I'm supposed no one has mentioned the - sort of - deterioration in our relationships. back in the day it used to be a lot easier for two people up meet, fall in love, get married and have kids. I'm not saying that there weren't any forced marriages, but that's not my point. In the age of tinder we are exposed to more and more people and possibilities. So basically it seems like the average Joe and Betty keep holding off for the perfect mate, when chances are they already rejected them. I'm just observing that the typical meets are decreasing rapidly and could be to, at least partially, blame.
More to the point, there is a curious social stigma around having children before you enter your 30s that has developed.
The idea that you should "play the field" is part of it, but I'm not sure that tells the whole story. There seems to have been a concerted effort to reduce pregnancies among younger women. In fact, programs like "16 and Pregnant" and "Teen Mom", which follow young mothers in their teens and 20s, were, according to their creator, meant as a "cautionary tale" to reduce pregnancy rates. In modern culture, "rural hick" even conjures up images of a young mother. Not the image most want to portray, which is a powerful social tool.
Equally curious, once you enter your 30s all of a sudden the social norms flip to "why haven't you had children yet?", "the clock is ticking", etc. However, once you are in your 30s, there are some rather hard limits to how many children you can practically have.
As others have said, having children very early is unsafe, and it's a demanding job that requires emotional maturity to do well. Having children before you have economic independence is also a very bad idea.
But your 20s are also critical from a career point of view. Women still have to fight a lot of prejudice from employers, which translates into trying to show commitment to career by delaying children.
The UK now has a very soft "two child policy": you won't normally get paid child benefit for children beyond two. The US has a ludicrous healthcare system where simply giving birth can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Also, they don't call it labour for nothing: it's a physically demanding, uncomfortable process.
I think its less stigma but economic realities that are driving this. People have too much debt and not enough income and are too early in their careers in their 20s to comfortably take time off to have a kid or pay for childcare.
For what? Less than half of Americans, aged 25-34, have a post secondary education. Less than half of Americans in the same age range own a home. The same age group are much more likely to reject car ownership than generations past. Outside of those purchases, it is not common for young people to take on debt.
You no doubt describe a minority, but the majority aren't putting any effort into picking up the slack. Birth rates are falling in all walks of life.
> not enough income
Or too much income? There is a very strong correlation between being poor and having more children.
At the extreme, the women of Niger have over 7 children each, on average. Even the least paid people in America are living like kings in comparison to the people of Niger.
But even within America, the reason the "rural hick" is oft associated with young mothers is because rural areas tend to be poorer and poorer people are more likely to have more children.
> are too early in their careers in their 20s to comfortably take time off to have a kid
While the average reader on HN is certainly career driven, most people are not. "You need to focus on your career" is a line that has been used to deter 20-somethings from having children. I'm not sure that is the same as them actually focusing on their career. Most people simply find what work is available to them, trudge through the day, and then go home as soon as possible to not have to think about work again until tomorrow.
> For what? Less than half of Americans, aged 25-34, have a post secondary education. Less than half of Americans in the same age range own a home. The same age group are much more likely to reject car ownership than generations past. Outside of those purchases, it is not common for young people to take on debt.
But the job prospects and odds of financial security for people without a college degree have cratered, and so they're still unable to support a family. Pick your poison: either stable income but a shitload of debt, or no debt but no income, and neither is a good place to start having children. College in America now is damned if you do, damned if you don't.
> But the job prospects and odds of financial security for people without a college degree have cratered
Are you sure you are not confusing that with the fact that post secondary attainment is rising, which means that those who are unable to attain a post secondary education, and find work, due to challenges in their life (disability, for example) take a larger share of the lower education segment?
Let me put it another way, as that may be confusing. Take two people. Let's say one is a highly intelligent, hard working, person who had to drop out of high school to care for his ailing parent. The other a drug addict who dropped out of high school because the drugs started to take over his life.
The highly intelligent person has a job. The drug addict does not. His addiction has left him unable to keep employment. Given this scenario, 50% of those who are high school dropouts are unemployed.
Okay, now let's say the first person's parent got better and he was able to return to high school and graduate. He is no longer in the high school dropout category, but now the high school completion category.
That means that 100% of those who are high school dropouts are now unemployed. If you weren't paying attention, you might think that the job market for those who are high school dropouts cratered, but in reality nothing really changed except a rise in high school attainment.
> either stable income but a shitload of debt, or no debt but no income, and neither is a good place to start having children.
There is never a good place to have children. But the data clearly shows that the richer you are, the less likely you are to have children. How are you resolving that discrepancy?
> But the data clearly shows that the richer you are, the less likely you are to have children. How are you resolving that discrepancy?
Without taking a stand on the greater discussion here, I'd just like to add: birth control is not all that cheap, and poorer people are much less likely to be as educated on all the birth control options available to them anyway. I would also reason that the feeling of having limited life prospects would make one more likely to have kids as it becomes a larger milestone at that point.
> Less than half of Americans, aged 25-34, have a post secondary education
Are you sure? Unless you mean post-secondary education means graduating college as opposed to attending college without graduating, the information I could find doesn't support this (with the caveat I didn't find info specific to the 25-34 demographic)
There's certainly lots of people who attend college (with loans) and dropout. They presumably may have the worse of both scenarios, college debt and no degree to show for it.
Pregnancies at 16 have very real health risks and 16 years old are not ready to be parents yet, not ready to be independent either. There is nothing curious or odd about the end.
Have you seen any data to support this? I'm not convinced it's true, based on my own experience. It seems to me like what's changed is the range of possibilities for women, who can now more easily pursue educational and professional ambitions rather than settling down right away. There has also been a striking decrease in the social stigma of being a single "older" woman, which used to be seen as reflecting a woman's desirability.
In my subjective opinion, things have gotten better in this sense, rather than worse. But it's kind of pointless to say so without any kind of study, because my own experience is limited and distorted by my unique perspective.
I don't have tangible information, but what I'm referring to is what I know from experience in my social circle. Maybe, as you say, my perspective is distorted in some way. However, 15 years ago if you wanted to meet someone you had to go out and talk to people, which is hard and you're more open to hearing someone out. Today you open an app and swipe into oblivion and no one seems good enough. I've heard many people say that; both men and women. I've had people show me perfectly nice looking people they met through online dating and they either swiped right or rejected them after one date because they weren't good enough.
And again, it's important to marry someone you want to marry and not marry just because you're getting older or for the sake of it. Those marriages, more often than not, end in divorce. But I see a lot of people either using Tinder as a way to get as many one night stands as possible, or swiping away looking for someone perfect who they'll never find. I also know people who developed severe depression because they were on the receiving end of perpetuated ghosting.
I am, by no means, saying that online dating hasn't worked for people, but it just seems like it's done more harm than it's done good.
There are a lot of interesting things here, although some (like that first graph) are rather subtle. In particular, I'd point everyone to the graph over time of where straight Americans met their partners. To my eye, it has three distinctive elements.
First, finding romance at a traditional "third place" has been almost completely destroyed. Meeting a partner through family, neighbors, church, or college shows an undulation in the sixties, followed by a sharp downturn in the last decade.
Second, meeting partners through work or friends has ceased to be a replacement. The decline in e.g. church meetings was thoroughly offset by professional and social meetings until the mid-nineties, but those meeting sources have been declining since.
Third, the spike in online meetings, and the s-curve in bar/club meetings. Crucially, this happens after meetings through friends and coworkers flatline; they aren't just being displaced by online dating, they stopped prior to that explosion.
Alongside all of those patterns, we can add the rising age of first marriage, the lowering frequency of sex (overall and within relationships), the rising gap in sexual intent versus outcome in both men and women (i.e. how much less sex people are having than they want), and the gap between intended and actual family size. A lot of the most obvious relationship shifts over the last ~70 years seem clearly good, and seem to benefit the people I know. But the data overwhelmingly suggests that people are forming relationships later and with more difficulty, with outcomes further from what they intend.
Isn't the opposite true? That in the age of Tinder, meeting people is easier than ever - and so it should be more likely for someone to also fall in love with someone. I don't see how the limited dating pools of the past provide any advantage on this front. It doesn't make sense to me that people today would "hold out for the perfect mate" when exposed to a larger dating pool - my thinking would be that when people have met someone they have a good relationship with they will settle down. I also don't buy the idea that someone has already "rejected someone when meeting them for the first time, if they weren't interested they wouldn't have gone on the date.
Tinder only works for a subset of the population due to human behavior. Women largely select for traits that are a proxy for alpha status. The same applies to all online dating. There is a paradox of choice going on where there is so much available that everyone ratchets up their minimum requirements.
The bottomline is that I've seen it happen in real life, to people in my social circle and family.
I wrote a reply to another comment that addressed something similar. The best way I can create a correlation in the real world is this way: If you go to a restaurant with 20 choices it takes people much longer to order something as opposed to a restaurant that can fit their menu on one page.
It's some psychological paradox, or research, that I can't remember. Someone actually replied with a TED talk that touches on this matter.
Your Tinder comment made me think of Barry Schwartz and his "paradox of choice" where too much choice ultimately leads to more unhappiness because it sets the expectation that, will all these options, we should expect to find 'perfect'
Take cars as an example: if we were building Fort T models, then yes, they would cost peanuts (especially Chinese copies). But for every dollar of productivity increase we add two dollars of safety devices, emission controls and new shiny gadgets.
Making safer and less-polluting cars is a productivity improvement: it means people are getting better cars -- and everyone else is getting less likelihood of getting killed in a car accident, less health damage from other people's exhaust fumes, etc.
Right, but in the context of this discussion the cost primary function of the car (moving my butt from one place to another) has increased, or, in the best case, stayed the same.
Though, interestingly, the older generations, especially in rural areas, talk about driving as an event. Back in the day they would carefully plan trips into town once a week to gather supplies and run other errands. These days, nobody thinks twice about hopping into the car every single day of the week. The average number of miles per driver driven per year has certainly trended upward over the years.
The total costs may be as much as ever, but the consumption is also higher. The productivity gains have been realized by moving your butt further and more often.
Productivity is an economic term of art, which IS the context of this discussion.
Productivity in the non—services sector of the economy has increased dramatically. You can buy much, much more stuff per inflation adjusted dollar.
There remains rigidity in the market, which doesn’t generally make it easy for people to work 15 hour weeks to earn a 1940s income, but really, productivity for goods has dramatically increased.
That's not quite true. Automation has expanded at an explosive rate for 20 years. For many products, it takes nobody at all to produce them. How does that figure into 'productivity'?
I do not believe there are that many fully automated production lines and even those ... needs people to maintain them and build them and develope them and fix broken parts etc.
Believe it or not, its been happening. In fact if it isn't automated and is of any size, then it's been outsourced to Asia. When it grows to a sufficient size to warrant the fixed overhead of automation, it may return to the western world. But without the assembly-line jobs, giving lie to the idea that bringing factories back will create (many) jobs.
The 1% of 'old factory jobs' that are retained (Engineer, planner etc) won't employ many people.
No. More and more robots and systems will have to work to support the expanding, aging demographics.
We're going to desperately need all the automation, robotics, AI and related productivity enhancements we can get. Most likely we can't build it fast enough given the rate at which large population segments are aging, the demand will be staggering.
You forgot to bundle “solution to corporate greed” along with the other things you say we’re going to need. Today’s keepers of “automation, robotics, AI, and related productivity enhancements” are for-profit corporations who are beholden to their managers and shareholders. It’s those two groups who act as beneficiaries of the soils; certainly not public pension funds.
I find it rather naive to expect a causal link to materialize between corporate profits attributable to automation and solvency of government pension schemes. Corporations certainly wouldn’t do anything to help humans out of the goodness of their heart.
1. Things become cheaper. Maybe you don't need a car anymore since robot taxis are much more affordable. Houses become cheaper to produce, as well as the objects inside. Food is cheaper to produce.
2. Stocks in the "greedy corporations" do better, growing retirement savings.
3. Taxes on the profits grow, which can contribute to pension plans.
Automation is/has been happening at an explosive rate in the US for 20 years. The number of 'factory workers' has halved in that time. And the rate is increasing. So there's that.
If you live in a hardcore capitalist country like the US all the automation money will go straight to the business owners pockets.
We keep talking about automation like it is _going_ to happen in the future, truth is it's happening for 40 years, if not more. In europe politicians were promising a 30 hours work week and retirement at 50 in the 70s, all of that thanks to automation, you don't need to be an expert in this field to know that it didn't turn out that way.
You don't need be an expert to know that quality of life has changed too.
If you want to live like the 1970s you need a lot less money. No cable TV bill for your 19 inch TV. No cell phone or internet bill. Your car has an AM only monophonic radio (unless you splurge on an aftermarket 8-track player), and no AC unless you are rich. Those are just a few of the areas of life that people have upgraded.
I contend that if all the people who worked on the above were spread out to the jobs of the 1970s with just automation applied the 30 hour workweek would be practical. However people have chosen to use the extra time automation gives them to develop more luxuries in life.
"changed" is the keyword here, not everything got better. At some point you hit the diminishing return law. Did Uber, Facebook and Netflix had a greater impact on human life than hot tap water and fridges ? Do we need 3 new versions of iphones per year ? Same day delivery ? Did food delivery really upped your quality of life or are we just getting lazy and fat because we consider walking 10 minutes a chore ?
Technological progress is automatically assumed to be good, but when you take a few steps back and look at the big picture we're not much better than 50 years ago. We have more useless activities and gadgets to spend our hard earned money, that's for sure, did it make the world a better place, that's another question.
> However people have chosen to use the extra time automation gives them to develop more luxuries in life.
I don't think "people" chose anything, the elite are very happy with the status quo. Look at wealth inequality stats, it's very easy to see where the money is going, and it's not in the interest of "the people".
People choose it. Every time you take a uber you choose to spend money instead of walking. All those little decisions add up to less money in your pocket so you need to work more/longer hours to support your spending habits. You don't have to, your boss might demand 40 hours a week, but if you only spend 30 hours/week of that income and save the rest after some years you can retire early on your savings. (note I'm ignoring the risk that you die young!)
Most people want more luxury in life now. The result of that choice is they have to work 40 hours/week to afford it.
Uber, Lyft, and ride sharing in general have significantly reduced drunk driving in places without good public transportation (i.e. most of the US).
Wealth inequality stats are irrelevant if your bar for success is “how people lived in 1970”. You can pretty easily live a 1970 middle-class life buying unsafe, unreliable, highly polluting cars living in an asbestos insulated house with ungrounded electricity that’s sweltering in the summer.
Nobody is forcing people to use food delivery services. You can still go to the grocery store like folks did in 1970 and save money just like they did. Inventing something expensive but convenient doesn’t force anyone to use it that’s struggling to make ends meet.
Finally, you’re living in a fantasy if you think any non-negligible portion of the US can walk “10 minutes” to get a meal at a restaurant or even to get to a grocery store.
Look around you. You're surrounded by goods you could afford only because automation made it so. So sure, you can say "all the automation money is going to business owners pockets", but you're surrounded by wealth made possible by automation.
> If you live in a hardcore capitalist country like the US all the automation money will go straight to the business owners pockets.
Let's look at this through a moral lens. If you come up with an automated way to make mouse traps, who should profit from your invention? If you came up with it on company time, the business owners should. If you came up with it on your own time, then its yours. Diverting that money anywhere else is immoral and disincentivizes future inventions.
I don't know many people having or even considering children under the age of 30. The window to actually have them gets pretty tight, a mother aged 35 or older is considered a geriatric mother on the NHS (basically higher risk). I'm sure that a lot of my friends are going to find it difficult to have children as they get older, in contrast to parents in the 80s and 90s who were mostly having their first child in their 20s.
From my anecdotal perspective it feels like we are going to see population growth flatlining and global population starting to decline over the next 100 years. It feels like the data is moving in that way to back that up.
This could be a really tough problem to solve. How do we keep economic growth going if our main driver (human capital) is disappearing?
> I don't know many people having or even considering children under the age of 30.
We now value professional careers above everything else. You can't have kids and be competitive anymore. Half of the people I know who have kids basically delegates everything to caretakers, they see them 30 min in the morning, and 30 min when they get back to work and kiss them goodnight.
Instead of telling men to slow down and take care of their kids we tell women to forget about kids and follow men in their insane quest for professional conquests. Sprinkle a bit of consumerism over that and it's game over, kids are too expensive, why would people do that instead of buying a nice car, the new $2k smartphone or a trip to Venice to flex on instagram for imaginary internet points.
I'm also inclined to believe that the hookup culture plays a huge role in the trend, why would you want to settle down when you have a virtually limitless pool of potentially better mates available at the tips of your fingers. Newer generations are afraid of commitment and responsibilities, having kids in your early 20s is more stigmatised than having a one night stand every other night until you're 40.
> We now value professional careers above everything else. You can't have kids and be competitive anymore.
Do you have any evidence of that?
> Half of the people I know who have kids basically delegates everything to caretakers, they see them 30 min in the morning, and 30 min when they get back to work and kiss them goodnight.
And that’s fine. There is nothing special about biological parents being the ones to take care of kids. Daycare workers, grandparents, etc., love the kids too and are better equipped to keep them engaged.
> One analysis of 11 rich countries estimates that the average mother spent 54 minutes a day caring for children in 1965 but 104 minutes in 2012. Men do less than women, but far more than men in the past: their child-caring time has jumped from 16 minutes a day to 59.
I can't read any of the detail (no access), but look at the example graph for Danish mothers. It suggests that in 1965, the average time spent by a non-university-educated mother on childcare for an under 13 was less than 10 minutes. That's an extraordinary claim, and needs extraordinary evidence to back it up.
> And that’s fine. There is nothing special about biological parents being the ones to take care of kids.
There absolutely is an irreplaceable bond between natural parents and their children that can’t be replaced. If you spend time around a lot of kids it’s very easy to notice a happiness difference between those with a stay at home parent and those raised by paid professionals (who are usually taking care of many other children, unless you’re wealthy).
> Indeed, our parents and grandparents spent half as much time with their kids than we are spending today, and their kids (us) turned out fine
I mean, did we? The birth rate is dropping through the floor, marriage rates are down, and studies show women in particular are more unhappy than ever.
As my generation ages into their 40s I see a stark happiness divide between those that focused on their careers vs those that built families (strongly in favor of the latter).
Instead of telling men to slow down and take care of their kids we tell women to forget about kids and follow men in their insane quest for professional conquests.
This is really true.
It was just assumed that the “right” goal for women was the same career focus as men have always had.
It won’t surprise me if that changes in the future once families realize the cost of it.
I think it will change in the future, not once families realize the cost, but because families that have already valued kids have kids while those that didn't realize the cost die out.
That is because men were valued more. Women and female infested things were considered lesser. Being like a girl was insult, manning up was compliment.
Besides, it is not just about career and money. This forum is full of men who don't work solely for money. Who work for challenge, to feel like they can do something special, to compete, to be with collegues, because the job fits their personality well etc.
It depends. After all “women and children first” has been the historical norm. Men have been treated as disposable for the history of humanity. Men get drafted to fight wars, women don’t.
> This forum is full of men who don't work solely for money. Who work for challenge, to feel like they can do something special, to compete, to be with collegues, because the job fits their personality well etc.
I have a great job but definitely work for the money. I am after all enriching the founders, execs and investors. I don’t think it’s a great idea to glamorize working for someone else.
That was not historical norm really. It happened once on side of titanic partly and in most situations there was no ordering. Yes, men died in wars. Then you had areas with many women and less men. The men were the ones making decisions still, voting, owning property, having accounts and the ones who were supposed to be head of household and women the ones considered stupider and having less options.
Male physical power and inability to be pregnant had a lot to do with most of this. Obviously.
The end result was that telling men to be more like girls would amount to massive insult.
It is about work and profession being super glamorous. It is about aspects of it fullfiling human psychology in small and big things that you don't even realize until you looses it.
I replied in depth up thread but I don’t agree. You’re framing this in a very specific lens of a very narrow period of time and ignoring all of the negative stereotypes about men and positive stereotypes about women that existed at that time as well.
Mother's Day is the biggest day for retailers. I wouldn't say that things typical mothers of yesteryear did were lesser. Speaking as a 43 year our mothers were less in the public eye but they definitely in our hearts.
That is not enough for men to take "you should be more like women" as compliment or inspiring ambition back then.
Typical mother of yesteryear was soccer mom and it is used as insult to this day. Typical mother of yesteryear would call with friends a lot, because she spent most of time completely alone in house otherwise - and that was but of jokes often. She would make big deal over non-existent color shade differences (this might have to do with men being more likely to be colorblind). When she complained, one just knew she is oversensitive.
It does not really matter how they really were and that their husbands were alright respectful guys. What matters is that there was that collective stereotype that added up to "I dont want to be like that" for many people.
> Instead of telling men to slow down and take care of their kids we tell women to forget about kids and follow men in their insane quest for professional conquests.
It is not just abstract us telling men and women what they should focus on out of other context.
It is more that being more like women was not appealing enough proposition to average guy. That would be something emasculating, something other guys would mock. The cool guy considers feminine things stupid - regardless of whether the thing would be actually good for him.
The reverse works differently. Being more like what guys do was something inspiring for enough women. Not all, but enough. The cool girl is often the one that crosses gender boundary - even when it is not actually good for her.
To add to sibling comment[0]. As I grow older I marvel at how the world behaves as if we are still in high school. Where I went to school there were definitely cool kids and most of us guys aspired to be in the football/rugby team. Our excuse back then was being teenagers. Now in hindsight, I realise there is no such thing as better. It is all relative. A man working a thankless corporate job for a lifetime only to be given a watch, to be managed by an MBA who knows nothing about the actual work isn't better than a woman who spends time raising her children. Man ends up with a watch and not so great relationship with his children and the woman ends up with deep love of her children. It is all relative. Some people love corporate life others find it suffocating. I wish people would stop saying something is better. By all means, doors should be opened for everyone so they have a chance to try it out. Maybe being a stay at home mom isn't for all women, that's fine too. We also need to grow a thick skin and learn to ignore people who make it seem like their chosen path is the right path. There is no such thing. Everything has pros and cons. There was great post on HN the other day, "What We Want Doesn’t Always Make Us Happy".
You’re cherry picking various stereotypes from different time periods and not including the bad stereotypes men had in the 20th century as well: the oafish dad, the wannabe player, the nerd, dumb jock...
None of this says much about people’s place in the world, more that 20th century sitcoms went for easy laughs.
The reality is that being a mother has always been seen as a powerful important role (because it is). It wasn’t until the late 20th century that diminished often at the hands of feminists.
You seem focused on the idea that telling a man to be like a woman is an insult but for as long as I’ve been alive people have been telling men to get in touch with their sensitive side, do more duties around the house...
I don’t think you’re accurately describing the big picture, just one slice of one piece of mainstream, late 20th century culture.
The 20th century culture is what is relevant to changes by the end of 20th century. Thomas Aquinas opinions or Ancient Rome opinions are much less relevant to the outcome.
Are you saying that a men or boy would take "you are like a girl" as a compliment? Or that femininity was something men would inspire to? Because afaik, while the girl who "is like a boy" is breaking rules, the expression is less humiliating then other way round. A boy in pink is more mockable then girl in blue. This alone tilts a lot peoples decisions on what they want for themselves and which wishes they show in public.
Mothers were not powerful except limited power over children, not in the usual "can get her way effortlessly in important things" way. It was not matriarchy for long time. I am not saying they were slaves or something. There were places where female social status depended greatly on number of children. In that sense, being mother was advantageous. But calling it powerful position is a stretch.
But for that matter, it is not like fatherhood was some kind of super powerful position, through it added social status where family was valued too. Father had great power over children, but calling it powerful position is a stretch too.
Yes, there are changes and increasingly more toward pushing men more toward that household works and emotional contributions. That is framed more as duty and work. Less as something men organizations push for as thing-men-should-want. Men do play more with small children or wash dishes etc. But the mass interest for changes in the past was the other way round.
There is difference between "I want better career for me" and "you should wash dishes more often".
First of all I don’t think telling someone that they should be more like the opposite gender has ever been well received. I dispute your point that telling a woman to be more like a man is less of an insult than the opposite statement.
I also think you’re downplaying the importance of mothers not just in the family unit but in society as a whole. Mother’s Day has always been a bigger deal than Father’s Day. Aside from optics the personal influence that a mother has traditionally had over children of both genders is second to none. That’s very powerful. Having a career isn’t very powerful for most people. You have multiple layers of people above you (your “superiors”) that have a very large amount of control over your life in exchange for a potentially livable wage. You can be fired at any time, for almost any reason. I don’t think divorce happens as easily.
We need to make it more common for people to have children first, then once the youngest is in school, only then, for the stay at home parent to get a part time job (or possibly study at university part time), and when the kids are in their teens switch to a full time career.
People are living longer, there's no reason you can't have a career second. But biology is such that kids need to be first.
And no, kids aren't as expensive as people think. If you wait till you have lots of money you'll never have the kids to spend the money on.
It could be more a product of the current economic system that requires both parents work full time jobs and have a career path. Its possible that in the future we could see a different system that actually increases birth rates.
Also, demand for fertility techniques for couples over 35 is going to drive a lot of research into that area.
It isn't the economic system, it is the lifestyle. I know a number of families where one parent stays home with the kids and they do fine. They don't "keep up with the jone's", but they have enough to eat and a warm roof. (Interestingly, in half those families it is dad staying home while mom works)
This is a subtle difference, but I think it is important.
It does sound like an economic system still. Anecdotal evidence, but of the people I know, those that can afford single-income household with kids are those with pretty high income, or eligible to social support, or really running two-income home with one person doing work in the "hidden economy" (e.g. gigs, or trading stuff via Facebook groups). "Just enough to eat and a warm roof" is pretty much the definition of living in poverty in the western world; no surprise people don't want to settle for that.
The vast majority of the population has chosen that lifestyle. mrmoneymustache.com lives a modest lifestyle and is able to afford it - he is also clear about all the luxuries he has to skip to do it.
I don't think it's just anecdotal, some data suggests this is happening. The book 'Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline' talks about this. The only place in the world with high total fertility rate is now subsaharan Africa, even countries you might think have a lot of children don't really anymore. China is well known to have a low TFR now, but even India appears to have reached replacement level, although something called population momentum will mean population continues to increase for a couple more decades, and then decline.
The states with better human rights, medicine have gone below replacement while the others have not progressed. South India with ever-lower voter share is becoming irrelevant to national politics, in effect a punishment.
It’s not really that narrow. Historically, people had an extended reproductive window. Elizabeth Schuyler (Alexander Hamilton’s wife) had half her kids after 35, three of them after 40. Risk goes up, but it’s still pretty low through the 30s. The NHS labeling is based on the medical community’s attitude of reducing risk at all costs, without regard to cost-benefit analysis.
I still think this notion of saving up (401(k) and superannuation) is going to fall in a heap. What good is money if no one is around to do the work? Demand will increase and all that saved up money is killed by inflation. The government is going to have to step in anyway, and do what it always did with pensions. That is, redistribute tax to care for people who are limited in their ability to do it themselves... because the tax will represent current labour than the false notion of nebulous saved "value".
Government redistribution won't work because it will just result in even more inflation. The only solution is to bring those people back into the workforce.
This could be a really tough problem to solve. How do we keep economic growth going if our main driver (human capital) is disappearing?
1. There is so much waste and distributional inefficiency in our global economy that there is plenty of room for growth by correcting these
2. Fewer people means that less growth is required to maintain and continue to improve living standards
3. Human capital isn't disappearing, its rate of appearance is slowing; there will always be new humans unless the global birth rate goes lower than the global death rate and stays that way for a long time
4. Human productivity is becoming decreasingly dependent on human capital over time
It's one of the most predictable features of capitalism that after a while any productivity gain becomes widespread, and on doing so its profits are distributed among consumers, not producers.
Distributed among consumers (via price reductions) and via _owners_ (via profit increases). Those graphs you've probably seen showing that the richest ~1% of the population owns an ever-increasing fraction of the assets suggest that quite a lot is going to owners rather than to consumers.
This prediction ignores the probably best-funded area of research on the planet, that is inventing ever more complex business models in order to retain the gains instead of distributing them.
> How do we keep economic growth going if our main driver (human capital) is disappearing?
The majority of the population does low or unskilled labor. This can be replaced by machines. Reduced focus on low skill work will also give more time to the individual which could foster more innovation. The future may have less people, but if technology removes the need for basic work, then it could end up that in absolute numbers the relatively small future population could have more advanced human workers than today's population.
> going to see population growth flatlining and global population starting to decline
Western population growth is flatlining. I have Beduin neighbours, who I have terrific relations with, who have over twenty children each. Some have over thirty, like the guy I buy my gas from. Some have more than that.
One guy that I know of, but have not met, is mentioned every time the subject comes up. If the Wikipedia list of most children had less of a Western slant, then he would be around number sixty on that list.
I do know that the one with 53 children (last time I heard, which was about a year ago, so the number has gone up) had more than the "allowed" four wives. I do not know enough about Beduin culture to tell you if he just went over the limit, or divorced, or what. I'll ask.
Growth will have to stop anyway at some point because the world is limited and it'll be a while until we can mine the solar system. Either that or the notion of growth will stop mattering (we enter a simulation, post-scarcity society, or society collapses)
As they say it's easier to picture the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Couple of interesting items from this US census data (month 6):
1. There are more people over 74 than under 5; there are more people over 80 than under 3.
2. x = [12, 62], y = 74 - x
It's a near linear relationship between those older and those younger for this age range, i.e. those older than 62 outnumber those under 12 and those older than 12 outnumber those under 62. Make note that the y-intercept equals the under 5 comparison age.
3. There's a large difference between the populations of those age 63 and 64, those born around 1946-47. The baby boom
Maybe but we also need an increase in quality of life, not a decrease. While a plateau (and even reduction) in number of people would not necessarily be a bad thing, it needs to be in a kind of controller fashion to avoid a broken age pyramid, ending up with too many elders incapabke of substaining their means by themselves, and too few working age people to support them, ending with both group living below the means we should strive for them to reach.
The age pyramid in some european countries, in china, in japan, ... Is scary, and not because of the decline of population it represents, but because unless we also change and adapt society accordingly there simply won't be enough people to pay for those who can't work anymore, and the few that can pay end up paying more than their fair share.
It's a huge issue, and nobody wants to change it much, making it feels like we will wait until the situation explodes before adapting.
But that ship has sailed. Population changes are notorious in how extremely predictable they are. If we wanted a slow decline we needed to act 20 years ago.
Right now the numbers look suspiciously quiet, hiding the fact that there are a number of countries growing ridiculously fast (sub-Saharan Africa), and a lot of countries (all of "the West", except the US) in accelerating decline.
So there will be increasing immigration despite low (global) population growth.
And this is over and done with. It's a fact at this point. Policy today can only determine if in 20 years we want to cause +0.2% in kids or -0.2% in kids. I mean anything short of a meteor strike or new spanish flu won't really influence anything sooner.
If they are predictable then many people have done an extraordinarily bad job at projections. Because there are a lot of real howlers out there then if you look at proven wrong population projections of the past both from Malthusian demagogues and official sources trying to do extrapolations.
Although it is true we can only "add" at 0 for new humans if you want workforce ready new humans immigration from elsewhere is required.
Well Malthusians are frankly crackpots trying to make a political point which the numbers (especially now) don't support. So that they come with numbers that are found lacking ... is not a fair attack against serious people.
Which specific forecast did you think was so bad ?
Right, it's a balance. A small decrease may not impact quality of life but a larger one would. Imagine Steve Jobs living in a world of population 1000. He'd be living like a homeless person foraging for berries in bushes in the forest, no matter how good his entrepreneurial skills may be. We need people to innovate, build, grow, trade with each other to achieve high quality of life.
A lot of technology comes from population increase. Necessity is the mother of invention, and more brains and resources means you can do more interesting things and things which increase the quality of life and production of everyone else. If you want technological advancement, innovation, and better life for everyone-- we need more people. And if you want space exploration and expansion, we need more people with more ideas and resources.
Ultra-brief summary: it may be that technological progress is actually tied to population growth, not economic growth - and population growth is slowing down. So unless we can figure out a way to switch the driver of scientific and technological breakthroughs from population (more researchers) to economy (e.g. machines that would think for us), we're gonna stall the progress of science and technology too.
Or. Use the existing population more effectively? Educate everybody instead of just the rich few. Subsidize technology again. Understand that basic research is the foundation of later development.
But we have to hope for a rational society for all that! I will be far easier I agree, to just grow population instead.
Using the existing population more effectively through structural changes would IMO very quickly hit diminishing returns. But it could be viable with various kinds of technologies designed to improve individual and organizational cognitive performance; hell, I think this is the very way from here to the "machines that think for us", so it's a part of the solution.
Wait - we don't need geometrically expanding technological development. It becomes sufficient at some level? So 'diminishing returns' might not be a thing, if we can get to where we need to be with some level of population.
And I'm pretty sure we have a long way to go on using existing population better. We probably don't use 10% of the very-smart people - they live and die in some lonely village somewhere without ever being recognized. Remember Ramanujan - one of the few to find his way (almost by accident) into the academic world.
> Wait - we don't need geometrically expanding technological development. It becomes sufficient at some level?
I don't know. I might reconsider "sufficient" after we've cured aging and had 100 years to play with molecular nanotechnology. It's my belief that we have a long way to go still.
> And I'm pretty sure we have a long way to go on using existing population better. We probably don't use 10% of the very-smart people - they live and die in some lonely village somewhere without ever being recognized. Remember Ramanujan - one of the few to find his way (almost by accident) into the academic world.
100% agreed here and I've used this argument in the past in support of helping to improve living conditions in developing nations. That said, even if we could 10x the intellectual output of the world through non-technological changes, what then? How do we get to the next 2x or 10x improvement?
To be honest that looks more like a history of really bad projections and extrapolations that failed to even try to account for many other variables let alone the correlations and their causations.
It brings to mind one flaw of the game series Civilization as a game with fixed assumptions - it always assumes food surplus maps to population growth. While it certainly poses a limit past a certain point more food isn't going to help any more than twenty randy husbands will cause a fertile woman to have a full term baby every month.
Food to farm labor's link has been downright economically broken with mechanized farming. People and even land aren't the limit to production for first world farming ability but the limit past which it makes no economic sense to do so.
Hyperbolic growth requiring a singularity to sustain does not imply hyperbolic growth alone is going to give a singularity - unless there are no other limits which will become readily apparent as it is approached.
A lot of technology comes from population increase too. Necessity is the mother of invention, and more brains and resources means you can do more interesting things and things which increase the quality of life and production of everyone else. If you want technological advancement, innovation, and better life for everyone-- we need more people. And if you want space exploration and expansion, we need more people with more ideas and resources.
Do you think less people make progress faster? What's your target level of depriving life of existence? How do you plan to keep mankind robust from extinction events on a single planet? You might just need more people. What do you think our technology would look like if we had 10x less people for the last 100 years?
More people make more progress faster. Aren’t you glad your parents didn't decide the world would be prettier or work better without you in it? If great minds like Einstein, Bell, Tesla, Da Vinci etc., were still alive and productive today, the world would be a better place. You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear. The burden should be higher. Have courage.
We know it makes more sense to use materials from outside than having to drag them out of Earth's gravity well; I don't see why wouldn't that apply to humans as well. Let's have kids there when we get colonies going, it'll be a new and wonderful experience; there's no need to rush.
> You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear.
On the contrary, you're the one playing up fears like extinction events. People are not having kids because they don't want to, not because point78 asked them to.
Because the shape of the population pyramid is changing. From a wider base when the fertility used to be high to about everyone surviving to their 80s. It's this momentum that will keep the total population increasing a couple of decades.
Read Factfulness by Hans Roslin if you want to learn more about this phenomenon and similar questions about poverty in the world.
There is a great book that lays out the case that the boomer's decisions, policies, votes, actions, and inactions have destroyed our environment, our economy, and our future. The greatest generation handed the boomers a world with a bright future; the boomers have squandered it. Instead of investing in critical infrastructure that would ensure a better future for their grandchildren, they have decided to shackle us with financial ruin.
And then they blame millennials.
The book is : A Generation of Sociopaths
Thanks to the boomers, you will never be freer (as in liberty and privacy), you will never experience the same economic opportunities, and you and your grandkids will pay for their short sidedness long after they are dead.
Yes. Total species populations grow exponentially, and all of the growth is at the lowest age bracket. The number of living members in each birth cohort also decreases exponentially as the cohort ages. It follows straightforwardly from this that population numbers by cohort will be on some log scale.
We can naively estimate the relative size of these cohorts like this:
So we should expect a little under a 3x difference in favor of 0-5, which is in the rough ballpark of the 2.6x difference that the chart shows for 1950.
Note that actual scientists work on this, and use much better methods than this (with confidence intervals and all that jazz). However, this method is a decent "try it at home" approximation, and still much better than comparing the number of years in the age cohorts.
Sounds about right. If people don't die young, the population pyramid becomes a rectangle, so there should be approximately the same number of people under 5 as above max age - 5, let's say 80.
65 used to be retirement age (for men at least), it clearly needed raising years ago, but was hard to do politically in many countries. It is finally being raised. When pensions were first introduced they were meant to run 5 years, not 20.
In the UK, at least, you could argue we're left paying for a generation of Baby Boomers who are swanning about on cruises, golf days and health spas on pensions they never paid even half towards.
Most are perfectly able to work for another 10 years at least (and if you're younger than 50 you'll have to work those extra 10 years), but for some reason we need economic migrants for economic growth. Even though we're not building anywhere near enough homes, schools, hospitals and transport infrastructure for this mass immigration, and we're not training enough nurses, doctors, teachers. We are effectively just shunting all the economic problems of the end of continual growth 20 years down the line. We even scrapped bursaries for student nurses! Utter madness.
And then, rather ironically, it's this same generation who overwhelmingly voted for Brexit to even further destroy their children's and their children's children prospects because they're not happy about the changing face of the Britain they're not even going to live in.
> in the UK, at least, you could argue we're left paying for a generation of Baby Boomers who are swanning about on cruises, golf days and health spas on pensions they never paid even half towards.
There is a massive (and sadly too common) social bias in this comment: this is not the life of retired baby boomers, this is the life of retired upper-class baby boomers, but the majority of people isn't like that.
The upper class people also live a lot longer than the lower one (a decade or more depending on the region) so they cost even more.
And since they are generally in a much better shape at the same age, raising the retirement age affects the lower class much more than the upper one.
Also, the life expectancy didn't change as dramatically as you'd think since 1950 in that context: in 1950 the life expectancy of a 60 years old British citizens was 77 years. Now it's around 84 years[1]. It rose, but not that much (it didn't go from 5 to 20).
The middle class is where all those cruises are being sold to.
They have huge disposable incomes due to final salary pensions and no mortgage to pay, or they've downsized and unlocked huge sums in an over-inflated housing market because we stopped building enough homes year on year 40 years ago when Thatcher banned the councils from doing so.
Pensioners now have higher disposable incomes on average than working people in the UK.
The average person under the age of 50 today will never have it as good as the baby boomers, unless some major, socially liberating, tech advance happens.
This is indeed correct. But a 60% increase isn't a 400% one, and talking about the increase of healthcare cost is very different from complaining about «lazy and selfish babyboomers going to the spa instead of working longer».
These are the two things I criticized in the original comment.
> 65 used to be retirement age (for men at least), it clearly needed raising years ago, but was hard to do politically in many countries. It is finally being raised. When pensions were first introduced they were meant to run 5 years, not 20.
Working beyond 65 is fine for some people but there are many cases where this isn't. Take any job requiring physical labour like construction. There is only so long you can do those kinds of jobs. Also the fact that you've been doing them for decades takes its toll, physically.
So what's the solution there? People still need stuff built. So you only work construction until you're 40-50 and then what? Change careers? To what exactly?
Even for jobs that aren't physically demanding, many people have jobs that if they lose them when they're over 50 they may never work again. This could be completely not their fault either. Their company could go under or get bought out. It could be economic downsizing.
The problem, on HN at least, is that there are young people in a high-demand high-paying profession who have never experienced a recession making sweeping statements like "just work until you're 70" as if everyone else is in the same boat as them.
As much as you might be a highly paid tech worker, come back here when you're say 55 and those same companies who were fawning over you as a new college grad won't give you the time of day. In tech we haven't really dealt with this yet but I guarantee you it's coming.
I don't like generalizing by "generations" but this is something where I see a divergence in younger and older coworkers.
Older ones literally say, "I don't want to learn [insert relevant skill] because I'm too old."
Younger coworkers seem to come better equipped with the mindset that they will have to continually unlearn and relearn to remain relevant. And to counter your point about a recession, many of them started their careers in a recession and I see it in their conservative approach to employment.
I think this is more about a complacent mindset with people who may not have recognize that they have to adjust to continue to be valuable. I've known people who were downsized and squandered ample opportunity like free tuition to change careers. I've known others who've successfully parlayed a physically demanding job to one less physically demanding because they knew they couldn't do that forever.
What company, exactly, is going to want to invest time and money training a man in his late 60s to do a job that will afford him a reasonable lifestyle in a large metropolitan area?
I think you are assuming there are no transferable skills and the person would have to trained from square 1. As an example of where this isn't the case, I know an older lineman who recently moved into a design slot. Sure, he needed some training but he also brought a wealth of other value, like design for maintainability
>65 used to be retirement age (for men at least), it clearly needed raising years ago
How old are you? Have you tried working at most jobs (not just some office job) as 65+? Have you tried programming as such?
If you mean "paying pensions for people 65+" was too much, and we needed to cut that, I'd understand. And sure, raising the retirement age is one way to do that.
Still, it's not the best way to solve the problem. Nor is it "needed" for any other reason (e.g. because people of 65+ today are more capable than in the 70s).
>Most are perfectly able to work for another 10 years at least
You can't pay for someone to not work for 20 years; who's going to pay?
There isn't enough wealth to cover it. All the wealth of all the billionaires in the world is only the EU healthcare budget for five years.
Productivity is what generates wealth, and we can't afford to have a large class of people merely consumptive. People aren't producing enough to do it.
If you want to give 20k/yr to someone it has to come from someone else. That's putting younger generations into a dire financial position.
Work of some form has to be found, even if it isn't covering living expenses for pension-age people. Some form of off-setting the cost has to be implemented, or else there'll be a political and economic crisis.
Since 1950 the retirement duration only grew by 50% (the life expectancy at 60 went from 77 years to 84 [1]) can you recall how much the productivity grew from that time ? If we cannot afford to pay 50% more when productivity grew by a factor 3[2], there is indeed a problem of repartition.
The relevant growth % is the total number of life-years being funded by retirement.
Since the total populaton of US in 1950 was 150, and is 300 million today -- assuming equal distribution of ages -- that's a 4x increase in life-years to fund.
ie., 2x for population size, and 2x for length of retirement
And worse, the distribution isnt equal, ie., there are more of the population today in retirement than in 1950.
So it's at least 4x the number of years, and probably closer to 6x.
No need to take the population into account because I used the per capita productivity.
And do you have figures for the doubling of the retirement duration ? As I showed above, it only increased by 50% in England and I'd be surprised is the American raise was higher since life expectancy is lower there (in part due to a less efficient health system).
Well it's a rather difficult calculation to make in this fashion.
The relevant data needed is total number of retirement hours funded, total productive output, and total "other" essential spending.
What's also happening is the cost of healthcare is increasing, quite dramatically, and eating up productivity gains.
I have a strong suspicion that we're way ahead of "general essential" social spending today, compared to 1950s, per-captia; productivity gains included.
>You can't pay for someone to not work for 20 years; who's going to pay?
For one, people pay pension savings throughout their careers (in most civilized countries).
Second, we've already discussing UBI for life, compared to which "paying people not to work for 20 years" is nothing.
Third, money to pay people is an artificial construct, which is not really what's missing. We have the wealth to sustain them. E.g. we have increased productivity dozens of times over the past 100 years, and yet we don't enjoy those fruits in increased leisure time or work-less access to food, health, studies, shelter, etc. If anything the latter have inflated many times over. Where are those "trickle down economics"?
>Productivity is what generates wealth, and we can't afford to have a large class of people merely consumptive.
We have increased the productivity of the average worker dozens of times over the past 100 years. How's that wealth distributed?
The idea is that your future pension is paid by yourself gradually over your productive years. Generally speaking of course - some have no work ever, some do and pay more, some die before they get some of it, and so on.
Complex calculations though, since we can't know the situation 40 years ahead, perhaps not even 5 years ahead.
This is the thing I don't get. Do you not understand that it's not sustainable? That this generation will quite probably be the only one to ever get away with it? That the following people who are 20 now will not have these luxuries when they are 65?
The sad fact is that expecting to be in a high-flying job your entire career and to only climb is no longer viable. Yes, older people will have to take lesser jobs, but that's what we're all going to have to do.
We can't afford to pay for people to have a second childhood when they can still do lots and lots of jobs.
It is also worth remembering that today's 65 year olds are nowhere near as run down as those 50 years ago. We've got better diets, better medicine, generally less demanding jobs, etc.
And I'm 40 and my 78 year old father only really started detiorating noticeably 3 or 4 years ago and would still be capable of many, many jobs.
I appreciate some older people won't be able to, but it's only fair that being unfit for work due to infirmity should be assessed as any other disability and paid for like any other welfare.
I’d argue it’s working every healthy day of your life is what’s not sustainable. You shouldn’t be paying people to do anything. People can earn their retirement, whether it’s through pension, social security, or personally funded IRA/401k or a reverse mortgage on property accumulated and paid for over the previous decades.
45 years of work should be more than enough economic output for one person to be able to get a “second childhood” as you call it. What the heck are they working for in the first place?
Speaking from Finnish perspective here. The thing is that the boomer generation did not save their pensions. We have a system where future generations pay.
It worked ok back when population grew. Now it doesnt. Basically they voted that their kids will pay for their pensions and then didnt have enough kids. So now we are quite screwed.
> 45 years of work should be more than enough economic output for one person to be able to get a “second childhood” as you call it. What the heck are they working for in the first place?
By simple approximation, assuming a real rate of return between 2% and 6%, you need to consistently save and invest 10% to 30% your working life income consistently for 45 years to fully fund about 20 years of non-work / retirement. The whole point of the pension problem is that most people are not able or willing to do that.
You've seen the charts, right, showing productivity vs wages since the 80s? We enjoyed a second era of industrialization, with huge advances in efficiency and productivity, and again the benefits were all captured by those at the top.
If society had been structured for the last 4 decades like it had been the previous two, we'd be talking about lowering the retirement age.
I'm in my mid-40s and I'm already burned out on work. I am desperate to retire. I can't imagine working past retirement age, just because I am still capable to do so.
Ditto, but despite having mortgage paid off and healthy 401k, I have 2x kids college expenses coming up over the next 12 years. I’m resigned to working till I drop dead. 63, or whatever Medicaid will be at, is the minimum.
As a college student, you really aren't doing your kids any favors by paying for their college. Its not going to teach them the value of money when they have never earned anything themselves and their tuition is magically paid.
Taking loans and working in the summer/internships to pay it off, without being reliant upon your parents is the ideal to aim for.
After all, I think Warren Buffet said that he plans to give enough to his children so that they could anything, but not enough so that they can do nothing.
As someone who paid his own way through college, I disagree entirely. There's nothing heroic about taking out loans. Not having to worry about college expenses allows one to focus on college and all the benefits that college has to offer. I never got to take an internship. Wanna know why? Because I had to ensure that I had enough money for the next semester, and I wasn't going to go from making $10 an hour back to $4.25 just so that I could go be an underling... I couldn't have afforded the next semester.
Buffet is giving his kids retirement money, not yacht money. They've all been in the work force for decades.
He's still giving them far more than the price of a college education.
I guess I am really biased, being in Tech. Internships pay around half of what full times make, which as a college student is an insane amount of money. It's more than enough to graduate debt free.
I can cash flow it as long as they go in-state, then use the saved cash to buy a cheap house instead of paying for rent. No way I’d have them take out a loan if I can pay for it; just debt slavery.
Even if we used double of his everything it wouldn't be nearly enough. If you are into taking stuff away from other people for your own benefit, I suggest invading/conquering other countries.
Mean income for retirees aged is $103,000 and below [3]
So, the amount of money spent on a single largely meaningless war that the US is solely responsible for could easily increase the quality of life of quite a few people for quite a few years (if you don't dole out $140,000 in its entirety but spread in smaller chunks over the years or invest in infrastructure, medical care etc.)
Oh, if you meant to save the money spend over about two decades and use that instead to pay out retirement for one to two years, then sure. However, retirement lasts more than one to two years. One or two decades are more likely.
>This is the thing I don't get. Do you not understand that it's not sustainable?
There's nothing about it that it's not "sustainable". Pensions aren't and shouldn't be a pyramid scheme (of younger vs older generations etc).
Let's consider UBI.
A UBI of $1000/month for 300M Americans comes about $3.5 trillion/year. That's around 18% of the US GDP.
And that's flat out giving the money.
Now reduce that by the current welfare spending which is $1.2 trillion (and which you could replace with the UBI, or perhaps just keep the 0.2 trillion of it for special cases), and you get to $2.5 trillion/year, or ~13% of the GDP.
For comparison overall government spending was 38% of GDP in 2017.
Of course "free pension" would be far less than that amount, because this UBI amount is calculated for 300M people. Whereas pensioners will be only people > 65 y.o or so -- a much smaller number.
We're getting to something like 5% of the GDP or less.
And that's assuming everybody is equally entitled to that money. Which people already having wealth need not be, living even less people entitled to that "free pension" -- if you have a million in savings you don't really need that $1000/month, do you?
And of course, workers pay (or can be made to pay, with an automatic tax of say 10% month, as most civilized western countries have) for their pensions throughout their careers. So a large amount of pensions can come from that.
Not to mention the pension money wont magically disappear -- it'll be reintroduced into the economy (and further taxed etc).
With sane housing laws and no crazy lifestyles, people can live just fine on $1000/month. In fact they do just that, even with less, all over the world, including in places with more expensive food and consumer products than the USA.
The two things that need to be kept low are rent (which should be: the US has ample space to built on --nobody said pensioners have to live in Miami or NY, and should not be costing more than a few tens of thousands for the kind of constructions that pass for homes there) and healthcare (which in the US is laughably overpaid for what it offers -- I have been asked to pay $200 for perfectly common and safe procedures one can do themselves, and which in other western countries you can have at your average pharmacy for $10).
This generation is likely the only one to have a pleasant retirement because our world is headed for 3 degrees and more of warming. It's unlikely that social security systems will survive the mass migration of climate refugees.
My 38 year old friend installs security systems in homes and businesses. This job involves crawling around attics in 100+ degree heat. Trying to imagine my very healthy 60 year old father doing this is... Well it's not happening. I suspect my friend's body will be shot by 50.
Friend of mine is a builder, mid-40's and had to give it up as his back literally an S. He's doing music now, not making much atm, but least he is active and not giving up on himself as many do alas.
Then you have professional footballers - don't see any old ones doing that.
So yes, some trades/professions do take a toll and in effect have age/fitness limits that do not correspond to retirement age.
Alas, nobody tells you at school the work-expectancy cut-off age for many a profession. Hence many will do a trade, that they will be unable to do in later life and not everybody wants to or is able to be a manager or business owner.
But many people fail to plan their pensions, let alone their working/income planning for a lifetime.
FWIW many (and I'll agree) would say 35 is when you start to really notice your age catching up with your body and downhill from their.
Agreed, except for the professional footballer comment, if you can't save for retirement while making more money in a year than most people make in 10, that's on you.
Agreed, the remuneration in professional sports tends to more than compensate an early end of a career. Was an example of how a career is not limited by some arbitrary pension age but the physical impact of that career and ageing.
Alas not all career paths afford remuneration to accommodate the aspect of age limitations and the impact of that career upon health.
A lot of this could be addressed by employers being more comfortable with part-time or less energetic employees; I'm sure there are a lot of people who would want to do some work during the week, but not 40 hours, nor the 10 hours of commuting that would entail.
The "make them go back into the workforce" argument needs to deal with the realities of aging and low-level chronic illness, or you end up with Amazon-style painkiller dispensers on the walls of the workplace.
(Note that a lot of the state pension debate is basically the same as the UBI debate. But most of the well-off pensioners you see are on either deferred compensation from more generous times, or savings, or property value)
It’s almost as if we should have a low friction way for people to contract for companies, doing simple non-physical labor, for as many hours a day as they desire.
Something where the investment in the worker is low enough that the company doesn’t need to optimize for someone who will perform at the highest level or have some upward career path over time.
It’s a nice fantasy, but nobody in the US is going to FIRE based on giving Uber rides without being very nearly in a financial position to FIRE without it.
In order to make this happen you have to get rid of age discrimination laws. If you want someone to hire 'less energetic' workers, those employers need to be able to pay them 'less energetic' salaries. That's going to be a tough sell for voters who tend to be in that age block.
It's not necessarily a barrier if you can measure their output - it's not age discrimination if you have a clearly measurable variable that relates to productivity and use it for pay. The old "piecework" model.
It's also not unreasonable or discriminatory to argue that part-time workers can be paid less because they have more overhead .. so long as you apply this across all PT workers.
My company has people who retire at 40 with full pension. To get that though you have to work in some nasty conditions for 20 years. We do our best to make it safe, but there is only so much you can do to make liquid iron safe. I retire at 65 like most people: developing software is not nearly as nasty.
I'm reading Garbage Land at the moment and she mentions that garbage collectors have an incredibly dangerous job, more dangerous than policemen or firemen, for example.
They're risking their lives to do a necessary job, and in that case I see no problem with the early retirement.
It's the traditional number at which to re-evaluate whether you'll need and/or feed someone, innit?
Along those lines, though, I can't help feeling that this result has got to be largely because of the increases in life expectancy rather than falling birth rate (although in some countries the latter is certainly a factor).
I'm Australian and my parents "retired" at 58. They're not quite on cruises and golf days but they're perfectly capable of work even now at 63 if they really wanted. They just don't want. Is it their fault or the governments?
The premise of working for cash is that no-one really wants to do it, which is why you need to give people money in exchange for the work.
So if they don't want to work, and they are entirely self funded, good for them! It's their "fault" and I'm happy for them.
But if they have enough cash flow only because of the current Australian franking credit setup (it no longer merely prevents double taxation, it's a subsidy for investors), tax breaks on Superannuation, and so on, then it's the Government's fault for incorrectly calibrating the benefits in such a way that tax payers end up paying people to be unproductive.
We've also seen low tax rates for most of the rich countries for the last 20/30 years, meaning they could save more and retire earlier, while underfunding pensions and infrastructure for future generations.
It's not just the government's fault, it's short-term thinking by both the government and the voters. Tax rises became anathema in the UK, even for socialist governments like Tony Blair/Gordon Brown.
My parents and other retired people I know feel they've earnt their retirement, when they really haven't. And will be one of the few generations out of the preceding and following to have this sort of luxury of sitting around for a couple of decades doing effectively nothing. Whether it be the rather middle class cruises, golf days, spas, etc. or sitting down the pub or going to bingo or pottering around gardening or sunning it up in Spain or whatever.
They say things like "I worked hard for 35/40 years", I say "So what? The following generations will have to work 50, 55 or even 60 just to pay for the fact you worked 35/40".
At least until automation/robots/AI whatever free humans from work, if it ever happens.
Then again, being in the industry that I am, and most of us are, I will also probably be one of the lucky ones.
> >My parents and other retired people I know feel they've earnt their retirement, when they really haven't.
> Hasn't anyone who can afford to retire earned their retirement? What do you mean by "they really haven't"?
I think what mattmanser is point (if this has to do with state-provided benefits and not strictly employer-provided benefits, though arguments about market performance can be made there) is that, in many cases, these benefits either 1) will not exist at all, 2) exist in a severely reduced form, or 3) will have the goal posts raised periodically (30 years until retirement for you means your children will have to work 50 years until retirement).
If that is a correct interpretation of mattmanser's argument, then he/she is effectively saying that current retirement benefits receivers are receiving their benefits only by encumbering future generations with a greater burden than they bore.
As an aside, this brought to mind the notion that perhaps there is such a thing as time inflation, where past promises don't add up in the future and thus result in moving the goal posts. I've seen this crop up more and more with state pension funds in the United States (which always seem to have assumed the most favorable (and unrealistic) rate of return on their investments).
N.B. My understanding of this stuff is pretty vague, but here's a quick summary of the arguments I've heard on the matter:
I think the grievances might be to do with the amount of money paid into a pension pot versus the size of that pot. At least in the UK, many companies offered generous final-salary pensions, which (as the name suggests) are based on your income and index-linked. These have been basically phased out now, since they're too expensive (i.e. I think they generally cost more to fund than the person originally paid in + any accumulated investment returns). However, for those people who paid into such a scheme, there's no recourse for the scheme providers but to subsidise these expensive pensions with the rest of the communal pot. This means that they necessarily must offer less generous pensions to those who are currently paying in and will draw a pension in future.
I think there are also some arguments in the UK that oil wealth was used for short-term subsidies (e.g. tax cuts), rather than put into a long-term investment fund, like Norway. The people who benefited from that are the people who were alive at the time, and the eventual beneficiaries of their wills.
I don't know how accurate this all is, so would welcome a more informed perspective too.
I'm actually on a final salary scheme but I'm only 33. If I stay in this job for a long time and work for promotions I could end up with a massive sum without even putting anything aside. If I also invest my money into the stock market then I'll be very well off in old age.
One thing about free healthcare and no real property taxes is that its a lot easier to retire early. If they lived in a coastal city in the US they probably couldn't retire because they'd need 40k USD per year in healthcare costs and property taxes.
The government’s primarily, but theirs too because they are the govt., or at least their cohort, friends and neighbours.
The proper thing to do is raise the retirement age to 75, reflecting gains in longevity and economic reality. Other options include some form of part-time mandatory volunteering component to earn the govt. portion of the pension.
However we do it, we are breaking a promise, if you will, that society made to these people when they entered the work force, in that if they endure the indignities and inequities of a salary/wage position for 35 years, then they have earned the freedom to spend the remainder of their time as they see fit.
A promise made by preceding generations that didn't think it through, not by us or people younger than us.
Politicians are now implicitly or explicitly saying that such a promise is clearly not being made to us, why should it be honored as they're the ones who didn't 'pay it forward'?
Right, and that’s exactly what’s happening across the economy. Old programs are being locked, and new entrants are being shunted into modified programs with fewer benefits. We suffer because we know what we’ve lost, but future generations may not know the difference.
The point is most people dont want to work, but society needs people working to provide food, build the things we use, create gas/electricity, help the sick etc. Its an argument about the fairest way to do this.
Allowing some people retire in their fifties while lots of poorer people are looking after them does not seem fair to me at least. (unless perhaps they started working FT at 15)
I do think we should move away from a static age and test the idea that retirement is calculated somewhere between the last 10%-15% of the average life span. And maybe we could do away once and for all with the charade that Social Security is a fund you pay into to receive later on in life and just figure out a better way to distribute X% of annual income taxes to retired folks.
Some unfortunate changes to UK pension laws mean that for some people who hit the - you have to retire or change jobs as you would get massive tax penalties.
One of my friends to early retirement from BT as other wise for his remaining time he would be working for a pittance
Well it is probably the highest number that still fits the threshold for under five. Under five itself is also arbitrary in that it is "show how the demographics have gone older".
Entering late 20s and I’m basically hoping for a next life similar to my parents generation. This generation has so many requirements thrown upon us that made living a modern day prison and only unless born into an upper class family that would pay for what have become necessary requirements to succeed past the apartment life. Sure, some people are anomalies and had events making the contrary but it just hinders the truth of the majority who didn’t necessarily get worthless degrees but still struggle to pay of student loans in an crippling economy for people without much money. I’m not sure if this is all the product of student loans, not enough homes being built, the all sexes need to equally work, and or people controlling capitalism getting even more greedy. Something is making it where having a kid would make a financial disaster even worse.
People got confused and started thinking there was something virtuous about not having kids.
Which, in my opinion, is one of the most anti-human sentiments that you could construct.
In a weird way, one could make an abstract argument that choosing not to have kids has an element in common with murder. It’s reducing the amount of lived human life.
Regardless, on a practical level we are seeing non-replacement birthrate in advanced countries ... and people are complaining about it ... while making parenting as unpleasant as we can possibly imagine ...
This is also part of the same philosophy, but turned sideways. Instead of viewing children as a resource they are viewed as a huge obligation, and we seem to feel a little guilty about bringing them in to the world.
> People got confused and started thinking there was something virtuous about not having kids.
It's simple resource management really. We have three alternatives: 1. Keep multiplying, keep our lifestyles and fuck the planet until it's unhabitable, 2. Keep multiplying but drastically reduce our impact on the planet by rationing ourselves, 3. decrease the multiplication rate so that at some point we can sustain our lifestyle while not fucking the planet up.
I can't see how wanting all humans to live decently is anti-human. Until we have good enough confidence that future humans will live decently, spawning new ones is risky, and spawning so many that our numbers keep increasing is just reckless.
> In a weird way, one could make an abstract argument that choosing not to have kids has an element in common with murder. It’s reducing the amount of lived human life.
So is not spending every waking moment (and every sleeping moment, where possible) having as many kids as you can.
I can see the slogans now: "Abstinence is murder", "Contraception is murder", "Save a life: fuck!".
> People got confused and started thinking there was something virtuous about not having kids.
Bringing people into a world that's going to be destroyed fairly within their lifetime because we can't get over the profit motive to save the climate is completely immoral.
