The irony of it is that in a few decades, you end up with sub replacement fertility rates in all the societies with good governance and social and welfare systems, resulting in those social and welfare systems (eventually) failing.
While I am not suggesting eliminating financial/logistic independence between generations within a family, but it is an interesting side effect.
Edit: to respond to vkou’s comment below, I don’t see any empirical evidence for this to be true. For one, the work involved in supporting old, disabled people is highly undesirable (meaning high prices for labor). And second, I do not see automation advancing quickly enough to change all those bedpans.
Also, the more resources a country spends on healthcare and defined benefit pensions (far and away the most expensive part of caring for old people), the less resources a country has to spend on other stuff (that benefits younger people).
This is evident in the fact that nursing facilities cost $10k to $20k per month for round the clock care, and the common adage is you don’t want to be stuck in a $10k per month facility.
There is, of course, truth to some of the productivity surplus being eaten by rentiers, but from what I can tell, nowhere near enough to make up for the economic boost that fertility rates of 4+ give.
Given productivity gains in industrialized society, there is no reason for why high QOL can't be sustained with a smaller percentage of the population working at any particular time.
The demographic implosion narrative is just a nativist distraction from the investment class eating all the productive surplus.
This is the most succinct description of the boom bust population pyramid realized and the economic system first exploiting and now in fear of the go forward I've read. Well done.
It’s succinct, but it says nothing of how to get there from where we are. It doesn’t talk about the constraints of the status quo and its inertia, let alone how any approach plays with the human psyche.
What I’m saying is that sure, I think I agree with GP that there is much getting in the way of us doing more with less. Namely inefficient, greed, and inertia. But how do we get out of this trap?
Actively engage in politics and realize the problem will take decades to incrementally solve, while taking tactical action in your life to protect yourself from current state. What the latter looks like is a broad conversation depending on what your potential trajectories are, what you're optimizing for, and what you're defending against.
Put the metaphorical oxygen mask on yourself first before you try to help others, and then, if you so choose and are able, defend and empower others as your sphere of influence (a function of time and resources itself) grows. Defend and empower the human, broadly speaking.
I say nothing about how to get from where we are to where we should be, because there are many solutions. Each flavor of political system claims to have one.
For a list:
* Shift some of the tax burden to profits and rent-seeking, and away from income.
* Front-load elder care costs by setting aside a bigger share of productive work done today for pensions.
* Aggressively reduce costs and waste across the economy. Cap student loan amounts. Mandate what % of tuition has to go towards instruction. Make medical school free, make doctors pay it off through X,000 hours of service.
* Deal with supply shortages for inelastic goods. Housing is a major one. Tax-advantage denser developments. Or turn cities/states/provinces into developers themselves.
* Fix low-hanging fruit in public health. Make vaccination free. We lose more economic output in sick days than we do from people not getting a flu jab.
* Fix waste in medical-adjacent spaces. Mandate that eye exams provide a pupil distance measurement. There should be no reason for why I can't get an eye exam, and then directly plug those numbers into an online glasses retailer, that will ship me a pair for $30.
* Wild-ass stretch goal: Make public transit/biking/walking/scooting preferable to car ownership wherever feasible. The societal cost of universal car ownership is huge, even if we only measure in dollars, and disregard all the other negative externalities.
* Reduce spend on zero-sum and negative-sum industries: Ban gambling, tobacco, alcohol advertising.
Or, you know, if you don't like any of these active-involvement ideas, another alternative is to shrug your shoulders and pray that the free market will sort things out before you get bread riots and a revolution.
Or, shrug your shoulders and just import more young immigrants. Preferably with skills that we need, other countries can spend their resources on training their youth, and we'd poach them once they are in their prime productive years.
All of the active-involvement ideas come down to 'There's a pit somewhere in our economy that we shovel endless amounts of money into, that is not efficient at producing material goods that people need to live. What can we do to reduce the fraction of the economy that is wasted in them?'
While I am not suggesting eliminating financial/logistic independence between generations within a family, but it is an interesting side effect.
Edit: to respond to vkou’s comment below, I don’t see any empirical evidence for this to be true. For one, the work involved in supporting old, disabled people is highly undesirable (meaning high prices for labor). And second, I do not see automation advancing quickly enough to change all those bedpans.
Also, the more resources a country spends on healthcare and defined benefit pensions (far and away the most expensive part of caring for old people), the less resources a country has to spend on other stuff (that benefits younger people).
This is evident in the fact that nursing facilities cost $10k to $20k per month for round the clock care, and the common adage is you don’t want to be stuck in a $10k per month facility.
There is, of course, truth to some of the productivity surplus being eaten by rentiers, but from what I can tell, nowhere near enough to make up for the economic boost that fertility rates of 4+ give.