I don’t live in the US so mostly I’m thinking of who’s gonna pay for my retirement and healthcare when I’m old.
I’m paying for the current old people’s retirement and healthcare. That’s fine, it’s the social contract we have in our nation: everyone gets taken care of and those who can work, pay a lot of tax to make it happen. If the population decline gets bad enough, there will be no one to do the same for my generation.
Oh and they populist conservatives did a pension reform so you can take out whatever you’ve gathered in your second pillar even at age 20 if you want (at which point it’ll probably be in the hundreds of euros lol) and can’t resume payments (which were matched by the government - you pay 2, 4 or 6 percent and government pays 4% of your gross income) for 10 years. Worst deal ever for most people taking it out if they want to retire at one point. And a third of the population took it out. They now have to fully depend on the first pillar (government) pension, which isn’t based on past investments at all, it’s taken from the working population’s social taxes when you retire. So far more directly affected by the population decline. I’m betting they’ll eventually forcibly fuck it up for the rest of us to pay for the retirements of those who took it out.
The only real billionaires of my country are the founders of Wise and Bolt. They all made their money from startups that succeeded internationally and none of them particularly politically active. One of the Wise guys is actually building a car-free “five minute city” block in the capital. The biggest problem is a actually a guy with under 100 million net worth who runs a small bank (called bigbank, ironically), keeps donating to the conservatives and his individual contributions are like 10-20% of the entire country’s political donations put together or something. It’s like eroding LGBT rights is his life goal or something.
All that doesn’t change the fact that since the population is aging, rather than people of all ages dying off evenly at once, things will get harder to maintain, as everything we enjoy in life still requires someone to do work, regardless of economic system - and old people still require resources to maintain (and more labour to maintain than young people)
The “resources” we rely on require (working) humans, less working humans means less resources. The population we have today won’t disappear all at once but when they age out of the workforce, a smaller population will not be able to support them
In other words, if we are below replacement level, we will eventually have a situation where the old outnumber the young, which means that the young have to work harder to support the old
The biggest concern right now is the looming massive unemployment crisis and you’re worried about too much demand for work?
It’s a two sided issue. We’re laying off a bunch of people in jobs that require thinking, but not doing stuff in the physical world. But jobs that require doing physical things are still much more difficult to automate if it requires any sort of flexibility to conditions. We’ll still need people in a bunch of roles, they’ll just be jobs people won’t want to do as much, because it’ll be dirtier and harder work. And of course in our present economic system at present time, these jobs aren’t very highly paid since we don’t have a real shortage of workers yet.
And how does fewer working people decrease resources? Fewer working peole means less land? Less water? Less energy?
Land on its own doesn’t produce much useful, you still need people to work it. Power plants need employees too. Etc. There are still so, so many things we can’t accomplish without humans physically present and moving objects. Automation makes things more efficient, but we still need humans.
If the population of the world shrunk evenly in all ages, it wouldn’t be an issue. It’s only an issue because the population is aging.
And yes, in the future we’ll probably have AI doctors, AI teachers and AI engineers to provide us mediocre healthcare, education and help invent stuff. But we won’t have AI electricians or AI plumbers anytime soon. Much harder problems to automate.
It does tend to happen that we’re pretty prejudiced, yes. Personally I’m not and most people I know aren’t either, but anyone who grew up in the soviet era is generally pretty racist towards people of color. It’ll take a few more decades for things to get better I’m afraid.
But think of billionaires’ bottom lines!
I don’t live in the US so mostly I’m thinking of who’s gonna pay for my retirement and healthcare when I’m old.
I’m paying for the current old people’s retirement and healthcare. That’s fine, it’s the social contract we have in our nation: everyone gets taken care of and those who can work, pay a lot of tax to make it happen. If the population decline gets bad enough, there will be no one to do the same for my generation.
Oh and they populist conservatives did a pension reform so you can take out whatever you’ve gathered in your second pillar even at age 20 if you want (at which point it’ll probably be in the hundreds of euros lol) and can’t resume payments (which were matched by the government - you pay 2, 4 or 6 percent and government pays 4% of your gross income) for 10 years. Worst deal ever for most people taking it out if they want to retire at one point. And a third of the population took it out. They now have to fully depend on the first pillar (government) pension, which isn’t based on past investments at all, it’s taken from the working population’s social taxes when you retire. So far more directly affected by the population decline. I’m betting they’ll eventually forcibly fuck it up for the rest of us to pay for the retirements of those who took it out.
Most countries have billionaires pulling strings at the top.
The only real billionaires of my country are the founders of Wise and Bolt. They all made their money from startups that succeeded internationally and none of them particularly politically active. One of the Wise guys is actually building a car-free “five minute city” block in the capital. The biggest problem is a actually a guy with under 100 million net worth who runs a small bank (called bigbank, ironically), keeps donating to the conservatives and his individual contributions are like 10-20% of the entire country’s political donations put together or something. It’s like eroding LGBT rights is his life goal or something.
All that doesn’t change the fact that since the population is aging, rather than people of all ages dying off evenly at once, things will get harder to maintain, as everything we enjoy in life still requires someone to do work, regardless of economic system - and old people still require resources to maintain (and more labour to maintain than young people)
You understand that money is a fiction, right? It’s not even numbers on a piece of paper anymore, it’s ones and zeroes.
Fewer people means more resources per person and less damage to the earth.
The “resources” we rely on require (working) humans, less working humans means less resources. The population we have today won’t disappear all at once but when they age out of the workforce, a smaller population will not be able to support them
In other words, if we are below replacement level, we will eventually have a situation where the old outnumber the young, which means that the young have to work harder to support the old
The biggest concern right now is the looming massive unemployment crisis and you’re worried about too much demand for work?
And how does fewer working people decrease resources? Fewer working peole means less land? Less water? Less energy?
It’s a two sided issue. We’re laying off a bunch of people in jobs that require thinking, but not doing stuff in the physical world. But jobs that require doing physical things are still much more difficult to automate if it requires any sort of flexibility to conditions. We’ll still need people in a bunch of roles, they’ll just be jobs people won’t want to do as much, because it’ll be dirtier and harder work. And of course in our present economic system at present time, these jobs aren’t very highly paid since we don’t have a real shortage of workers yet.
Land on its own doesn’t produce much useful, you still need people to work it. Power plants need employees too. Etc. There are still so, so many things we can’t accomplish without humans physically present and moving objects. Automation makes things more efficient, but we still need humans.
If the population of the world shrunk evenly in all ages, it wouldn’t be an issue. It’s only an issue because the population is aging.
And yes, in the future we’ll probably have AI doctors, AI teachers and AI engineers to provide us mediocre healthcare, education and help invent stuff. But we won’t have AI electricians or AI plumbers anytime soon. Much harder problems to automate.
Not if the robots take all the jobs
there are other humans in other countries that are looking for a better life
the problem is that countries with declining birth rates dont see them as humans
It does tend to happen that we’re pretty prejudiced, yes. Personally I’m not and most people I know aren’t either, but anyone who grew up in the soviet era is generally pretty racist towards people of color. It’ll take a few more decades for things to get better I’m afraid.