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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

yes, this is the thing I'm not quite getting from the "malthus was proven wrong" argument. Yes, technology increased food production, but that doesn't mean there isn't a carrying capacity to the earth. We have overfished. Fisheries are in decline all over. I guess you could say "no problem, we'll have lab created or grown fish and it will be fine" ok, maybe. But it's not going to be the same and the oceans won't be the same.

What I don't get from all of the demographic collapse hand-wringing: Somehow in the 1970s we got by with 1/2 as many people as we have now - why would a long, slow decline back down to that number be catastrophic? Why would stabilizing at a lower population be problematic? Sure, during that decline there's going to be issues, but once you hit a new stable population those would go away.

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One commonly perceived problem is the increase not just in the fraction of the population that is retired, but how long they will remain retired if provided with adequate care, or (more bluntly) how long it takes them to die compared to previous generations. Here in Germany the social system was established when most people died within two-three years of retirement age. Today they can expect to live for more than fifteen years, thanks in part to more expensive health care (cardiac arrest used to be effectively lethal, if not immediately then through subsequent arrests, now it's generally survivable with expensive care). The current retirees are entitled to this, having paid into the system, but current workers can look upon their own increasing contributions and the overall maths and feel uneasy that though paying more they may receive less.

The retirement age is now slowly being raised, and given time the system may level, but in the meantime "issues" will indeed present.

Raising the retirement age is one thing, but finding work for those retirees is another. Ageism is rampant (and especially in tech). Maybe that becomes less of an issue when more of the population is older, but I don't think we're there yet.

> Sure, during that decline there's going to be issues, but once you hit a new stable population those would go away.

I think you're compressing a lot of hardship into "issues"... It's not about total number of people, it's about demographic distribution. If half of your population is at retirement age, who is going to take care of them? Who will be working to generate tax revenue to provide the social services that you expect?

Also populations don't just stabilize, they feed back off of themselves. If half of your population isn't procreating, you get fewer and fewer babies which is a vicious cycle. There aren't many policy levers to pull during demographic free fall.

Easy, raise the retirement age.

The problems you are expecting from demographic free fall aren't going to happen for generations, and at any point during that time people could decide to start having more babies.

> Easy, raise the retirement age.

I'm not sure it's that easy. There are a lot of people who aren't able to work as they get older for medical reasons. And there's a lot of ageism that keeps older people out of the job market. Maybe that ageism lessens as the population ages, but we're not there yet.

That usually doesn't go super well [1]. Are you good with delaying your retirement 24 months for the greater good? If so, do you think that your fellow citizens would be?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_French_pension_reform_str...

Conversely, I think a lot of people would like to delay retirement and continue working, but they can't because they got let go after they were deemed to be "too old". It's a pretty common occurrence for people in their 60s. And then since your options aren't great you may as well be retired.

The issues might go away sooner than that, because I imagine - naively? - that a society full of old people would put lots of effort into reducing the problems of being old.

Having declined, the population might increase again, and decline again, but with fewer issues the more practice we have. Stability sounds unlikely.

> Why would stabilizing at a lower population be problematic?

1. There are no incentives to stabilize at a lower population. It is not like population are decreasing because of overpopulation.

2. It is workers / welfare recipients ratio that will be the catastrophic problem.

> catastrophic problem

with an easy answer.

Boomers will probably die off before that, but able workers aren't going to skip a meal for someone no one cares about.

> > Somehow in the 1970s we got by with 1/2 as many people as we have now - why would a long, slow decline back down to that number be catastrophic?

Because we've built an economic system based on the idea that you must, at all costs, grow. Stable success is insufficient and will be seen as failure.

And then we spent many decades programming people to believe this is the only thing that can possible work.

Nothing natural about this at all, it is just the result of the cult of capitalism.

Have we, though? Governments rely on economic growth to fund their plans. That means economic activity has to grow, which means ... something ultimately rather unclear about what people around at the time consider wealth to be. It doesn't mean "everybody into the spawning pools and get busy".

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