If the country does not get richer faster than it gets older, the increasingly older population will suffer, having to work till they're older and getting less financial support (healthcare, pensions etc) because there would be proportionally fewer healthy young people to pay in to the system.
I keep seeing this, but then I look at how rich countries treat their old people, and generally it's stuff them in retirement homes, which seem like awful places.
I agree, but that isn't much of a counter-point, if anything a population that is majority old people will only make that worse since the increased burden on the young would breed more resentment towards older people.
Would you rather old people be dying of starvation/due to lack of healthcare because the country isn't rich enough to support them fully than living in old age homes?
They're going to die regardless. Is it better to die younger from lack of health care than die older with dementia and bed sores? I've only witnessed the latter. Doesn't seem like something I'd like to go through.
I think that's a very defeatist/nihilistic point of view. Since we're all going to die eventually anyway, we should aim to improve our standards as much as possible so we or our kids get to enjoy a better old age than what old people get right now. Our ancestors have gone through much worse to build the better world we enjoy today.
Nah - that's more of a system of control. You can definitely have a poor country where people are not slaves to mortgages. It's called building your own house. Many countries allow that.
Consider healthcare, usually older people need it more than younger people. If you have a higher proportion of older people in a population compared to younger people, you have a larger proportion of the associated costs being carried by a smaller proportion of the population, this means decreasing healthcare quality, increasing the pool of people paying in by increasing retirement age or increasing taxes. None of which are particularly good.
Mortgages are the number one cost associated with "working til you are very old".
By far in poor countries healthcare is much more affordable than in rich countries. I think one of the main outcomes of rich countries is just increased costs for everything.
Look at how the poor in India live. "Getting rich" does not mean becoming multimillionaire, it just means reaching a developed country's standard of living.
For all the people down voting: I urge you to consider a different perspective where the hoarding of resources is a bad thing for humanity and life at large. The US, along with other countries, have done this for too long. We should have "having lots of money and resources" as a primary goal. Resources are tools to accomplish other things, not an end in itself. This is why I say its lame and shortsighted.
Technically, social mobility is just relative income position changes over time, which applies to zero sum games. It does not imply that you can significantly increase your income. Social mobility is also an indirect measure of income distribution, and by proxy geographic compactness -- you can double your income and still have low mobility if the distribution is wide.
A country can be "highly mobile" with flat GDP and limited income growth opportunity for the individual. That is just how the math works out. Social mobility is a term-of-art that does not mean what most people intuit it to mean.
I think it's more apt to consider mobility in absolute terms in this context as opposed to relative. Having a country with super high mobility but extremely low GDP is obviously not favorable.