[devonkim]

The children will likely end up moving into their parents' homes and paying off their parents' medical bills with reverse mortgages leaving the once young at mid-life or later with nothing to inherit and no job prospects in these areas typically away from major metro (and increasingly, employment-availability) areas. This will leave most Americans in the positions before WW2 about given there will be few assets in the hands of most Americans again.

I'm seeing housing prices in suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas dropping as lack of viable jobs in these areas combined with crushing commutes to cities makes these locations terrible for those still needing to work. There's an alarming number of people I've heard of commuting from West Virginia into DC and from Richmond into DC enduring 3+ hour commutes as cities that used to be self-sustained economies now become suburbs of the largest cities, and the trend is going to continue with a few deviants that buck the trend like remote workers or homesteaders.

Where I live, the local economy is driven by two demographics - tourists and local retirees sprinkled with some of the wealthiest households in the US living here part time to avoid paying state income taxes. Much of the US is eerily similar to this pattern and it's extremely depressing to think of a way out of the spiral where almost all of our money will go into paying outrageous mortgages / rent with lower-paying jobs and the few in the middle class are in finance, tech, or healthcare.

[losteric]

Whats even more fun is there other major problems approaching on roughly the same timeline...

- Less developed nations will be transitioning to a population crunch (WSJ 2050) with huge ramifications on global economics/politics

- fossil fuels (especially oil) reaching depletion or becoming too expensive to extract

- climate change impact in full swing, serious disruption to even domestic agriculture

- Ubiquitous AI, and all the associated social unrest of a deprecated generation of workers

Ultimately there's just too many people. Society doesn't need 8 billion humans anymore, the US doesn't even need 300 million... Arguably what youre describing is an emergent solution to that problem. Now we've reached the point where the next generation will need to support their parent's slow death instead of raising the next generation of children... That's going to wreck society's ownership of the future in a big way.

(Mobile, excuse the poor formating)

[jsprogrammer]

>Society doesn't need 8 billion humans anymore

This is self-contradictory. Society is exactly the humans that exist.

[kyllo]

It think it's more like, human society is collectively deciding that optimum human population size is less than current size, and adjusting reproductive behavior accordingly.

[jsprogrammer]

Isn't the human population increasing?

[kyllo]

It is still increasing, but the slope of the curve is decreasing. It will peak in the next few decades and then start to decrease if current reproductive trends continue.

[jczhang]

Right, the issue of overpopulation is huge. It's going to need a different kind of society with very different values than the ones we have today. Capitalism can't grow like it has been once we realize the issue of overpop and work to reduce it. We have a crazy new world coming. And the transition has be fast.

[cmdkeen]

Or alternatively human ingenuity adapts and overcomes - Malthusians have been consistently proved wrong in their constant cries of overpopulation. There is still plenty of land, plenty of ability to grow food to feed us and plenty of advances being made in areas which will allow that to increase. We've already seen a vast decrease in the number of people living on less than $1 a day across the world enabling many countries to start reaping a demographic dividend.

If the pessimists can quote fossil fuel depletion then surely I can optimistically promote fusion, carbon capture etc. Capitalism has been one of the greatest success stories of humanity.

[Spooky23]

I never understood how one could embrace prophecies of doom in this day and age. We live in a near golden age of plenty, and the train hasn't slowed down yet.

[timr]

"We live in a near golden age of plenty, and the train hasn't slowed down yet."

If by "we", you mean "citizens in the most prosperous cities of the world", then yes.

If you mean "people in most of the USA", then I have some news for you: the train's wheels are locked, and sparks are flying while everything skids to a stop. It's absolutely shocking how much of the country has declined in prosperity in my lifetime. The smaller cities near where I grew up -- places that were thriving small towns as recently as the 1980s -- are nearly all trapped in downward spirals of poverty, debt and addiction.

If you mean "the citizens of this planet", well...for most people, the train never left the station. Even in modern "success stories" like China, you don't have to try very hard to find appalling levels of poverty and despair. A few have become incredibly wealthy, but mostly, people are struggling to keep up. In the third-world? Forget it. Yeah, people can pay for cellphones now, while they're dying of preventable diseases due to filthy water.

Optimism is one thing, but it takes a Silicon Valley (aka Leibnitzian) view of the world to claim that this is a "golden age". Mostly, a select group of people are getting richer, while everyone else stagnates (or just barely inches forward).

[drob]

> Mostly, a select group of people are getting richer, while everyone else stagnates.

Actually this isn't true. Middle classes in the developed world are doing poorly relative to the richest in the developed world, but global poverty is on a steep decline.

Throughout the developing world, economic development is pulling hundreds of millions of people out of poverty at breakneck speed. Check out some of the data here, for starters: http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-pr...

[MaysonL]

Bucky Fuller outlined the problems facing us in his book Critical Path.

To quote Abebooks's description: "Critical Path is Fuller's master work--the summing up of a lifetime's thought and concern--as urgent and relevant as it was upon its first publication in 1981. Critical Path details how humanity found itself in its current situation--at the limits of the planet's natural resources and facing political, economic, environmental, and ethical crises.

The crowning achievement of an extraordinary career, Critical Path offers the reader the excitement of understanding the essential dilemmas of our time and how responsible citizens can rise to meet this ultimate challenge to our future."

[cmdkeen]

In 1981 since when we've moved on from the Cold War (political crisis), massively decreased world poverty (economic crisis) and moved from an era of 14% inflation in the West being considered something economics couldn't address. On all of those measures we're doing much better than in 1981 - surely that demonstrates our capacity to improve and overcome problems.

[subsection1h]

In the US, the median retirement age keeps rising, and it's rising far faster than median life expectancy. My idea of a Golden Age of Plenty isn't one in which people punch a time card until they drop dead.

[sixQuarks]

You know that famous YC question "What is something you feel most people are wrong about?"

Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine, believes the answer is overpopulation. He says it would be a disaster to stop population growth. Read more here:

https://edge.org/response-detail/23722

[losteric]

The WSJ 2050 series of articles supports that. However population is shrinking in many parts of the world, despite government attempts to force growth... This is going to have a tremendous impact on the global economy and political unrest.

On the other hand, thats a good way to reduce humanity's contribution to climate change

[gotchange]

> This is going to have a tremendous impact on the global economy and political unrest.

Why do you associate the decline in population numbers with political unrest? Are you referring implicitly to the phenomenon of immigration to make up for the falling numbers and the typical and usual problems that come along with this development?

[losteric]

I wasn't referring to the US with that line. We'll suffer but we're just along for the ride.

What do you think is going to happen when China finds itself with > 1 senior for every working age citizen, with a male-skewed population? Worse yet, what happens when China's heavy investments in AI/automation pay off? A dictatorship of 1 billion that has it's jobs permanently filled by machines while it's citizens struggle to raise their parents, working in overcrowded cities, with little hope for their own future? A country that's already rapidly depleting their agricultural resources through poor management, with dire projections ~20-50 years out?

That alone isn't a pretty picture.. But then remember that India's next door with similar problems, and the two aren't exactly buddy-buddy. Inevitably both countries will have to lean on regional allies to power through, but that might bring in the US (via S.K./Japan, today). And then we've got Russia upstairs, their future is a bit harder to see but today they're the nuclear-armed wildcard oligopoly... one that's not on friendly terms with the US's sphere of allies.

Then there's the middle east. If you think today's bad, wait until their oil money starts running out as climate change keeps turning up the oven. That's just adding fuel to the fires, millions of culturally alien people flooding relatively homogeneous societies already under pressure from their own needs.

And then Africa... yet another wild card. Today the various countries are in various states of development with mixed weak alliances to the East/West, but there's a massive population boom coming. No one is really certain where that's headed. Maybe it becomes the next China (selling environmental degredation and cheap labor), or maybe we'll end up with an under-developed continent of high unemployment/desertification. I'm really curious to see how the various countries land on that spectrum.

Taken alone, the Americas don't have a particularly risky looking future. South American drugs, guns, immigration, revolutions, old news for the US... though mass deforestation/desertification will be a tragedy with serious climate impact. Europe might build some walls but they're not going to war with each other again either. Australia probably won't play a big role unless it gets invaded. But the other big continents? I can't see the future, but today there are many red flags of something much worse.

[javajosh]

Or the kids will say, "I'm sorry, but I'm moving where the jobs are, and I'm going to have a life of my own. I'll come visit you once a year, but I'm not giving up my life for yours."

The good parents will say, "Good! Don't sacrifice your chance for happiness for me. I'll make it through."

[icebraining]

And where are the jobs?

[khuey]

The coastal urban areas and Texas, not the rural south or midwest or rust belt cities.

[devonkim]

This is a terrible comment in hindsight given I made it on Christmas but spending the holidays in rural Appalachia for years makes me ponder how oblivious people in tech are to the realities of their countries. Enjoy the holidays, folks and go talk to everyone - get out of your comfort zones and experience something completely crazy perhaps. We have the best living standards worldwide in the history of the planet but we have a long way to go before we can achieve the humanist dream of providing the opportunity for each person to work hard for their dreams and realize them. I hope that during the holidays as a time of reflection we look for our common struggles and work towards creating human consensus rather than the every day popular rhetoric of creating division and controversy out of their own desperation to put food on the table.

[sholanozie]

You pretty much hit the nail on the head here. It really is alarming to think that we have not started to plan for this almost inevitable scenario in ~20 years time. We need to begin re-thinking our role as humans in an economy which increasingly does not require us.

[partisan]

How do you plan for the collapse of the economy?

[losteric]

Start by having level-headed discussions about the value of life.

I know a lot of families taking on massive debt to help pay for their parent's old age. Five-Six figures here and there to extend their parent's lives by a decade or two, saddling themselves with debt and leaving the next generation with no assets... Likely after moving the entire family to a decaying suburban city. All so the previous generation can stick around with a much poorer quality of life.

Health care has a far larger impact than the number on the bill. We need to openly talk about life and accept the inevitableness of death.

[mhurron]

I wonder if you'll be so ready to give up your life right around retirement age instead of trying to have it extended 'by a decade or two.'

It's so incredibly easy to say when you're simply throwing others lives away, rarely do people do it with their own.

[losteric]

I'll fight tooth and nail for every minute of my own independent life... But I would never dream of crippling my children's future just to exist in an "assisted-living" retirement home. Personally, that's an undignified life that's not worth living... modern day vampires.

Again, this is just my personal position regarding my life's value vs my descendants. I'm advocating the questions, not my answer.

This is a hard problem, which means the questions are hard to ask and the answers are difficult to accept... Death has never been easy. However it's a conversation that families and society at large need to have.

Culturally, we are lagging behind what science can do... We can do so much but never stepped back to ask if we should. Society needs to make conscious decisions instead of blindly following our biological instincts.

[sholanozie]

The first step is to invest, as communities, into producing as much food as possible locally in order to lessen our dependence on the global economic system. We have the technology to turn all those shuttered Targets and malls into indoor farms powered largely by renewable sources. An ironic side effect would be the creation of jobs and a reduction in the net cost of feeding a city.

[hueving]

Locally grown food is an unsustainable luxury that doesn't work for large portions of the US because there is not year round farm worthy land close enough by to sustain the population.

[douche]

You could do what people always did, and grow crops that keep through the winter. You're not going to be eating fresh kale and tomatoes in January, you'll be eating your turnips and beets and potatoes and apples out of cold-storage, and making bread with your oats and corn and wheat that you harvested in the fall.

[sholanozie]

Did you read my comment? I propose using currently-available technology to grow food indoors.

[grogenaut]

What's the difference in energy cost from farming indoors in an area that can't support it normally and growing things in season in areas that can and transporting it? Got any studies to link? I'm curious. Heat is incredibly energy costly so I'd be interested in seeing a calculation.

[icebraining]

Why not just move somewhere with arable land?

[sholanozie]

That's what most people will do. This current refugee "crisis" is nothing compared to the vast migrations that climate change will instigate.

[nine_k]

How about job availability?

[icebraining]

Oh, I assumed we were talking about a post-jobs era. The idea that growing food to sustain a community can be done as a after-hours hobby sounds a little naive.

[cryoshon]

Yep, not to mention these people who are struggling to take care of their parents are dealing with medical bills and debt slavery of their own. They can forget about owning a home or car. They can forget about having children, as the money is needed to care for the old. They can forget about retiring, as they have no savings. Wages have been stagnant since their parents' careers were at their start.

The banks will be extracting wealth from the fading boomers until their last breaths, leaving their children with no inheritances and a large debt of their own.

[branchless]

I hear this "inherit housing riches" a lot and I'm glad to see you aren't fooled by it. Housing isn't wealth. The value of land represents the ability to make use of it.

If the support ratio slips (ratio of working to non-working) then if we are to maintain the living standards of the non-working we either have to have a big productivity leap or lower living standards for those in work.

Reverse mortgages aren't going to cut it. And as you say, what then when the millenials have to hand over the keys to their parents' house?

Land isn't a thing of value in and of itself if we can't work it.

The only use ramping land value has is as an inflationary tax by private banks on workers.

My $0.02 on this is we give the boomers+ a massive haircut right now. Just pull the rug right out from under them, their politicians and their banks.

[nugget]

Wyoming?

[paulddraper]

Florida, I assume.

[phyllostachys]

I would have guessed Las Vegas.

[devonkim]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_locations_by_pe... 2. Biltmore Forest, North Carolina $85,044

Buncombe county rank in state and per capita income: 19 Buncombe $25,665

The Vanderbilt family, descendants, and close associates have strong ties to Asheville and its economy, where the Biltmore estate is located.