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Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

I kind of like Longman's data but have never understood his sense of panic. It's as if he's stuck in some kind of time bubble in which the world doesn't suffer from a massive economic depression and a sizable excess of industrial capacity.

We have 10% unemployment in the USA, our jobs growth rate is so anemic that we're projected to take decades, plural decades, to recover to full employment, and productivity keeps going up. Thanks, but I'll wait until -- at the very least -- all my unemployed friends are fully employed in caring for the elderly before I start worrying about a shortage of humans.

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The world will change, news at 11.

I agree with the skepticism about his panic. There has always been the optimists and the pessimists, nothing new there. Projections >30 years into the future are mostly doomed anyways.

Moreover what often amuses me is how these analyses tend to ignore the predictable part of technological progress and how that negatively affects the relevancy of their projections.

We went from the first flight to the moon landing in 66 years. Autonomous cars are performing their first test-runs in real traffic today. Asimo & friends are demonstrating quite impressive tricks today.

Call me naive but personally I don't have the slightest doubt that a large portion of all jobs will be taken by robots in 60 years from now. This will not just change the job market or certain industries, it will fundamentally change how our societies work. He doesn't seem to consider that at all.

So, he's worried about the global population being half of what it is today in 2150?

2150?

140 years from now?

I guess his musings about 2150 are about as relevant as those that a person in 1870 could have made about today...

  I guess his musings about 2150 are about as relevant as
  those that a person in 1870 could have made about today...

Or even, less relevant, as technology, economy and population all change exponentially.

It's not at all naive to think that. Just look at the auto industry. Labour was cheap but it wasn't cheap enough so technology quickly stepped up.

To see what the most advanced futurists, namely Jules Verne, were thinking about the far out future, take a few minutes and read this interesting piece published in 1889. The story is titled In the Year 2889, here's the link http://wondersmith.com/scifi/2889.htm

Most of the elderly do not have enough money to be cared for, and the social security trust fund is empty.

Considering the number of jobs that have moved overseas, and the malinvestment that has occurred in the last 10 years, I'm amazed that the unemployment rate is only 10%. (Actually, it isn't....so many people have fallen out of the categories considered unemployed, it is an artificially low number...the real number is likely somewhere between 15% and 20%).

And if all the young people are in jobs caring for the elderly (for which no one has the money to pay for), who will grow food, build houses, manufacture goods?

China? Well, it's worked so far I suppose.

Most of the elderly will not need to be cared for, and will in fact be capable of working.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/329/5997/1287

(Ungated summary: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/INF/PR/2010/2010-09-09.html )

The issues are political, not demographic. In many western countries, old people (in their youth) voted in governments which promised to force their children to pay for them to comfortably retire.

> Most of the elderly will not need to be cared for, and will in fact be capable of working.

A very presumptuous statement, and not backed up by that study. While it is true that there is a large increase in life expectancy, there is a much larger increase in life expectancy beyond the point where the person can no longer work. Much of this could be solved in the future with greater attention to exercise later in life, proactive re-training for a career shift to accommodate reduced mobility, etc, this is not yet being done in a meaningful way.

> The issues are political, not demographic.

Bang on here. If you look at the actual math comparing what the boomers put into the system vs what they are taking out, and compare that to optimistic projections for the current working generation, it is pretty scary. This article touches on some of the issues: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/01/60minutes/main2528...

IMHO, a lot of programs and entitlements need massive, intelligent reform, and soon. And even then, I think a good deal of luck will be required as well.

One can come up with a variety of qualitative theories of how nothing bad will happen (you can't predict the future, new technologies, etc), but looking at it from a quantitative perspective, I just don't see an easy way out. I hope I'm wrong.

According to the paper, the ADDR (Adult Disability Dependency Ratio) will remain at about 0.1 in most countries listed for the forseeable future. In the US, the old age dependency ratio will increase from 0.21 to 0.38, but ADDR will increase only from 0.9 to 0.1. I.e., 2x as many old people, but the same number of people who can't support themselves (as a fraction of population).

That means that while there is an increase in old people, there is not an increase in disabled old people. It's not just life expectancy that is going up, it is also "disability free life expectancy".

> the social security trust fund is empty.

The social security trust fund contains something like $2.4 trillion. Current projections are that if nothing changes then it will continue growing until 2025 and not be empty until 2042. See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Trust_Fund .

All that stuff you've been told about how Social Security was bankrupt, and "reform" was urgently needed, and so on? None of it was true. I shall refrain from speculating here about the motives of the politicians and pundits who said it.

$2.4 trillion what? Government debt. T-bills. This is not wealth, but obligations to be paid by future generations of workers.

Heck, they could have $25 TRILLION in the SS trust fund, and it would be the exact same thing, the number is meaningless.

There is no trust fund. The government spends all the extra money social security collects. Yes, they do put in special IOU treasury bonds that have no value and cannot be sold.

All of the money for the "trust fund" comes out of regular taxes.

So let's say they have to dip into the trust fund for 100 million dollars, that means that the regular budget will have have to increase by either 100 million, or 100 million in services will need to be cut.

This is not sustainable and with the government hemorrhaging money left and right I don't see how that 2.4 trillion will ever be repaid. Unless the dollar loses most of its value through massive inflation, which would be very very bad.

> There is no trust fund.

That's a different claim, of course, and a totally unfalsifiable one. (Suppose the Social Security trust fund did in fact take the form of a big vault stuffed with dollar bills, or something of the kind. It would still be true that the government could spend them on other stuff if it wanted to. You could equally say that "there is no trust fund".)

> So let's say they have to dip into the trust fund for 100 million dollars, that means that either the regular budget will have to increase by 100 million, or 100 million in services will need to be cut.

The trust fund contains $2.4T (or whatever the exact figure is) in Treasury bonds. That money is already accounted for as money owed by the government. It's part of the national debt. The fact that there's a big national debt may well be a problem, but it's not a problem specific to Social Security. It's a problem with all the other things that the government has spent money on, effectively raising the money by selling (kinda) T-bills to the social security fund.

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