I believe I did a post about this recently, but the New York Times has reposted the recent article on the radical increase in human life expectancy alongside a new piece about the declining global birth rate and the aging of the population. Tom Sullivan has put up a summary so I don't have to, and he can deal with their copyright lawyers.
My two cents, or more like $2 million, is that everybody talks about the declining birth rate and the aging population as, you know, a bad thing. Who's gonna support us in our old age? Where is economic growth going to come from if there are fewer workers? Won't society lose its vigor and innovativeness?
Talk about missing the point, being unclear on the concept, not seeing what is two inches in front of your nose. The human population has to stop growing, at some point if not 50 years ago. Whatever you think constitutes a sustainable population, it obviously cannot be infinite. Ergo, one of two things needs to happen:
a) The death rate drastically increases and life expectancy goes back down to pre-industrial levels; or
b) The birth rate has to fall meaning, yes, there will eventually be more old people than young people.
Assuming you don't like the idea of (a), the issue with (b) therefore cannot be "Oh my God, how can we stop this from happening!" The issue must be "How can we adapt to the inevitable reality?" On the one hand that actually isn't so hard, on the other hand the reason people don't seem to want to ask the question is because it requires radical demolition of fundamental assumptions about society and the economy.
If you think about it, if there are fewer people every year we don't need to have economic growth. The same amount of economic output will mean more for everybody, year after year. In the second place, maintaining the same amount of output with fewer workers is no problem at all, because technological advances mean that the productivity of workers continually increases. In fact with fewer people and no pressure for growth, it actually gets easier. You can let marginal farmland revert to nature. You can close down the antiquated and least productive factories and other infrastructure. BUT . . .
You need to redistribute income and investment. You need to redirect resources from sixteen mansions, three yachts and a private jetliner for a billionaire, to supporting people who are too old to work and to investing in technological solutions to a shrinking workforce. It also helps that as people are healthier they can be productive for longer, so we don't have to assume that everyone retires at some traditional age. But we can still make that possible. What it requires is imagination, and the political will to remake society.*
*Calling me a socialist is not an intelligent response.
9 comments:
"It also helps that as people are healthier they can be productive for longer, so we don't have to assume that everyone retires at some traditional age."
Joe Biden seems to be handling one of the world's most demanding jobs admirably at the age of 78. Of course, he's doing something he loves. Other politicians, and Supreme Court justices, also come to mind.
There are other lines of work, like plumbing, where very few make it to the minimum retirement age. Yes, we certainly need to redefine or replace the word "retirement".
For a start, how about a work requirement for those who can in order to receive Social Security?
Not a lot of hours, and not necessarily paid. There are lots of young people who could benefit from having a mentor. There'd just need to be an easy way to create the connections. Some hobbies might count. For example, a gardener helps beautify the neighborhood.
The biggest down side I see is that with something useful to do the old farts would probably hang around even longer. (Ingest with a crystal of sodium chloride.)
Yes of course, many people, particularly those who do physically demanding jobs, can't keep doing them until what has been traditional retirement age. In fact often people who work as carpenters or masons and such have injuries that knock them out of the trade fairly young. What this means, to me, is that we need to make it easier for people to move on to other kinds of work in those situations. But as far as a work requirement for SS, there are big problems with any system that has to adjudicate whether people "can work." I'd much rather take a constructive, positive approach -- create opportunities and incentives to do useful, interesting work. But everybody over a certain age, or maybe everybody period, should be taken care of, no questions asked.
When "labor-saving devices" entered society, the planners were worried about what people in the future would do with all of that spare time.
Yeah, that didn't go as planned either.
Well yes Peckerhead, that is exactly the point. As automation made workers more productive, and allowed more people to enter the labor force because household work became less demanding, plutocrats confiscated all the surplus, and workers' wages stagnated. So the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson and the rest of them hoovered up all the money and the rest of us were still screwed. What I'm saying is that we need to rise up and take back what is ours from the capitalists who have stolen it. At last you're starting to get it.
Check out "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" by David Graeber.
He suggests that a lot of jobs are make-work that wouldn't be missed if nobody did them. We can get away with this because the real work is being done so efficiently.
This can happen in any organization. After all, the more FTE's in your department the more important you are.
A good clue that you're working a Bullshit job is that you viscerally hate doing it.
For once, estemado Cervantes, you have left me with nothing to ad.
My point was the future is difficult to predict.
The problem with your story is the timeline.
Labor-saving devices that relieved household work appeared around the early part of the twentieth century and relieved mostly women. Some Devices such as washing machines, electric irons, etc. But those women did not start entering the workforce until the fifties and sixties. There were devices that also made farming more efficient, but those farmers also didn't immediately got get a job, either.
The mechanization of agriculture coincided in substantial part with the Depression, and a lot of pain and unemployment. WWII put an end to the Depression and drew a lot of women into the labor force, actually, but that was as much a cultural as an economic issue. I agree that the future of work is hard to predict -- there is a lot of controversy about whether automation will produce long-term structural unemployment. (Viz. Player Piano by Vonnegut.) I don't know the answer to that but it's a somewhat different question than the one I'm addressing here.
I totally agree with your main point. Basing prosperity on an ever increasing population is mathematically doomed in a finite world. It is the most vicious Ponzi scheme ever.
BTW, one possible argument for the existence of Little Green Men is that they are the aliens' solution to this very problem. In order to conserve scarce resources they reduced their bodies to the absolute minimum needed to function. Clothes would just reduce the surface area available for photosynthesis.
Post a Comment