[Derpdiherp]

Surely this is a good thing? We (as a species) have been growing exponentially in an unsustainable manner. It'll be tough as we transition into looking after more elderly with less of a young population to support them - but in the long run it's for the best.

[tremon]

In the current economic climate, it is not a good thing. Due to the past 50+ years of policy making, a large part of the able-bodied workforce is excluded from contributing to the GDP. And as long as economic policy (both business and government) is still driven by the myopic vision that GDP is all that matters, all those "old people" are a burden, not an asset.

In itself, having a more reasonably distributed age distribution is neutral (in my view). But it is a consequence of two good things: the population boom is leveling off, and healthcare has improved tremendously around the globe.

[pjc50]

> a large part of the able-bodied workforce is excluded from contributing to the GDP

Could you explain? Recent policy seems to have been about pushing everyone possible into the workforce, even the not-able-bodied. By every means short of actually putting up wages.

[douche]

We've got almost a third of the US population that has dropped out of the workforce completely[1], with another 5.5% unemployed but still trying.

[1] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/americans-not-...

[tremon]

I was referring to pensions and early retirement mainly. Yes, there have been recent efforts to shift the retirement age upwards, and I'm certainly not saying that people shouldn't be allowed to retire at all. But a population-wide cutoff at a certain age seems arbitrary, and I've seen plenty of examples around me of people starting self-employment in their 60s, simply because employers could no longer legally hire them.

Of course, the other side of that coin is that there needs to be enough jobs available to employ everyone, and forcing retirement is one way to reduce a labour surplus...

[marcosdumay]

It literally means there is high unemployment of young people.

It can also be pushed into meaning that young people are mostly barred from effectively investing and creating successful business.

[s_kilk]

One huge downside would be that older people tend to skew to the more conservative end of the political spectrum, and can end up drowning out the voices of the young.

See the age breakdown of the recent Brexit vote for one example. I also remember with the Irish referendum on gay marriage in 2015, there was much worry that the older generations would swing the overall vote to "No", despite the legislation having no impact on them.

Worth thinking about: How many Brexit "Leave" voters have simply died of old age in the two months between then and now?

[pc86]

> One huge downside would be that older people tend to skew to the more conservative end of the political spectrum

Only a downside if you (a) disagree with them; (b) for whatever reason, feel they are not entitled to their beliefs

> and can end up drowning out the voices of the young.

Funny how when your opinions are the majority it's democracy, and when they're not it's "voices being drowned out."

> Worth thinking about: How many Brexit "Leave" voters have simply died of old age in the two months between then and now?

It's not.

[rwmj]

Trouble is the elderly have pensions, often backed by the state, and therefore are (or at least feel) immune to the financial consequences of their decisions.

[cmdrfred]

You are correct if everyone gets to vote. If the elderly with little to do all day have an easier time getting to the polls than the working class single mom supporting them, then you have a problem. I say make election day a national holiday. The AARP likely disagrees.

You don't even have to do that, I'd make July 4th election day in the states for example.

[nradov]

While I don't particularly like the AARP, they haven't said anything against making voting day a national holiday. And with voting by mail it's totally unnecessary anyway. In CA now even postage is free so there are zero obstacles preventing the working class from voting.

[shostack]

Except there are issues with it. For example, I ordered my ballot and never received it. Fortunately I work somewhere with a flexible enough schedule that I could vote in person, but it isn't reliable enough for me.

There is really no compelling argument I can think of for why there shouldn't be a federal holiday to vote, unless you are arguing about lost productivity as a business owner or policy changes from more people of different demographics voting. Neither are compelling arguments.

[guard-of-terra]

"feel they are not entitled to their beliefs"

When there's polarization in a society where a majority of population out-vote a minority on every proposal, said minority has all motivation to withdraw from public politics and secede.

Imagine a country with 60% big-endians and 40% little-endians. Big-endians own every president, every senate and every vote they care to win. Little-endians have no sensible choice but to split into their own country where they'll be a majority, perhaps with civil war and ethnic cleansings in the process.

[angry_octet]

This situation has been engineered in many countries: the gerrymander (great etymology btw). Combined with other techniques to disenfranchise voters (making it difficult to register to vote, voter ID charades, not enforcing that employers give time to vote) it is very effective in making the minority believe it is 'pointless' for them to vote.

The first past the post system strongly encourages this sort of manipulation. If electorates were made larger and multiple candidates elected for each then this problem would disappear, but established parties would never allow that to occur.

Edit: it has become evident recently that the HN downvote system cannot cope with political discussions, as evidenced by your post being killed. I would suggest that posts with political content have up and down votes shown, rather than the sum being applied to modify visibility. As it is, the downvotes are just "I don't want you to be able to express your ideas."

[Practicality]

Congratulations on equating being conservative with being wrong. (In saying conservative voting = downside)

I think I am fairly liberal, but in being objective I know I could very well be wrong.

Just to put the counter point. If conservative ideals are correct, then older people voting more would be a huge UPSIDE.

I agree that the older voting bloc causes a problem, but it's not because they are conservative, it's because they're retired and will continue to try to vote more benefits for themselves while removing benefits from others.

But to say it's a problem because they are conservative? You're just saying people that agree with you are right and people who disagree are wrong. It's closeminded.

[fragola]

>One huge downside would be that older people tend to skew to the more conservative end of the political spectrum, and can end up drowning out the voices of the young.

This is actually not true [0]

[0]http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/getting-more-li...

[ZeroGravitas]

Your citation actually supports that claim:

" At any given time older people are likely to be more conservative than contemporaneous young people. But relative to themselves as young people, today’s older folks have generally become more liberal than they once were."

It seems your thinking of the latter half of that quote, but the claim was regarding the first half.

[czechdeveloper]

Exactly what i thought. In light of us living unsustainably, we can either decrease consumption, or decrease amount of people living on the planet. Or little bit of both.

And if that happens organically, without special policies, the better still.

[Derpdiherp]

Population control with the right to children is a very delicate subject and hard sell.

My thoughts on the matter was always that nature itself will eventually take care of the numbers if we keep going the way we are without some form of measure to keep control - every population explosion has had it's eventual decline - sharp or smooth. We seem to believe that we're different but we're not.

If we self regulate by choice - whether it's the lack of income, lifestyle or a lack of want to have children that has brought us here it's always going to be preferable. As unsavoury as it may be in some regards.

[CaptSpify]

> nature itself will eventually take care of the numbers

I don't think most people would disagree. It's just that nature isn't very merciful, and the way it enacts it's policies could lead to a lot of suffering. It'd be much more pleasant if we self-regulated so that nature didn't have to.

[c3833174]

Tell that to people expecting continuous growth

[tonyedgecombe]

People expecting continuous growth are in for a shock at some point, it's just a matter of when.

[drakonka]

I would tend to agree. Of course having fewer young people to contribute to taking care of old people and such is going to be tough, but governments will need to adapt and find ways to deal with it. The problem of not enough young people to contribute to our worker churn system to me seems far preferable to population growth that our planet cannot sustain.

[pmyjavec]

Totally agree, although, hopefully they age with the environment in mind.

There seems to be whole businesses building around milking elderly people's retirement money. I'm thinking about highly polluting cruise ships etc.

Interesting times ahead.

[guard-of-terra]

It would be a good thing if not for a policy of covering losses by importing large number of people from struggling societies that many affected countries have adopted.

Which BTW makes no sense when you look closer at demographics, since most depopulating areas are rural, but immigrants usually live compactly in countries' largest cities (where also existing youth flocks to), increasing population imbalance in fact.

Yes they get total head count stable but at cost of getting everything else wrong.

[naasking]

> Surely this is a good thing? We (as a species) have been growing exponentially in an unsustainable manner.

Population growth has been slowing due to increases in quality of living, and is set to peak around 2050. Then we'll experience population deflation, which may be even more problematic than inflation.

[aiyodev]

> We (as a species) have been growing exponentially in an unsustainable manner.

This is a myth.

In fact birth rates are decelerating at an alarming rate and actually starting to decrease in some parts of the world. In a couple of decades, population is projected to begin decreasing worldwide. Many governments are creating programs to encourage procreation to try to hold off the inevitable death spiral most countries will experience.

[dracht]

Tell that to (most) EU governments. They are selling mass-immigration as a solution to an aging population.

[icebraining]

And that's exactly right: the only way to get more people of working age to a region without increasing the world population is with migration.

[2almalki]

I think its a valid way to solve that problem. In Canada, the STEM programs are filled with 2nd/3rd generation immigrants that were labourers, servers, restaurent workers, etc. These guys/gals go on to get 40-80k salary jobs after uni/college and pay significant taxes WHICH help pay for medical/state pension for the aging populaion

[guard-of-terra]

It's not solving any problem[1], and Canada is an extreme example as a country and can't be used as a model for (mostly) monocultural countries.

1: First people argue there's no problem with low birth rate, and then people tell that they're solving the problem. Pick one.

[2almalki]

I'd say there is a problem with low birth rate :)

[tcoppi]

Demographic shifts like this and the ensuing competition for limited resources are the kind of things that fuel major wars. It may be the transition that is needed long-term, but we should be very mindful of the way it is actually achieved.

[ekianjo]

> Demographic shifts like this and the ensuing competition for limited resources

Less resources are needed if you have less people. Ultimately everyone will benefit from it.

[tcoppi]

The thing is we don't have less people right now. The population is still growing rapidly, just getting older overall. That is going to lead to a massive grab for limited resources(not just physical like food and basic goods, but time for caretakers, medical services, etc.) that could be massively destabilizing. We've already seen rising food prices recently lead to unrest in poorer regions of the world, that could be only the beginning.

[ekianjo]

I'd just like to remind people that at the beginning of the 20th century many were predicting the doom of Mankind once we would reach one billion folks. Needless to say it did not happen and we went much further than one billion and took care of starvation along the way. Of course there are many reasons for this, but let's not underestimate the resources of mankind to solve its problems.

[tcoppi]

I completely agree, I don't think it will end up being a massive disaster in the long-run, precisely because people will be thinking about how to solve them. Quick dismissal of the potential problems that could result does not help us solve them.

[collyw]

Sounds like what many politicians have been saying about global warming for 20 years or so. The scientists will figure something out. We haven't figured out much so far (yet we have worked out how to extract more fossil fuels via fracking).

[googletazer]

Not at the point where you have one worker for two retirees. "Ultimately" you're talking about might never be reached as every government in the world scrambles to cover its own ass by any means necessary.

[eli_gottlieb]

More resources split among fewer people only really works well if your economy is capital-bound in almost all lines of work. If there was anything where you really needed labor, you're fucked.

[hx87]

Every year labor is becoming less and less necessary for economic production and capital is becoming a better and better substitute for labor, so our economies /are/ capital-bound.

[eli_gottlieb]

Judging by prices, we have gluts of both labor and capital, a systemic shortage of aggregate private and public demand, and yet consistently increasing employment and rock-bottom productivity growth. To me it seems like cheap labor is being used to substitute for capital.

[hx87]

Wouldn't the /lack/ of a demographic shift fuel major wars? After all, it's a lot easier and more likely to have a war with populations full of young people than one full of old people. Besides, unlike oil or water, healthcare and services isn't something you can just steal.

[mathattack]

I was thinking the same thing. From an environmental point of view, less damage. From an economic point of view, more capital and wealth per person. The only downside is people will need to live longer.