It just seems like we could adjust our economy to compensate for a shrinking population. The answer of paying your working population more seems so much easier trying to get people to have kids they don’t want. It would also slow the population shrink by making children more affordable, but a smaller population seems far more sustainable than an ever growing one and a shrinking one seems like it should decrease suffering with the resources being less in demand.
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Just some simple math from the US:
The age of retirement is 67 (not everybody can or does retire at this age, but it’s something we as a society have agreed upon as something we aim for). US life expectancy is approximately 77. Approximately 16% of the population falls into this range at the moment. There’s also approximately 20% of the population under 16, and thus not eligible for work. This means the other 54% of the population for the most part is supporting these people, in one way or another. We’ll ignore the children for a second, as they don’t require as many resources when it comes to healthcare and palliative care, so that effectively means we have about 3 working-aged adults per one retiree.
If everybody stopped having kids right now, in 20 years we’d have approximately 55% of our current population at working age and 20-25% of our current population in retirement age, which is a number that grows closer to 2:1 than 3:1. Another 20 years after that, we’d have about 35% of our current population at working age and 25-30% at retirement age, which is perilously close to 1:1. In two generations, the number of people working to support each retirement-aged person would be almost cut into a third.
Now of course, people are still having kids, the above situation isn’t remotely reflective of reality. But as the number of children per household decreases and life expectancy (in theory) increases, there’s going to be more retirement aged people per worker, and that’s going to strain a system that’s already overloaded. It’s going to be mean either that retirement will have to be pushed back dramatically, leading to people working beyond the point where they physically or mentally can, or quality of life for retirees has to be sharply curtailed, or we have to increase how much we take from each working person to pay into the system to keep it at a good amount at the same age.
If, instead, the trend is reversed and people have more children (or we replace aging populations with work-aged immigrants), the reverse can hold true. We can keep or expand the current standard of living and retirement age for retirees, without taking more money from each worker.
There’s also the fact that capitalism as a system is fragile and doesn’t cope well when numbers don’t go up. “Our sales declined 2% this year, because the population shrunk by 3% due to declining birthrates” shakes investor confidence and has ripple effects on the market that cause economic decline or depression. Yaaay.
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