| HN Mirror

The problem is economic distribution not growth. It doesn't matter how many people are participating the in world economy if it still doesn't benefit the majority of the participants. Throwing more workers into a broken economic system to bolster it instead of addressing the problems is just bailing water on a sinking ship. We'll just end up with more impoverished people that drag economies down and make the situation worse.

Social security as you mentioned is a good example. We only have that issue with our current social security system because we spend the money people pay in to social security as part of the governments yearly budget and pay out money to current SS recipients from the same yearly budget. This only works if there always more people paying money in than receiving it. We built a broken system that depends on continuous growth instead of just saving some of the money to distribute later. Making more babies is just bailing out water until it happens again with the problem only getting worse with each iteration.

Another huge issue that Elon never mentions or is not aware of is the coming robotics revolution. We are on the cusp of Industrial Revolution 2.0 with robotics. Robots will replace humans in the majority of jobs. Workers will shift to building and maintaining the machinery rather than doing the actual work. This requires less people but ones with higher skills and that's what we should be concentrating on, building an educated and skilled work force instead of just making more workers for jobs that soon won't exist.