6 ms·
Why do we obsess over growing everything all the time?
by queuebert 8mo ago
Why do we obsess over growing everything all the time?
- seanmcdirmid 8mo agoWe need young people to pay for old people retirement (economically speaking, someone has to be working when someone else is just eating).
- mmastrac 8mo agoI really hope that automation and robotics will _finally_ allow us to invert the pyramid.
- nradov 8mo agoDespite the hype cycle around humanoid robots it's unlikely that they'll advance enough to be capable of replacing many human workers in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities within our lifetimes. Expect to see lots of really sad stories about elder abuse and neglect because as a society we simply won't have the resources to adequately care for them all.
- seanmcdirmid 8mo agoThey don’t have to. If say robotaxis become widespread, you’ve freed up some portion of the labor market to do something else. They don’t have to automate all jobs, just some.
- arcologies1985 8mo agoThe evidence has shown that this thinking is flawed - disruption of jobs in an industry causes a slow, wrenching, scarring adjustment process that increases the load on welfare programs and makes quality of life broadly worse: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/g-s1-47352/why-economists-got-free-trade-with-china-so-wrong https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/g-s1-47352/why-economists-got...
- nemomarx 8mo agosure but after 3-5 generations it works out, like with farming and weaving. just gotta wait longer!
- arcologies1985 8mo agoIf only this was a game of Victoria 3
- seanmcdirmid 8mo agoso ease the robotaxis in now then rather than waiting 30 years.
- nemomarx 8mo agoI kinda expect nursing and people paid to give attention to the elderly to be the last job standing. very hard to replace or automate
- nradov 8mo agoPaid by whom? That's the problem. The people with money won't be willing to pay more taxes to fund workers to care for a growing indigent elderly population. It's already causing shortages today and will only get worse.
- seanmcdirmid 8mo agoit isn't just about money, it is about production. Even if the money is evenly spread, if there isn't enough production (because not enough people providing goods and services) you'll just have inflation. But ya, if all the money is concentrated and billionaires are indulging in most of the production while the elderly starve, most of us are still screwed.
- MyHonestOpinon 8mo agoIncreasing health span would be a big step forward. More specifically old age dementia.
- CodingJeebus 8mo agoIt won't. The economic gains of automation will continue to be captured by the capital-owning class. It's simply too valuable to just give over to the masses.
- compounding_it 8mo agoDon't know about inverting the pyramid but we may get more pyramid schemes. Like Google and Oracle doing 100 year bonds for AI.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- dmm 8mo agoMuch more likely is that conditions for elder care will continuously degrade until MAID becomes most people's choice.
- MyHonestOpinon 8mo agoFor those who don't already know this, like me. (MAID) Medical Assistance in Dying
- MyHonestOpinon 8mo agoI think the solution is in adjusting our ways of life. Simpler living, smaller houses and more density, being able to walk and bike, shared common areas, increase health span, being able to live independently for longer, simpler hobbies, not needing so much stuff, etc.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 8mo agoWhy though? All those old people paid in all their lives so surely that is sitting in a vault somewhere waiting for them.
- actionfromafar 8mo agoWe need young people to pay for the billionaire subsidies (economically speaking, someone has to accumulate all that profit and it's not going be us)
- sandworm101 8mo agoIf they were only eating there would be no problem. But they want fancy vacations. They want houses. They need drugs. They need MRI machines. And they need these things for decades for minimal cost irrespective of ability to pay. And, when they do die, they expect to pass estates tax-free to thier children. Supporting the retired population is one thing, but the day may soon come when we revisit what it means to be retired.
- supertrope 8mo agoIf you want to punch up try aiming higher than the upper-middle class. Other countries have MRIs and drugs as part of universal healthcare.
- bluGill 8mo agoThose other countries are still paying for those things somehow. (or they really have the alleged death panels critics talk about) You can shove the cost in different places, but somehow they still have to be paid.
- sandworm101 8mo agoYa but those countries also do not enjoy private health insurance and for-profit care providers. The ability to purchase shares in both the hospital that is treating you and the company that authorizes your treatment is a uniquely american priviledge.
- triceratops 8mo ago> those countries also do not enjoy private health insurance and for-profit care providers I don't think anyone enjoys them per se.
- supertrope 8mo agoYou jest but to play devil's advocate every system has its supporters. One of the reasons we didn't get a public health plan option is because the Senator for Connecticut was representing his constituents such as Cigna and Aetna. If you provide an easier exit for the former death panel workers in the form of working at the public option administrator, re-training, etc. you might be able to assuage unemployment based opposition to reform. People don't gloat at privatization but aforementioned wealthier retirees rely on corporations squeezing ever more money out of customers, employees, and vendors.
- triceratops 8mo agoWhy? I understand that's how the system works now but does it have to? Productivity has never been higher.
- torlok 8mo agoIf the benefits of increased productivity went to the people instead of the 1%, you wouldn't need a growing population.
- mothballed 8mo agoThe Social Security system relies on creating a debt of unborn children to older people based on those older people having already paid now dead people, so keeping it solvent requires more meat for the tax machine. A pyramid inversion means the old keep voting for OPM from the young, using their numbers to crush them, meanwhile there are fewer and fewer young to actually pay it. Eventually creating instability, couple this with entitlement "I paid that dead guy, so that kid owes me!" (of course, abstracted, as "the government owes me" to hide the kinetics) and you are in a bad spot. ---------- edit: reply to below since I am throttled ----- yes under any system youth are needed. But SS creates a tragedy of the commons. Because retired get benefit obligation of children whether they have/adopt/foster the children or not. In most other systems, the link is more direct, so there is greater incentive to have or adopt child and provide investment in the child, as their success is directly linked to yours. In SS system you can reneg on most of the responsibility of creating the engines of the next generation but still simply scalp that investment off someone else, and indeed still get roughly the same share without making the investment. Obviously there is great moral hazard to simply scalp the benefit of children without having to make the investment yourself, and SS is all to happy to provide that.
- anonymars 8mo agoMentioning Social Security and government implies there is some other form of retirement that doesn't inherently depend on younger people still working, doesn't it? I mean, who else going to grow the food and sweep the streets?
- pjc50 8mo agoThe traditional approach to this is: a) make younger female family members do all the work b) make them invisible, politically and socially, so everything looks fine
- bombcar 8mo agoEven if you don't go to that extreme, you look back only a few generations and even today at immigrants, and you see that the old people never stop working until they're literally bed-ridden. They might not have GDP-increasing jobs that show up on balance sheets, but grandma watches the kids (effectively working as daycare, off-books), grandpa fixes things, and so on. By demanding everything be reduced to the nuclear family (or smaller) we've created an unnatural situation on never seen before on a global scale.
- tonmoy 8mo agoThe main issue with population decline is the inability to depend on the growing younger population to fund the retirement of elderly people
- vjvjvjvjghv 8mo agoThat's the way the system is set up but basically it's not sustainable. You can have more young people now to fix the problem of funding older people. But what happens when these young people get old? Now you need even more young people.
- Sol- 8mo agoBecause progress and growth makes us wealthier and happier? It's pretty simple. People say "Oh, but GDP isn't everything" - but it's correlated with almost everything good, so might as well be.
- supertrope 8mo agoThis. The prospect of a brighter future at least means capital and labor are fighting for slices of a bigger pie. If the pie per capita stays constant or shrinks there will be a lot more anti-social behavior to response to the zero-sum environment.
- bombcar 8mo agoGDP is correlated only while good things are increasing - forcing every married family to divorce at gunpoint and become two family households would greatly increase GDP - but I don't think we'd agree that's good.
- jandrewrogers 8mo agoThe growing population of economically non-productive people requires a growing population of economically productive people to support them. At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al. At the limit, not growing the productive population puts younger generations in a position of existing solely for the purpose of serving the non-productive population. At some point, they will simply choose to opt out and the whole thing collapses.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- yoyohello13 8mo agoI think it's inevitable, the model is unsustainable and going to fail. In a finite world we can't have social models that rely on infinite growth. I'm sure the changing demographic is going to cause pain (probably right when I'm getting ready to retire), but historically pain is the real catalyst for change so maybe some good will come out of it.
- izzydata 8mo agoBut infinite population growth is unsustainable so it had to come to an equilibrium eventually. Maybe we overshot the maximum comfortable population by a bit and we are going to rebound for awhile. Also an economy that requires an infinitely growing population feels like a pyramid scheme which is also an unsustainable system.
- neutronicus 8mo ago> But infinite population growth is unsustainable so it had to come to an equilibrium eventually. Or not. It could be oscillatory and humanity could cyclically reverse-decimate itself while the descendants of the survivors get to enjoy millennia of the fun part of the pyramid scheme. The big losers are whoever is part of the "perish in a holocaust" generations, and probably the first couple bootstrapper generations afterwards.
- jpadkins 8mo ago
- biophysboy 8mo agoI am not remotely worried about birth rates. Every tech executive hyperventilating about it is extrapolating social trends decades ahead, which is the same mistake Erlich made when he published the "The Population Bomb". The total fertility rate has limitations as a metric too (it assumes constant birth timing). The fact that they do this coercive paternalism on the very platforms that substitute for real life social interaction is very rich to me. I'll listen to them when they divest from the social corrosion machines.
- oklahomasports 8mo agoPredicting population decline is safer than overgrowth. Since with low birth rates we know we need substantially higher than replacement rates to make up for the deficit. Which seems unlikely
- biophysboy 8mo agoSafer in the sense that its better to be overcautious than under? I definitely agree! I'm just saying we could do without the finger wagging. Either we commit to fostering relationships or we commit to their substitutes. I'm just saying I call their bluff.
- snowwrestler 8mo agoPredicting numerical decline is easy and obvious. What is silly is predicting economic or social doom because of that population decline.
- arcologies1985 8mo agoLook at the problems South Korea is having, where there are not enough young people to support and care for the elderly. Elders face economic hardship and the healthcare system is buckling under load.
- dalyons 8mo agoand its going to get so so so much worse. Look at this pyramid. https://www.populationpyramid.net/republic-of-korea/2025/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/republic-of-korea/2025/
- r14c 8mo agoThe line has to go up every year forever, even if it causes cyclical market instability and consolidation into mega conglomerates. Creating sustainable wealth across all sectors of society just isn't profitable enough in the short term.
- reducesuffering 8mo agoI think people really fail to understand the gravity of an inverted demographic pyramid, going from 2 young people supporting 1 old, to 1 young person supporting 2 old. That's .5 -> 2x, a 4x increase in burden (taxes / extra work).
- randycupertino 8mo agoBetter for the environment though. I know people who chose not to have kids because they were worried about climate change and overpopulation.
- hackable_sand 8mo agoWhat were these old people doing that they couldn't set up a sustainable system? Sounds lazy to me
- globular-toast 8mo agoBasically it makes people feel good. Growth is exciting and motivates people to do stuff. Shrinkage makes people sad, depressed and more likely to try to protect what they have. It's often irrational, but that's just the way it is. Growth isn't sustainable, of course. If you're a gardener you get to experience the joy of growth every year, but you have to "pay it back" in autumn and winter as everything dies back and resets. The seasons force it on you in the garden, but we can't force it on ourselves. We'll just keep having summer after summer until it all goes boom.
- bombcar 8mo agoThis might be a really good analogy - we're in an endless summer and we have people who are now dying having lived in it their entire life - we don't even know what fall is like, let alone winter. On a personal level it might be possible to "bring winter back" - I'll have think on what that might mean.
- fooker 8mo agoBecause you are not prepared for the poverty that follows from an economy stalling.
- tehjoker 8mo agoAmerican capitalists and economic planners fret about "Japan Syndrome". To have more productivity and more consumption i.e. GDP growth, you need more people as a core driver. We don't actually need this, we could do fine with a stable population, but capitalism needs to grow or perish. Declining populations are trickier for most economic concepts though. Less labor, less consumption. That said, a slight decline can leave more houses unoccupied which can be good. A major decline would mean so many unoccupied houses that you would have broken and abandoned houses though because it would be too costly to deal with the abandoned units.
- bpt3 8mo agoIf you or anyone you care about is or will be elderly and is not financially independent, you should care. This has nothing to do with capitalism; it's a resource allocation problem. We spend inordinate amounts of money on end of life care, and any changes are currently unacceptable to voters.
- tehjoker 8mo agoYou're talking about age structure, but overall population age-structure can be adjusted by immigration flows, births, deaths, etc. My point was about the total population number. You can imagine a steady-state population where the age structure is stable and productivity is high enough to sustain the retirees, trainees, and disabled.
- bpt3 8mo agoI can imagine one in theory, but not in practice without, at a minimum, a very painful transition that would need to occur in the near future.
- NeutralCrane 8mo agoA population decrease is not a stable population
- anthonypasq 8mo agohumans are good. life is good. we should be trying to increase the number of conscious beings in the universe. we have a diseased misanthropic culture. i dont know where it came from but its existential.
- r00fus 8mo agoCapitalist systems (even used in moderation by China) based on Keynesian economics relies on constant growth.
- queuebert 8mo agoWhy can't you have a steady state? Is it just undesirable, or actually mathematically impossible?
- snikeris 8mo agoIf you planted an apple tree and it never produced apples, you might start to wonder what's wrong with the tree. Maybe there's something wrong with the soil? How do you know if an organism is thriving in its environment? You count the offspring over generations.