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Consider even more traditional methods of elder care such as apprenticeships and village elders.

It is rather mysterious how we take kids in prime physical shape and mush for brains and lock them into ignorant echo chambers for years while we take wise and skilled old people with worn out bodies and brains full of very expensive experience and lock them into lonely old folks homes next door and then make sure they never mix. Its almost like our culture is so stupidly designed someone is trying to sabotage it.

You'd have to expand the concept of apprenticeship beyond current restrictive beliefs and expand the idea of teachers aide quite a bit. If all some old duffer does is make sure the kids don't tip over an unchained acetylene bottle in shop class, its still worth it if all he does is sip coffee the rest of the semester. Three old duffers stand at the table saw all day doing nothing but safety and technique critique.

Advanced disciplinary procedures are interesting to contemplate. Not so much the return of corporal punishment but you'd be surprised how well kids wanting attention can react to being assigned to work with a team of five old people. You will do your math homework alone or with the five grandmas ...

Note that this is a fair trade unlike your gerontocracy because the kids derive considerable value from the old people.

Where it gets weird is when you mix unemployed people in. Say due to ageism I'll never get paid to write code again because I'd be too expensive or unwilling to work 60 hour weeks. If welfare paid my bills would it be that bad if I did nothing but volunteer computer lab tech all day?

I don't understand how we continue to dignify the premise that elder care in our existing marketplace isn't a fair trade. We want our elderly family members to be comfortable. If nobody was available to perform these services, we'd do them ourselves, at great personal cost. Instead, we exchange money for the services of specialists. Everybody comes out ahead.

We don't need "the kids to derive considerable value from the old people" to justify these economic transactions.

> It is rather mysterious how we take kids in prime physical shape and mush for brains and lock them into ignorant echo chambers for years while we take wise and skilled old people with worn out bodies and brains full of very expensive experience and lock them into lonely old folks homes next door and then make sure they never mix. Its almost like our culture is so stupidly designed someone is trying to sabotage it.

It's really a failure to think holistically. When you break a problem down and over-specialize, you can turn a solution into two or more problems. I'm reminded of something I read about farming: traditionally livestock production and farming were done on the same farm. The livestock ate healthier and could be of higher quality, and their manure fertilized the soil for the crops. They were separated in the name of specialization and efficiency, and that created problems of agricultural mono-cultures, unhealthy livestock, fertilizer runoff, and the disposal of concentrated livestock waste from factory farms.

>but I can't imagine that there is a reasonable economic case to be made for it

Median net worth of a retiree is $210,000. Many have saved for care in retirement and therefore will be able to 'demand' it in the market. And I don't believe that includes income from Social Security (which is just a forced savings plan).

>It seems to me that what is needed is alternative industries that are booming because they create new economic opportunities in a generative fashion.

This is word soup.

word soup would be a sentence that doesn't even parse. you're misusing the term in an effort to beat me down with the force of your snark. cut it out.

do I actually need to explain it to you? I will anyway, in word sandwiches, since you might prefer that instead of soup.

Re-training assembly line workers to be barristas, mall parking lot attendants, and elder-care nurses is not an acceptable outcome. There is increased demand for positions like that in our economy but that is indicative of economic dysfunction, not economic health. Some industries are declining (in terms of labor force participation) because of off-shoring and automation. Those industries are benefiting in profitability from the reduction of their labor costs but the laborers being displaced are not receiving those benefits. New industries that can offer work for displaced laborers are needed. Ideally, those industries are _generative_. That means they are primarily involved in production (of raw materials, of manufactured goods, of energy).

>word soup would be a sentence that doesn't even parse

I use it to describe sentences where I can jumble up all the adjectives and get the same meaning - a meaning which is so vague that people can just interpret the sentence as something that conveniently agrees with their prior convictions

>Ideally, those industries are _generative_. That means they are primarily involved in production (of raw materials, of manufactured goods, of energy).

Your prior conviction is that new stuff is needed and intrinsically good. I am not so bold as to hold such a conviction. Maybe people simply need to be enabled to do more with less.

I don't understand the reasoning here, like, at all. For decades now researchers have been pointing out the demographic issues of aging populations and the workforces required to care for them. I don't know the specific numbers, but they're doubtless enormous. Why wouldn't they be a significant part of the economy?

Not the above poster, but their point appears to be that caring for the elderly doesn't CONTRIBUTE to the economy (i.e. as a transaction it adds to GDP, but in terms of value-creation it's near zilch. So while a blue-collar worker might add value by creating a product, an elder care worker adds only humanitarian benefit. (And unlike a doctor that can help those blue collar workers continue to work, there isn't even much INDIRECT value-addition to elder care).

To continue my devil-advocacy, I'm sure the above poster wouldn't argue AGAINST elder care on humanitarian grounds, but is instead saying this is not where you want to redirect significant portions of your workforce, because you'll tank value-addition and harm everyone (including those elderly patients).

Personally, I find the argument a little repulsive, but also an important argument to refute. So I'm glad it was raised.

My rebuttal would be that with increased automation we're doing fine in value-addition, and the entire point of having positive wealth creation is to improve the overall well-being of a lot of people (I was going to say "as many as possible", but that might not be agreed to by some). If we skip the "reward" of a society's wealth-creation, why are we doing it again?

That was the "logic" I took from that comment too, but it still doesn't make any sense. We spend money on all sorts of things that don't "contribute" (in this weird, narrow sense) to the economy. But of course, most things we spend money on do in fact contribute to the economy: the money goes into the pockets of the people providing the service, who go on to buy things with that money and fuel the economy.

That's what I meant when I said I didn't understand the reasoning of the comment --- like, at all, even a little bit.

I'll ask you, then, to focus less on the GDP/value-add side of the argument and more on the "spiritually corrosive to individuals and society" side of the argument.

Are you conceding the economics? (You probably should, unless I'm missing some subtlety of your argument.) That's really all I care about here.

no, I'm not conceding the economics. I don't have any hidden subtlety here, it seems fairly obvious to me that elder-care is redistributive (money from old people to their servants) rather than productive. quite a lot of service jobs are like this, except in many other cases the redistribution is not from accumulated wealth from the past, but from newly produced wealth in the present.

that might be of some net economic benefit anyway, purely on the basis of freeing up money that would otherwise be stuck in sequestration from the rest of the economy. however, I'm not sure what "flaw" in my economic claim you're trying to point out. can you be more explicit?

I would ask you, however, to actually care more about the non-economic part of the argument. I believe that's the more important part.

This isn't even wrong. In market transactions, there's no dichotomy between "redistribution" and "productivity". There's "redistributive" tax and economic policies that governments enact, by political fiat. Those policies are almost the opposite of market transactions.

Using the definition you've proposed, it's hard to think of any service transaction, from doctors visits to architectural consults, that isn't somehow "redistributive".

I believe the general view is that 'non value producing' service jobs add value by saving the time of and thus amplifying the productiveness of individuals with 'value producing' jobs.

If you are comparing the economic effect of a growing industry of elder care to a society where no elder care occurs, then I can see how you might draw the conclusion that growth in this industry is a waste because these are not 'value producing' jobs.

In reality, a society where no elder care occurs is not the alternative as some form of elder care would be taking place. People who work doing elder care are amplifying the productiveness of the friends, family and neighbors who do have 'value producing' jobs.

Personally, I think our current styles of elder care and our ageist biases waste a lot of economic potential and social value by wasting the time of our elders. I think that finding ways to tap this potential while providing better care for our elders would be the OPPOSITE of spiritually corrosive. As it is, many find working in elder care quite rewarding, especially when that elder care happens in less institutional and dehumanizing settings.

"spiritually corrosive to individuals and society" seems less of a fact and more of a narrow personal opinion. I personally don't consider caring for the elderly as a corrosive/demeaning job.

a person who _wants_ to be an elder-care service provider will not find it spiritually corrosive. a person who is forced to re-train to work in elder care because the job they used to perform was automated/off-shored is much more likely to find it spiritually corrosive.

a young person seeking employment at the beginning of their career might find it deeply troubling as well (assuming there were not enough good alternatives to working in elder-care), as it represents an inversion of social and economic priority from the future (young people) to the past (the elderly).

Then what's "corrosive" is the loss of jobs. Please leave older people out of it.

No, I won't, and shouldn't leave older people out of it. This is absolutely central regardless of whether or not you acknowledge it.

Whether a society prioritizes its future or its past is an important social, economic, political, and moral decision. Suppose that demographic trends lead to a massive boom of elder-care jobs that is supported (in the short term anyway) economically and "solves" an employment crisis for the younger generation. Is that a solution worth doing?

I don't get the sense that you're really thinking through how economies work. The "massive boom of elder-care jobs" isn't a result of secular decline in manufacturing; it's due to increased demand for elder care as our population ages. That increase would occur even if no manufacturing job had ever left our shores in the last 70 years.

You're unhappy that people who were doing a job can no longer do that job, and putting yourself in their shoes when they confront the possibility that their economic best interests are in jobs they don't want to do. That's fine; that is in fact a real challenge in how societies engage with market economies. But it has nothing to do with older people; it has to do with the fact that not everyone can make a living doing the exact job they want to do.

once again you're arguing against a strawman. you've now completely abandoned trying to engage with what I've said and have instead favored the approach of trying to make me seem "stupid" with discredited rhetorical devices.

additionally, where do you get off acting as if you're an authority on economics? you're nothing special. stop acting as if you're automatically correct. you have something to say, then say it, argue your point and support it. simply phrasing things as if you're authoritative only makes you seem arrogant. it's not convincing.

finally, by choosing to deliberately ignore what I offered as the more important dimension of my position (the moral one, rather than the economic one) you have derailed the entire conversation into something nearly irrelevant.

in other words, you're not worth the time. we're done here.

An economy can be based around digging holes and moving the dirt between them, if that's what people wanted to happen.

We literally pulled an entire nation out of a depression in order to go to war. Fighting a war has to be the least "productive" activity imaginable for humans to engage in, yet we did it and it managed to do the opposite of break the nation's back.

The only criteria is that lots of people need it and are willing to pay for it. The second bit doesn't even have to be economic, a society could simply make it a matter of politics and allocate tax revenue towards it.

As an aside, fighting a war is actually one of the most productive things a society can do: it stimulates government spending and gambles that some of it will be offset by lasting post-war prosperity and the spoils of war.

You can potentially eliminate unfavorable competition, acquire more land or resources open for exploitation, raid materiel and intellectual patents, all the while reducing the size of the working class and its proportion to the wealth-owning classes.

Only in the country-vs-country zero-sum-game sense. In the grow-the-pie global-economy sense, war is a broken window fallacy.

If the holes are being put to productive use by the people demanding them, then sure. Given how little HN likely understands about agriculture, I'd be wary of trying to use "hole digging" as a kind of absurd example.

But this also illustrates how dumb it is to single out elder care as somehow economically unproductive. We pay for elder care because we desperately want our elder family members to be comfortable. If there were labor shortages in this sector, we'd be taking on the work ourselves, at substantial opportunity cost. It's one of the great things about market economies that this work can instead be done by people who have chosen to specialize in it --- they do the work more effectively, at lower cost, and derive more personal satisfaction from doing it.

There is a really weird undercurrent to this subthread that I find unsettling. The availability of elder care services in the marketplace doesn't constitute a "gerontocracy".

> The availability of elder care services in the marketplace doesn't constitute a "gerontocracy".

that's not what I said and you're now arguing against a strawman.

I said that retraining of displaced laborers to be elder-care service providers is moving in the direction of gerontracracy, and that if the trend is extrapolated enough (perhaps to the point of absurdity, but I was making a speculative point, not a comment about the current state of things) then it is easy to imagine funneling young people into that industry as alternative job opportunities are less and less available. that would be gerontocracy.

Wider availability of services for older people as a response to market pressures does not "move us in the direction of gerontocracy". The market "funnels people" towards elder care services by increasing the relative compensation for the field, and by making the jobs easier to obtain, which makes the jobs more attractive.

>> Why wouldn't they be a significant part of the economy?

Because they don't have any money. Retired people either don't have a lot of money to spend or they tend to be very conservative in their spending since they don't have a regular income. If you want to increase the amount of money they have, you're looking at increased government handouts which come from taxes, which come from the people who are working. BTW I don't consider social security in the US to be a handout, but it does theoretically come from taxes on a persons previous income.

They in fact do have money, as do their families. When we note that senior care is an increasingly important part of the economy, we're not saying that's because we're allocating more government funds to them; it's simply because there are more seniors to care for.

If those 'elders' lives can be meanginfdly improved with care, than the resulting GDP from their payment to service providers is as 'productive' to society than anything else.

What the hell is the economy for otherwise?

Most of the economy is not based things that grow the pie massively like 'new energy forms' and 'more powerful computers' etc..