the amounts we are today.
  - darkmarmot 1y ago
    We're on the verge of ecological collapse, undergoing an insane mass extinction event with ocean acidification and methane release going off the charts. I can't even begin to conceive of your reality.
    - dgfl 1y ago
      The point is that this is not what people were worried about in the 70s. Even halving the population we’d still have all of these problems. While we obviously don’t suffer from famine, at least not globally. Those predictions have completely failed and were replaced by new issues.
      - tsimionescu 1y ago
        We're not yet suffering from famine, because new technologies allowed us to extract way more food than anticipated from the same surface area. However, these practices are not workable long term. You can't actually extract the amount of food we are currently extracting from our agricultural land for another 100-200 years. If we try, we'll ultimately leave the soil in such a bad state that will not grow much of anything - and mass starvation will happen long before then.
  - coldtea 1y ago
    >However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever. All of those things came to be - and we're on track for food shortages and famines too with the environmental crisis. The latter has the qualifier "without interventions". The interventions just happened (widespread acceptance of abortion, "1 child per family", increased neoliberalization attack leading to less people being able to afford to start a family, cultural changes around marrying, loneliness epidemic, etc).
    - rat87 1y ago
      We are not on track for famines due to lack of food production. It's been solved. There is more trade then ever people are richer then ever and therefore less likely to have kids. 1 child per family law was a gross violation of human rights that likely did not significantly change the birth rate compared to other countries
  - reeredfdfdf 1y ago
    "We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem." Solved problem for now. A large part of world's agriculture is dependent on stable rainfalls and temperatures. If climate change gets bad enough, a big collapse in world's food production capability might happen.
    - sdoering 1y ago
      "Solved problem for now." With "now" being the important word here. We should not forget the significant amount of soil erosion. Not only, but especially in already vulnerable regions. While I will probably not get to feel it, the next generation will. There are quite relevant studies already showing how the erosion of soil is already impacting agricultural yields. And that it is likely only getting worse from here on out.
- zdragnar 1y ago
  The predictions of Ehrlich in "the population bomb" and the club of rome were undone within a few years with the "green revolution" which saw massive increases in food production. Ehrlich in particular was suggesting mass starvation by the 1980's. Conceivably, it is possible that too many people will cause problems, but nothing like what they actually predicted has come to pass.
  - Unearned5161 1y ago
    I encourage you to revisit what you know about the club of rome and what was actually published in the Limits to Growth paper. We have been disturbingly on track for a lot of the variables that were of interest back then in the “business as usual” model. People tend to dismiss anything and everything around resource constraint thinking by doing the quick Ehrlich quip, and never really dig deeper into where people like Ehrlich ever got their ideas to begin with.
    - throwup238 1y ago
      What were those variables?
      - galangalalgol 1y ago
        I don't know the work in question, but the extremes of agriculture we have gone to aren't sustainable simply from a soil destruction standpoint. We may figure that problem out too, but just assuming our ingenuity will get us out of any predicament we create will eventually leave us with a catastrophe. Carefully planning demographics is going to be necessary for stable long term well-being. Doing that in a way that isn't dystopian is a good problem to point our ingenuity at.
      - Paianni 1y ago
        The scenarios were calculated based on hypothetical 'policies' of a society and the availability of natural resources. The scenario (from the 2004 book) we are tracking most closely is no.2, i.e 'business as usual' but with twice as much resources as was assumed in the 70s.
- throw0101c 1y ago
  > Seems to me like that prediction is pretty on track. For an interest take on this debate (?) I recommend the book The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann (who also wrote 1491 and 1493): > In forty years, Earth's population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups--Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug's cry. Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces--food, water, energy, climate change--grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author's insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth. * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220698/the-wizard-and-the-prophet-by-charles-c-mann/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220698/the-wizard-a... * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-the-prophet https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_C._Mann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_C._Mann
sometimes_all 1y ago
In my opinion, we might have avoided some of the mistakes, but that is still costing us. The best usually leave the country after getting the prime education India can provide, and support the retirement plans of other countries' aging populations more than their own - the Indian government actively seems to encourage this, looking at how our PM tries to negotiate for more visas during every first-world trip. Even with the demographic dividend, we do not have enough jobs, so the elderly are not supported neither fiscally, nor infrastructure-wise, since old people cannot walk on bad roads or take advantage of non-existent programs anyway. For the younger people, the insane competition makes both work and personal life hell. Whenever I see videos of China and their cities, and then look out of my window, it makes me both depressed and angry. I still don't understand how India can even be compared to China any more.
- HexPhantom 1y ago
  The talent drain is real... when the system doesn't create enough high-quality opportunities at home, people are going to leave, no matter how patriotic they are.
- zigzagger11 1y ago
  Yes and it creates a mad scramble for people to get out to any other place they can find. An immense incentive for corruption, crime and trafficking.
yanhangyhy 1y ago
I believe automation can solve this problem. Perhaps the government believes it too. But there are still many people who don’t believe it. I sincerely hope automation can solve this problem.
tossandthrow 1y ago
The main issue with a demographic decline is that fewer people can live of their wealth. This is in particular a problem for the older generation. But if you are not a big believer in retirement, then there are no issues with demographic shifts.
- coldtea 1y ago
  There are MANY issues with a demographic decline, "that fewer people can live of their wealth" is the least of it. Less productive hands (60 year olds are not as productive as 20 and 30 year olds, especially in any industrial and labor intensive field, but also in intellectual ones - who would have thought?). More older people in need of health support. Less dynamic society. Slowing economy. Beyond some (not very low) point it's also a self-reinforcing feedback point to relatively quick (in historical term) elimination of a whole people.
  - tossandthrow 1y ago
    From me what you mention seems to be derivative of the retirement argument where you clearly state that those not being able to work as much and have higher maintainance needs are the ones at disadvantage. Living of wealth does not only mean your own wealth. That is also state wealth as in getting services redistributed to you.
    - coldtea 1y ago
      >From me what you mention seems to be derivative of the retirement argument where you clearly state that those not being able to work as much and have higher maintainance needs are the ones at disadvantage. I state the opposite: the younger people, who are being able to work as much, are the ones at a disadvantage. That's regardless if the older people live off their wealth, have state services redistributed to them, or are just left to die. You could even confiscate their assets and kill those old people, it wont fix most problems associated with a shrinking demographics. The economy has fewer productive people, so the (fewer) younger ones have to work more, while at the same time the economy contracts around them because of fewer consumers. Infrastracture built at X level of population also can't be maintained (due to cost, political justification, and capacity) as the population drops far below X. The younger ones have to live in a staler society, which an increased average age (in some countries the average person is already over 45 - used to be the average person was merely over 20-25 in the same societies decades ago), more decisions taken by people on their way out and not to their benefit etc.
coldtea 1y ago
Overpopulation is not the problem of India. Mindset towards public areas and public behavior is - and the very much active in practice caste system, still excluding millions from full participation in all of society. And inversely, demographic collapse if fertility falls will be a problem, just because it will hit after 2065 doesn't mean it's something to ignore.
simsla 1y ago
European here. One of the problems is that many of our society's systems are predicated on a growing population. Social security and pensions, for example, are structured not unlike a pyramid scheme: for every old person we should have more than one working young person. People take more than they give. Fixing that will be painful, but possible. More worrying is how many countries' birth rates have fallen below the replacement rate. Some SE Asian countries are interesting case studies here (Japan, S Korea), but it's not looking good, and much of western Europe is heading in the same direction. Maybe the worry is overblown and populations will eventually stabilize at a lower point, but currently it seems like a declining population will just add to the stressors that are putting people off from having children, so it could just as well keep snowballing. All that's to say, I don't worry too much about over/underpopulation, but I do worry about a shrinking population.
- globular-toast 1y ago
  We are already seeing the effects of this. Rich people still get to take more than they give, poor people increasingly do not.
- thiago_fm 1y ago
  > Social security and pensions, for example, are structured not unlike a pyramid scheme: for every old person we should have more than one working young person. I'm from a western country and I agree with your statement and have a similar fear. My country is doomed because of the pension system. BUT this doesn't apply to China. Their system isn't structured this way, therefore this is mostly irrelevant for them. As long as China have a working population bigger than most countries, as well such amazing universities, they will perform better than all those countries. Even with the population decline, they'll still have more able workers than all western countries for at least the next 100 years. Let that sink in.
- consp 1y ago
  The problem with most current pension systems is the inability of the last boom to plan for that boom to become part of it. And people hating on immigration, not realising it is massively needed to offset the negative replenishment rate. We might also have a negative growth rate when the boom generation starts dying but that might not actually be a bad thing. Note: the boom lasted from about 1948 to 1974 so it will take a while.
Dumblydorr 1y ago
An inverted population pyramid is a huge problem. What does China do when it has far too few workers and far too many elderly? This is coming for them in the next few decades, a slow moving crisis in demographics.
- yanhangyhy 1y ago
  robots
- SapporoChris 1y ago
  Optimistically: Advancement in gerontology and improvements in problems that the elderly face. Pessimistically: A society that doesn't support it's elderly, well it's a self correcting problem.
mensetmanusman 1y ago
China’s economy is transitioning to one of taking care of the elderly. With a shrinking workforce and more robots, maybe that productivity gain is good enough to stall the inevitable. Their crazy bad policy decisions resulting in 20% youth unemployment is a risk.
alex_smart 1y ago
India’s problems have nothing to do with population and everything to do with complete collapse of all government institutions.
6510 1y ago
My thought was that we should develop a good DSL to design pensions. You obviously cant have a formula with more money coming out than going in. Pensions can gradually scale up and down depending on all factors. It isn't even hard to create. Things currently work like that children's game where each participant has to write the next word in the sentence. No amount of effort or coordination will produce a good novel.

unglaublich 1y ago

The nice thing about being a growing, underpopulated country, is that you're very attractive to immigrants. China can just fill the demographic gap with migration policies.

GolfPopper 1y ago

>Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated <looks at the world today> Seems to me like that prediction is pretty on track.

shubhamjain 1y ago
Partially, yes! Population is #1 strain on resources. However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever. We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem.
- catmanjan 1y ago
  >food is largely a solved problem It really isn't...
  - samarthr1 1y ago
    *logistics of food is not solved?
    - jl6 1y ago
      Neither production nor logistics is solved at all. We have bought ourselves time, largely by racking up environmental debt on our planetary credit card. Food is still massively dependent on fossil fuel consumption (machinery, transport, fertilizer). The good news is that the answer is to reduce the cost and carbon impact of energy production, and we’re making great progress here, but we cannot afford to take our foot off the gas, because although Ehrlich was wrong about the timing, he wasn’t wrong in his fundamental observation that the Earth has a finite carrying capacity.
      - rat87 1y ago
        The idea that he was off on the timing is wrong. He was wrong and continued to be wrong even as he insisted his predictions would come any day now
  - adrianN 1y ago
    Production of calories is a solved problem. Distribution of food to people in need on the other hand…
    - matheusmoreira 1y ago
      There's more to nutrition than calories. Generally speaking: the more nutritive, the more expensive.
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      It's not really a solved problem, we're depleting many extremely slow to recover resources in order to produce the amounts we are today.
- darkmarmot 1y ago
  We're on the verge of ecological collapse, undergoing an insane mass extinction event with ocean acidification and methane release going off the charts. I can't even begin to conceive of your reality.
  - dgfl 1y ago
    The point is that this is not what people were worried about in the 70s. Even halving the population we’d still have all of these problems. While we obviously don’t suffer from famine, at least not globally. Those predictions have completely failed and were replaced by new issues.
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      We're not yet suffering from famine, because new technologies allowed us to extract way more food than anticipated from the same surface area. However, these practices are not workable long term. You can't actually extract the amount of food we are currently extracting from our agricultural land for another 100-200 years. If we try, we'll ultimately leave the soil in such a bad state that will not grow much of anything - and mass starvation will happen long before then.
- coldtea 1y ago
  >However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever. All of those things came to be - and we're on track for food shortages and famines too with the environmental crisis. The latter has the qualifier "without interventions". The interventions just happened (widespread acceptance of abortion, "1 child per family", increased neoliberalization attack leading to less people being able to afford to start a family, cultural changes around marrying, loneliness epidemic, etc).
  - rat87 1y ago
    We are not on track for famines due to lack of food production. It's been solved. There is more trade then ever people are richer then ever and therefore less likely to have kids. 1 child per family law was a gross violation of human rights that likely did not significantly change the birth rate compared to other countries
- reeredfdfdf 1y ago
  "We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem." Solved problem for now. A large part of world's agriculture is dependent on stable rainfalls and temperatures. If climate change gets bad enough, a big collapse in world's food production capability might happen.
  - sdoering 1y ago
    "Solved problem for now." With "now" being the important word here. We should not forget the significant amount of soil erosion. Not only, but especially in already vulnerable regions. While I will probably not get to feel it, the next generation will. There are quite relevant studies already showing how the erosion of soil is already impacting agricultural yields. And that it is likely only getting worse from here on out.
zdragnar 1y ago
The predictions of Ehrlich in "the population bomb" and the club of rome were undone within a few years with the "green revolution" which saw massive increases in food production. Ehrlich in particular was suggesting mass starvation by the 1980's. Conceivably, it is possible that too many people will cause problems, but nothing like what they actually predicted has come to pass.
- Unearned5161 1y ago
  I encourage you to revisit what you know about the club of rome and what was actually published in the Limits to Growth paper. We have been disturbingly on track for a lot of the variables that were of interest back then in the “business as usual” model. People tend to dismiss anything and everything around resource constraint thinking by doing the quick Ehrlich quip, and never really dig deeper into where people like Ehrlich ever got their ideas to begin with.
  - throwup238 1y ago
    What were those variables?
    - galangalalgol 1y ago
      I don't know the work in question, but the extremes of agriculture we have gone to aren't sustainable simply from a soil destruction standpoint. We may figure that problem out too, but just assuming our ingenuity will get us out of any predicament we create will eventually leave us with a catastrophe. Carefully planning demographics is going to be necessary for stable long term well-being. Doing that in a way that isn't dystopian is a good problem to point our ingenuity at.
    - Paianni 1y ago
      The scenarios were calculated based on hypothetical 'policies' of a society and the availability of natural resources. The scenario (from the 2004 book) we are tracking most closely is no.2, i.e 'business as usual' but with twice as much resources as was assumed in the 70s.
throw0101c 1y ago
> Seems to me like that prediction is pretty on track. For an interest take on this debate (?) I recommend the book The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann (who also wrote 1491 and 1493): > In forty years, Earth's population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups--Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug's cry. Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces--food, water, energy, climate change--grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author's insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth. * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220698/the-wizard-and-the-prophet-by-charles-c-mann/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220698/the-wizard-a... * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-the-prophet https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_C._Mann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_C._Mann

sometimes_all 1y ago

In my opinion, we might have avoided some of the mistakes, but that is still costing us. The best usually leave the country after getting the prime education India can provide, and support the retirement plans of other countries' aging populations more than their own - the Indian government actively seems to encourage this, looking at how our PM tries to negotiate for more visas during every first-world trip. Even with the demographic dividend, we do not have enough jobs, so the elderly are not supported neither fiscally, nor infrastructure-wise, since old people cannot walk on bad roads or take advantage of non-existent programs anyway. For the younger people, the insane competition makes both work and personal life hell. Whenever I see videos of China and their cities, and then look out of my window, it makes me both depressed and angry. I still don't understand how India can even be compared to China any more.

HexPhantom 1y ago
The talent drain is real... when the system doesn't create enough high-quality opportunities at home, people are going to leave, no matter how patriotic they are.
zigzagger11 1y ago
Yes and it creates a mad scramble for people to get out to any other place they can find. An immense incentive for corruption, crime and trafficking.

yanhangyhy 1y ago

I believe automation can solve this problem. Perhaps the government believes it too. But there are still many people who don’t believe it. I sincerely hope automation can solve this problem.

tossandthrow 1y ago

The main issue with a demographic decline is that fewer people can live of their wealth. This is in particular a problem for the older generation. But if you are not a big believer in retirement, then there are no issues with demographic shifts.

coldtea 1y ago
There are MANY issues with a demographic decline, "that fewer people can live of their wealth" is the least of it. Less productive hands (60 year olds are not as productive as 20 and 30 year olds, especially in any industrial and labor intensive field, but also in intellectual ones - who would have thought?). More older people in need of health support. Less dynamic society. Slowing economy. Beyond some (not very low) point it's also a self-reinforcing feedback point to relatively quick (in historical term) elimination of a whole people.
- tossandthrow 1y ago
  From me what you mention seems to be derivative of the retirement argument where you clearly state that those not being able to work as much and have higher maintainance needs are the ones at disadvantage. Living of wealth does not only mean your own wealth. That is also state wealth as in getting services redistributed to you.
  - coldtea 1y ago
    >From me what you mention seems to be derivative of the retirement argument where you clearly state that those not being able to work as much and have higher maintainance needs are the ones at disadvantage. I state the opposite: the younger people, who are being able to work as much, are the ones at a disadvantage. That's regardless if the older people live off their wealth, have state services redistributed to them, or are just left to die. You could even confiscate their assets and kill those old people, it wont fix most problems associated with a shrinking demographics. The economy has fewer productive people, so the (fewer) younger ones have to work more, while at the same time the economy contracts around them because of fewer consumers. Infrastracture built at X level of population also can't be maintained (due to cost, political justification, and capacity) as the population drops far below X. The younger ones have to live in a staler society, which an increased average age (in some countries the average person is already over 45 - used to be the average person was merely over 20-25 in the same societies decades ago), more decisions taken by people on their way out and not to their benefit etc.

coldtea 1y ago

Overpopulation is not the problem of India. Mindset towards public areas and public behavior is - and the very much active in practice caste system, still excluding millions from full participation in all of society. And inversely, demographic collapse if fertility falls will be a problem, just because it will hit after 2065 doesn't mean it's something to ignore.

simsla 1y ago

European here. One of the problems is that many of our society's systems are predicated on a growing population. Social security and pensions, for example, are structured not unlike a pyramid scheme: for every old person we should have more than one working young person. People take more than they give. Fixing that will be painful, but possible. More worrying is how many countries' birth rates have fallen below the replacement rate. Some SE Asian countries are interesting case studies here (Japan, S Korea), but it's not looking good, and much of western Europe is heading in the same direction. Maybe the worry is overblown and populations will eventually stabilize at a lower point, but currently it seems like a declining population will just add to the stressors that are putting people off from having children, so it could just as well keep snowballing. All that's to say, I don't worry too much about over/underpopulation, but I do worry about a shrinking population.

globular-toast 1y ago
We are already seeing the effects of this. Rich people still get to take more than they give, poor people increasingly do not.
thiago_fm 1y ago
> Social security and pensions, for example, are structured not unlike a pyramid scheme: for every old person we should have more than one working young person. I'm from a western country and I agree with your statement and have a similar fear. My country is doomed because of the pension system. BUT this doesn't apply to China. Their system isn't structured this way, therefore this is mostly irrelevant for them. As long as China have a working population bigger than most countries, as well such amazing universities, they will perform better than all those countries. Even with the population decline, they'll still have more able workers than all western countries for at least the next 100 years. Let that sink in.
consp 1y ago
The problem with most current pension systems is the inability of the last boom to plan for that boom to become part of it. And people hating on immigration, not realising it is massively needed to offset the negative replenishment rate. We might also have a negative growth rate when the boom generation starts dying but that might not actually be a bad thing. Note: the boom lasted from about 1948 to 1974 so it will take a while.

Dumblydorr 1y ago

An inverted population pyramid is a huge problem. What does China do when it has far too few workers and far too many elderly? This is coming for them in the next few decades, a slow moving crisis in demographics.

yanhangyhy 1y ago
robots
SapporoChris 1y ago
Optimistically: Advancement in gerontology and improvements in problems that the elderly face. Pessimistically: A society that doesn't support it's elderly, well it's a self correcting problem.

mensetmanusman 1y ago

China’s economy is transitioning to one of taking care of the elderly. With a shrinking workforce and more robots, maybe that productivity gain is good enough to stall the inevitable. Their crazy bad policy decisions resulting in 20% youth unemployment is a risk.

alex_smart 1y ago

India’s problems have nothing to do with population and everything to do with complete collapse of all government institutions.

6510 1y ago

My thought was that we should develop a good DSL to design pensions. You obviously cant have a formula with more money coming out than going in. Pensions can gradually scale up and down depending on all factors. It isn't even hard to create. Things currently work like that children's game where each participant has to write the next word in the sentence. No amount of effort or coordination will produce a good novel.