this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
14 points (100.0% liked)
Politics
10176 readers
107 users here now
In-depth political discussion from around the world; if it's a political happening, you can post it here.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
- Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
- Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
- Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
- Social media should be a source of last resort.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The clickbait title is at least explained in the first paragraph:
The rest is basically that the government is trying to reverse this, partly by trying to increase wages and economic stability for younger people.
I know some economist will tear me apart for this but I don’t see where the big deal is. To me this is just a consequence of a bunch of factors like the economy and overall women education. I get that you end up with a weird lob sided age graph, but solving that feels like an engineering problem.
We have breakthroughs in automation every year. Every year a single citizen’s impact on overall GDP grows through productivity or efficiency. This is not even considering the impact AI/LLM/AGI will have on the next 10 years. I believe the focus should be on the positives of these trends. The environmental impact of a shrinking society for example. Let’s focus on those things instead of trying to convince people that adding more life to the capitalist income inequality machine is the solution. Adding more kids to the problem seems to only serve the top 1%ers instead of forcing us to have real serious discussions about universal income and what we should do with all the automation and efficiencies we keep creating.
The thing is: You need young people to support old people. This is irrespective of economic model; an upside down pyramid just isn't a sustainable demographical situation. This could change as automation gets better, but for now both UBI and increasing birth rates are necessary. You can see this now in Japan needing foreign workers because there are more jobs that need to be done than people.
There are also some jobs that just can't be automated, particularly around care for people (healthcare and education) and work that's too unique to be automated (trades, in general, particularly around maintaining/upgrading existing homes and infrastructure).
The fact that our economic system requires never-ending growth to remain solvent is so crazy to me. And somehow many of the serious economists don't see an issue with this.