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[–] 20 points 2 days ago (22 children)

Okay, but retirement is based off there being more people working than not, so in countries with national pensions we'll have to significantly raise taxes, and in countries without such a system, retirees who are invested into index funds, need publicly traded corporations to start underpaying their employees even more (it's really eye-opening when you realize people over 55 own 73% of all the resources of the US, from money to stocks to real estate).

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  • [–] 14 points 2 days ago* (17 children)

    Sounds to me like we'll have to do a communism, i.e banding together to help each other out more, to allow people to retire in comfort. The horror!

    (Just in case it seems like I'm dismissing anything you said, I'm not, and thank you for your analysis. My main takeaway is that it seems an unavoidable problem)

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  • [–] -1 points 2 days ago (16 children)

    This is not about communism vs capitalism, its about the ratios. If there are 5 old people for every young person then how are we supposed to take care of all the old people? There’s just not enough manpower.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago* (1 child)

    No, it's about the scale of society and how we support ourselves in retirement, though. See, if retirement funds rely on, as the guy above me says 1. Companies underpaying their employees and 2. Governments taxing a group of more people in the below generations than there are to support in the top - then those are unsustainable sources of retirement comfort.

    So what would be sustainable? Well historically, and in some countries today, old people need family to support them into old age. You would need either your own kid, with their own house big enough for you, or a rich little nephew with a house big enough for all you and your siblings to live in while retired.

    Or... We just do the decent thing and take care of non-relatives. To ease the load on, say, retirement homes, we'd need to agree across society to bring the old people into communities of younger adults, and those younger adults would need to check on them regularly.

    Sice this requires a community binding together, you might call it "communism." Though it isn't necessarily Marxism.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    We should be in a situation where people need to take in like 5 non-relative old people into their homes and provide them constant care (which they cannot do if they are at work). It's not sustainable no matter your economic system.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    Why do you care about the ratio of workers to old people? What matters is the ratio of dependents to workers. We have more retirees, but we also have fewer children. This isn't that hard. If we could manage the Baby Boom of the 50s, we can manage this.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    What matters even more is total productivity per citizen. It does not matter if a house is built by 20 builders with shovels or 5 builders with excavators. What matters is the house being built. And productivity per worker has massively risen and is, in my opinion, going to rise further.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    That's an interesting point but I'm not sure if the numbers really add up. As I understand it, the number of dependents will be greater from population decline (primarily due to an aging population) than it was during the baby boom

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago (2 children)
  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    Also the ratio is a lot higher in nursing homes. Yes you might have a ratio of x nurses to y old people, but you also need to consider the people indirectly contributing. Like the trades people who built the building, or the people who pay for the care through taxes or otherwise, the people working to route electricity, the pharmacists making all those medications that the old people need, etc.

    Also, we need people to do jobs other than working in nursing homes. We can't have all our workforce caring for the elderly.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago (3 children)

    Actually it is a communism vs capitalism thing. The problem arises in both, but the solutions available depend on the system. I reccomend you look up how China is handling its massive elderly population. For example the elderly there have huge public parks and get outside moving and socializing a lot. In big cities it's common for them to have mid day slow dance meetings in the parks. This is only possible because the government's priority is not producing profit for billionaires but caring for its people. So it maintains these things and the public transport required to get the elderly there, and the assistance to keep them fed and healthy.

    This video is 15 years old: https://youtu.be/SvmV7GRRPq0

    When people stay active and a part of their community into their old age instead of sitting in their huge houses alone or in a nursing home they require much less support to keep living.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Username checks out... I am not particularly happy about many of the things china does, and I don't think "but they are not the US" is an excuse for authoritarianism and imperialism, they got a way better culture of how to deal with old people than the west, both in traditions and in institutions.

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  • If I had praised the the EU for their open border policy and talked about how freedom of movement has had multiple positive impacts on the nations in it would you have felt the need to jump in and be angry and start bringing up french neo-colonialism in west africa, and german munitions support for israel, and their mistreatment of immigrants/rising far-right movements? I don't think you would have. Maybe you should do a bit of introspection and try to figure out why seeing China mentioned in a positive light causes you to have such a reaction?

    If you notice also, critiquing them here was done using specific examples. Not vague terminology with no concrete real world example of what you mean. I genuinely do not know what imperialism you are talking about in regards to China the only guess I can make is that sometimes people call the BRI imperialistic, which I think is a bit silly. And as for authoritarian it's a useless term. Yes, China has laws. These laws restrict what people can do there. That is Authoritarian. Yet so do all nations. You do not disagree with their use of authority. You disagree with how they use it.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago (2 children)
  • [–] 7 points 2 days ago* (1 child)

    Population decline is a global phenomenon. You can't offset this loss with immigration when the countries people are coming from are also experiencing a population decline. We (in the West) are currently using immigration to offset this loss now, but when the population decline really starts hitting other parts of the globe (as it is projected to do within the next few decades) then that will no longer be a solution.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Hogwash. You forgot the other half of the equation. We don't have as many children to support. Notice how people obsessed over birth rate always focus on the retiree:worker ratio rather than the dependent:worker ratio? The problem disappears once you realize we can simply take money that we were spending on childcare and shift it to eldercare.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    Children live with parents. If retirement becomes burden of your offspring this will have interesting consequences.

    Re resource shift: in my country we managed to increase total employment in education while birthrates continue to dwindle

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