Sure, a problem in the sense that it requires a solution. Capitalisms solution is infinite population growth via forced pregnancy. A non capitalist option is to simply use the very large amount of resources available to take care of the old folks. It’s not profitable, but that’s not the point.
A non capitalist option is to simply use the very large amount of resources available to take care of the old folks. It’s not profitable, but that’s not the point.
Oh, the capitalists have very much figured out how to cash in on old folks. It’s incredibly lucrative. I can’t imagine them abandoning that gravy train until they’ve siphoned off all that filthy lucre that’s settled out in the aging class.
You can’t just borrow or create money to fund things that are not profitable. Not saying infinite population growth is desirable but spending the large amount of resources on old folk does mean not spending it on the young folk = less money to education, health care and infrastructure. It’s not fair to reduce real world problems to ‘you just need to spend your money wiser’
Edit: just to clarify the comment I made above, it doesn’t say we shouldn’t care for retirerees, it is saying you can’t keep the price we pay for supporting them the same if the size of the group if old people rises and the group of people who work to pay for it shrinks. An aging population is a burden to any population in any financial system just like a growing population is a boon. Again, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care for old people.
Hear me out. Maybe we consider the resources available directly rather than the made up paper system we have to abstract the concept of wealth. Aka, fuck money
the concept of currency is absolutely not the problem… barter systems are hugely complex and incredibly inefficient
currency is (should be) an abstraction of the value of something… to support the population as big as we have we need a system that’s able to manage that complexity
currency unlocks immense amounts of human effort and allow people to do what they want instead of just the things that are wanted in their local area. you can’t really have grants with a barter system, complex supply chains are impossible (so say goodbye to advanced scientific research and most modern technology), large scale planning is over because you can’t guarantee whether you can get the resources you need for the things that you’re able to trade in months or years time (just because your iron supplier wants toilet paper now doesn’t mean he will want it 2 years into the future when you need more iron)
it’s also a multiplier, on top of just reducing work required for every single trade. to do a lot of those large-scale things there will always be cash laying around somewhere - you get given it, and then you need to plan or get it from multiple sources until you have enough to request the resources you need… whenever currency is laying around like this, it’s wasted effort. currency works; currency gets things done when it’s moving; currency sitting around is wasted… when you put that currency in a bank, they’re able to loan it to others, who then put it to good use by being productive. you get that currency back when you’re ready, and all of a sudden there is more done that what would have otherwise been able to be done: that’s what the “made up paper system” allows (and there are many more examples of this)
it could be arguable that there’s plenty to go around and that if everyone is happy living with equality and not extravagance then we wouldn’t need to barter or trade anything… perhaps that’s true person to person (ignoring human behaviour, sociopaths, power over people in and of itself becoming the currency, doing the work that nobody wants to do - some of that can probably be tamed with societal norms and punishment, and technology) but humanity’s understanding of the universe needs to progress to improve everything for everyone, and the more we progress the more complex and large-scale the needs of the projects are that are required to do them… if you have a bundle of resources, how do you allocate them to projects without knowing how much of a dent they’ll make? how do you say which will take more to complete: ITER or the LHC? it’s already impossible for us to comprehend everything about our system of trade without removing the abstraction that simplifies it all so we can reason about it
don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of tweaks to be made to make sure currency again becomes representative of value, but currency in and of itself absolutely makes people’s lives better every single day. unrestrained capitalism is absolutely the problem with currency - currency is just its tool of choice
You can’t just borrow or create money to fund things that are not profitable.
BWAHAHA
That’s a good one!
You absolutely can borrow billions of dollars to fund things that have no clear path towards profitability. It’s called Silicon Valley VC. If you’re a member of the aristocracy, it’s easy to borrow money for things that aren’t profitable.
Ok you can, but you have to pay for it. Were talking about society as a while. In a fair world if the people collectively borrow money, the next generation will have to foot the bill.
In a non-zero-sum game, it is possible for two parties to both benefit from a decision.
It also lists examples for each.
Zero sum games are often misunderstood and used as a vehicle of misinformation to perpetuate the lie that if you do one desirable thing, you lose the status quo.
Therefore, looking after the young and looking after the old is a non-zero sum game because you can literally do both. My best example is Australia; we have aged care and child care, with plenty of room for subsidising mining corporations.
Can’t you See, that when you have a smaller percentage in young folk, you can improve the quality of living (of education, If health Car, infrastructure) for them and the old Folks? As Thread Opener Said, it would Not be profitable, but it don’t have to be in a post-capitalism World. Its sufficient enough for it to become a Zero sum Game, where expenses are the Same as the realized gains.
And once the Population has been reduced to a sustainable amount, we as humanity could start over again, then growing in a sustainable way ( and hopefully Out of this planets restrictions). But oh Well, in Out current track record, this all will be nill, AS capitalism will have Destroyed our fixed Environment - earth - by then.
Yes, less young folk is lower cost. But more old people is higher cost. So the cost of supporting old folk is higher per young person. Even in a fair world, an aging population is a borden tot the young people. I’m not saying we shouldn’t support the old folk, I’m saying there is no magic fix you can achieve by changing how we spend money.
But the larger older Population will only exist in a (relatively) small time frame, until the (significantly) smaller Young Population have catched Up to that age, thereby eliminating this conundrum.
And because you can’t burden the young people of the full Impact of the larger old Population, you should subsidize the hell Out of those benefits to the elderly. Because it is only temporary.
It is true it isn’t a problem for the rest of eternity, but this small time frame is indeed relatively as in the people alive at that time will have to go through the consequences for at least a decade probably longer. You can spread that out over a longer period of time with all kinds of economic tools but you can’t erase it entirely is my original point.
Well If your economic system is not built to sustain your countries people sufficiently, and by means of debt for a small timeframe, what is the Point of your economic system then?
Maybe its my Point of View of an entitled European, we learn early in school, that the Economy is there to Support the society, and in Turn the society supporting the Economy. As economic success alone has no inherent purpose by itself. That is also why you can Not govern a Country Like a Corporation, and you can Not govern a Corporation Like a Country.
A Country has to govern their society and Economy for long term success, this shaping their economic system Like so.
I totally agree with you, but that is often not how reality works. For example Norway when they found oil they put (most of) the income from that in a fund and now only use the interest they earn so it is like an infinite source of income. The Netherlands on the other hand invested their money in infrastructure, social subsidies and other stuff that was useful to the people alive when the money was flowing. Now I don’t want to say one of those choices was the better choice, because that is actually not my point. Because either you save up money when the population is growing (meaning people in that time frame have less benefits), or you spend your money and you have a deficit later on. In either case a group ‘misses out’. The same here, because the population is getting older and less people remain to pay the bill, the working people have less money left. In a perfect scenario when this money was saved up earlier, that money wouldn’t have been spent before. Either way, and I agree the society should take care of it self by organising an economy that benefits the society, you end up in a situation were the expenses have to be paid. The right argument is on whether it is worth spending the money (which I think it is), but the argument made is that it only is a problem for capitalists /in a capitalist society and that is just not true. Also communists or for example hunter gatherer societies would face the problem of increased costs of supporting a part of the population that is to sick and old do work.
Sorry long ramble, but it being true that it’s not a problem when you zoom out enough doesn’t mean it’s true that it’s not a problem for the individuals alive during that time frame.
It’s really not a problem though. Half of the work done in society is completely pointless.
Anyone who has worked in a corporate office job can tell you just how much pointless overhead there is in big companies. Improvements in technology haven’t resulted in a decrease in working hours, the standard of work has just been pointlessly increased to consume the same amount of labor hours. Look at computers and their introduction to the office. Things that would have been handled by a single page memo in 1970 are now handled by a 50 page report with glossy images and endless charts and graphics.
The key thing to realize is that companies are not rational. Their behavior is not driven by hard-edged perfectly rational profit and loss decisions. They’re run by people, and people are social animals. And the people running the major companies are a fairly tight knit social group. They all talk with each other, they’re all friends and intermarry with each other’s families. They chase the same fads. Why do you think useless AI models have taken off so much? Historical aristocracies regularly became obsessed with fads. Our aristocracy is currently obsessed with LLMs.
This matters because this aristocratic group-think guides the actions of companies. Companies could have used computer technology to dramatically slash their labor costs. But that was unfashionable among the ownership class. Instead, it became fashionable to simply have the workers use those tools to create more elaborate reports and documentation. It’s the modern office equivalent of a medieval lord pouring resources into a gilded palace and an elaborate retinue of performers. Executives get prestige from having highly paid people create pointless busy work, so that’s what they do.
This pattern can be seen across many fields. Labor-saving devices haven’t been used to reduce total human hours worked, they instead are used to expand the quantity of work done, usually pointlessly. Companies are not rational, and they do not make rational labor decisions.
This is why I am not in the slightest worried about an aging population. You state that too many old people is a genuine problem, no matter the economic system. But that is demonstrably FALSE! Too many old people is not a problem for a society that already employs the majority of its workforce in pointless bullshit jobs. The majority of our labor is pure performative waste; it exists primarily to stroke the egos of the aristocracy. We could cut the total hours worked in half without any decrease in the actual quality of goods and services available for people to enjoy.
Over the last several decades, companies have been able to get by while being incredibly lazy and inefficient. They’ve had the luxury of keeping excess headcount. Yes, it costs money, but prestige is more important than profit once you reach a certain level of wealth. As long as labor has been cheap, the owner class can afford to employ people in largely performative roles.
But with an aging population? The value of labor will skyrocket. Companies will find that they can’t employ scores of people to fill pointless bullshit jobs. Companies that refuse to adapt will simply go bankrupt and be replaced by rationally-run operations.
How are we going to take care of a rapidly greying population? Simple. We’ll just stop wasting most of our labor.
I find this rhetorical framing unfair and even disingenuous as it suggests, absent clarification, that this is a universal scenario created by any system rather than a scenario that is only common under hierarchical systems that demand continual population growth, like capitalism.
You’d have been better to say “Any system would face problems if suddenly burdened by the consequences of capitalism.”
In the long term, yes. Ideally your birth rate matches your death rate so you have stability in supporting the citizenry. But when your system expects the birth rate to exceed the death rate, even changing to equilibrium can be catastrophic.
Well yes but no. Supporting this many old people is a genuine problem, no matter the economic system.
Sure, a problem in the sense that it requires a solution. Capitalisms solution is infinite population growth via forced pregnancy. A non capitalist option is to simply use the very large amount of resources available to take care of the old folks. It’s not profitable, but that’s not the point.
Oh, the capitalists have very much figured out how to cash in on old folks. It’s incredibly lucrative. I can’t imagine them abandoning that gravy train until they’ve siphoned off all that filthy lucre that’s settled out in the aging class.
The clone army is right around the corner. Boy that’s gonna be spicy.
You can’t just borrow or create money to fund things that are not profitable. Not saying infinite population growth is desirable but spending the large amount of resources on old folk does mean not spending it on the young folk = less money to education, health care and infrastructure. It’s not fair to reduce real world problems to ‘you just need to spend your money wiser’
Edit: just to clarify the comment I made above, it doesn’t say we shouldn’t care for retirerees, it is saying you can’t keep the price we pay for supporting them the same if the size of the group if old people rises and the group of people who work to pay for it shrinks. An aging population is a burden to any population in any financial system just like a growing population is a boon. Again, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care for old people.
Hear me out. Maybe we consider the resources available directly rather than the made up paper system we have to abstract the concept of wealth. Aka, fuck money
the concept of currency is absolutely not the problem… barter systems are hugely complex and incredibly inefficient
currency is (should be) an abstraction of the value of something… to support the population as big as we have we need a system that’s able to manage that complexity
currency unlocks immense amounts of human effort and allow people to do what they want instead of just the things that are wanted in their local area. you can’t really have grants with a barter system, complex supply chains are impossible (so say goodbye to advanced scientific research and most modern technology), large scale planning is over because you can’t guarantee whether you can get the resources you need for the things that you’re able to trade in months or years time (just because your iron supplier wants toilet paper now doesn’t mean he will want it 2 years into the future when you need more iron)
it’s also a multiplier, on top of just reducing work required for every single trade. to do a lot of those large-scale things there will always be cash laying around somewhere - you get given it, and then you need to plan or get it from multiple sources until you have enough to request the resources you need… whenever currency is laying around like this, it’s wasted effort. currency works; currency gets things done when it’s moving; currency sitting around is wasted… when you put that currency in a bank, they’re able to loan it to others, who then put it to good use by being productive. you get that currency back when you’re ready, and all of a sudden there is more done that what would have otherwise been able to be done: that’s what the “made up paper system” allows (and there are many more examples of this)
it could be arguable that there’s plenty to go around and that if everyone is happy living with equality and not extravagance then we wouldn’t need to barter or trade anything… perhaps that’s true person to person (ignoring human behaviour, sociopaths, power over people in and of itself becoming the currency, doing the work that nobody wants to do - some of that can probably be tamed with societal norms and punishment, and technology) but humanity’s understanding of the universe needs to progress to improve everything for everyone, and the more we progress the more complex and large-scale the needs of the projects are that are required to do them… if you have a bundle of resources, how do you allocate them to projects without knowing how much of a dent they’ll make? how do you say which will take more to complete: ITER or the LHC? it’s already impossible for us to comprehend everything about our system of trade without removing the abstraction that simplifies it all so we can reason about it
don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of tweaks to be made to make sure currency again becomes representative of value, but currency in and of itself absolutely makes people’s lives better every single day. unrestrained capitalism is absolutely the problem with currency - currency is just its tool of choice
I’m not against, but it won’t change the facts that every expense can only be made once.
BWAHAHA
That’s a good one!
You absolutely can borrow billions of dollars to fund things that have no clear path towards profitability. It’s called Silicon Valley VC. If you’re a member of the aristocracy, it’s easy to borrow money for things that aren’t profitable.
Ok you can, but you have to pay for it. Were talking about society as a while. In a fair world if the people collectively borrow money, the next generation will have to foot the bill.
Mate, it’s not a zero sum game. You can do both.
In a perfect world you can do both because a society has a very wide range of sources of income, but in the end it actually is a zero sum game.
This
Particularly about the misunderstandings section.
Or if you don’t like Wikipedia, here’s an economics website:
This
It also lists examples for each.
Zero sum games are often misunderstood and used as a vehicle of misinformation to perpetuate the lie that if you do one desirable thing, you lose the status quo.
Therefore, looking after the young and looking after the old is a non-zero sum game because you can literally do both. My best example is Australia; we have aged care and child care, with plenty of room for subsidising mining corporations.
Can’t you See, that when you have a smaller percentage in young folk, you can improve the quality of living (of education, If health Car, infrastructure) for them and the old Folks? As Thread Opener Said, it would Not be profitable, but it don’t have to be in a post-capitalism World. Its sufficient enough for it to become a Zero sum Game, where expenses are the Same as the realized gains. And once the Population has been reduced to a sustainable amount, we as humanity could start over again, then growing in a sustainable way ( and hopefully Out of this planets restrictions). But oh Well, in Out current track record, this all will be nill, AS capitalism will have Destroyed our fixed Environment - earth - by then.
Yes, less young folk is lower cost. But more old people is higher cost. So the cost of supporting old folk is higher per young person. Even in a fair world, an aging population is a borden tot the young people. I’m not saying we shouldn’t support the old folk, I’m saying there is no magic fix you can achieve by changing how we spend money.
But the larger older Population will only exist in a (relatively) small time frame, until the (significantly) smaller Young Population have catched Up to that age, thereby eliminating this conundrum. And because you can’t burden the young people of the full Impact of the larger old Population, you should subsidize the hell Out of those benefits to the elderly. Because it is only temporary.
It is true it isn’t a problem for the rest of eternity, but this small time frame is indeed relatively as in the people alive at that time will have to go through the consequences for at least a decade probably longer. You can spread that out over a longer period of time with all kinds of economic tools but you can’t erase it entirely is my original point.
Well If your economic system is not built to sustain your countries people sufficiently, and by means of debt for a small timeframe, what is the Point of your economic system then? Maybe its my Point of View of an entitled European, we learn early in school, that the Economy is there to Support the society, and in Turn the society supporting the Economy. As economic success alone has no inherent purpose by itself. That is also why you can Not govern a Country Like a Corporation, and you can Not govern a Corporation Like a Country. A Country has to govern their society and Economy for long term success, this shaping their economic system Like so.
I totally agree with you, but that is often not how reality works. For example Norway when they found oil they put (most of) the income from that in a fund and now only use the interest they earn so it is like an infinite source of income. The Netherlands on the other hand invested their money in infrastructure, social subsidies and other stuff that was useful to the people alive when the money was flowing. Now I don’t want to say one of those choices was the better choice, because that is actually not my point. Because either you save up money when the population is growing (meaning people in that time frame have less benefits), or you spend your money and you have a deficit later on. In either case a group ‘misses out’. The same here, because the population is getting older and less people remain to pay the bill, the working people have less money left. In a perfect scenario when this money was saved up earlier, that money wouldn’t have been spent before. Either way, and I agree the society should take care of it self by organising an economy that benefits the society, you end up in a situation were the expenses have to be paid. The right argument is on whether it is worth spending the money (which I think it is), but the argument made is that it only is a problem for capitalists /in a capitalist society and that is just not true. Also communists or for example hunter gatherer societies would face the problem of increased costs of supporting a part of the population that is to sick and old do work.
Sorry long ramble, but it being true that it’s not a problem when you zoom out enough doesn’t mean it’s true that it’s not a problem for the individuals alive during that time frame.
It’s really not a problem though. Half of the work done in society is completely pointless.
Anyone who has worked in a corporate office job can tell you just how much pointless overhead there is in big companies. Improvements in technology haven’t resulted in a decrease in working hours, the standard of work has just been pointlessly increased to consume the same amount of labor hours. Look at computers and their introduction to the office. Things that would have been handled by a single page memo in 1970 are now handled by a 50 page report with glossy images and endless charts and graphics.
The key thing to realize is that companies are not rational. Their behavior is not driven by hard-edged perfectly rational profit and loss decisions. They’re run by people, and people are social animals. And the people running the major companies are a fairly tight knit social group. They all talk with each other, they’re all friends and intermarry with each other’s families. They chase the same fads. Why do you think useless AI models have taken off so much? Historical aristocracies regularly became obsessed with fads. Our aristocracy is currently obsessed with LLMs.
This matters because this aristocratic group-think guides the actions of companies. Companies could have used computer technology to dramatically slash their labor costs. But that was unfashionable among the ownership class. Instead, it became fashionable to simply have the workers use those tools to create more elaborate reports and documentation. It’s the modern office equivalent of a medieval lord pouring resources into a gilded palace and an elaborate retinue of performers. Executives get prestige from having highly paid people create pointless busy work, so that’s what they do.
This pattern can be seen across many fields. Labor-saving devices haven’t been used to reduce total human hours worked, they instead are used to expand the quantity of work done, usually pointlessly. Companies are not rational, and they do not make rational labor decisions.
This is why I am not in the slightest worried about an aging population. You state that too many old people is a genuine problem, no matter the economic system. But that is demonstrably FALSE! Too many old people is not a problem for a society that already employs the majority of its workforce in pointless bullshit jobs. The majority of our labor is pure performative waste; it exists primarily to stroke the egos of the aristocracy. We could cut the total hours worked in half without any decrease in the actual quality of goods and services available for people to enjoy.
Over the last several decades, companies have been able to get by while being incredibly lazy and inefficient. They’ve had the luxury of keeping excess headcount. Yes, it costs money, but prestige is more important than profit once you reach a certain level of wealth. As long as labor has been cheap, the owner class can afford to employ people in largely performative roles.
But with an aging population? The value of labor will skyrocket. Companies will find that they can’t employ scores of people to fill pointless bullshit jobs. Companies that refuse to adapt will simply go bankrupt and be replaced by rationally-run operations.
How are we going to take care of a rapidly greying population? Simple. We’ll just stop wasting most of our labor.
Alternatively: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ättestupa
I find this rhetorical framing unfair and even disingenuous as it suggests, absent clarification, that this is a universal scenario created by any system rather than a scenario that is only common under hierarchical systems that demand continual population growth, like capitalism.
You’d have been better to say “Any system would face problems if suddenly burdened by the consequences of capitalism.”
So wouldn’t adding more make it worse?
Infinite growth! Infinite population growth to feed the machine! More babies!
In the long term, yes. Ideally your birth rate matches your death rate so you have stability in supporting the citizenry. But when your system expects the birth rate to exceed the death rate, even changing to equilibrium can be catastrophic.