591–600 of 835 posts
Plenty seek high paying jobs elsewhere.
Literally paying your most experienced people not to work is a little … not so good.
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My understanding was that almost all countries with advanced economies are experiencing negative growth in producing children. So even if you are right about the nuance in age, go look at Japan. Their population is shrinking.
I think you're making a big leap to saying that economics are the reason people aren't having kids. Many people who are financially well off don't want kids either. I haven't looked for good numbers, but it seems the poorest members of society have the most kids, while the richest have the least (could be some issue with lack of controls here). https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
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My understanding was that almost all countries with advanced economies are experiencing negative growth in producing children. So even if you are right about the nuance in age, go look at Japan. Their population is shrinking.
Purely economically, only a total moron would have a child. Child labor has been outlawed and society says the (grown) child is their cash cow not yours, so the retirement from taxing the kid is spread across everyone else. Meanwhile you're asked to pay the lions share of the investment for everybody else to cash out on. So the name of the game is to let everybody else have the kids and free-ride the fuck out of that…
OK but nobody is making that decision "purely economically." Returning to a world of filial piety laws and no real social safety net sounds nightmarish.
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At some point we have to rethink what "contributing to the system" means. What are web developers designing ads for online casinos contributing?
They are contributing to entertaining end users of the casino. Entertainment is a valid need. You or some academic in an ivory tower can't dictate worth or contribution. It is determined democratically by actions of consumers (literally voting with dollars). That said, there are some jobs we can easily label as zero wroth. E.g., jobs where people dig pits and fill them up (common in job schemes in socialist countries…
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Your thesis is the government consumption of the GDP has nothing to do with where the productivity improvements went?
You’re comparing decades of productivity going to capital to debt incurred within the last half decade (“Here's where the money went”). The US does have a lot of sovereign debt, no doubt, but that’s not why Labor isn’t seeing a greater share of the productivity gains since the 70s. A loss of collective labor power and 10% of the country owning 89% of public equities gets us here. To arrived at an improved end state,…
Globalization seems like a major factor that's often ignored for that. We had productivity gains. We didn't benefit from them as much as expected because people in Asia had bigger productivity gains. Joe six pack now competes with people in China working 996 instead of just his neighbors like in the 70s.
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>This is a huge departure from almost all of human history except the last 100 years in the developed world, where the family formerly was the safety net so these kind of investments and arrangements stayed in the family leaving a much stronger economic incentive for children. except the evidence seems to point towards kids being a net drain, even in preindustrial societies. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/10/w…
When options are thin, hope commands a premium. See: lottery tickets. Would you give up planning for retirement just because all of the options were unreliable? I wouldn't, I'd pick the least bad and try anyway.
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If the system is expecting population to grow infinitely and holding everyone to hostage for it then the system needs to change.
Be careful what you wish for. Societal change comes with disorder.
In the US at least, the original retirement age, set in 1935, was 65. The average life expectancy was 60. Today in the US it's 77.8. In France, it's 82. As populations age into a higher percentage of retirees, the system is forced to cope with more people who are purely consumers, and contribute nothing to the system. In a post-scarcity world, this would not be a problem, but currently with the oldest generations own…
> "Giving old people money for free " uh, didn't the old people finance their own social security? Didn't they give up money their whole lives to finance their homes? Don't they contribute to society in other less-measurable ways? That said, there could be some ways to retire, but be able to work in such a way that retirement is not adversely affected. Some of my friends who retired had to carefully not work or socia…
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>This is a huge departure from almost all of human history except the last 100 years in the developed world, where the family formerly was the safety net so these kind of investments and arrangements stayed in the family leaving a much stronger economic incentive for children. except the evidence seems to point towards kids being a net drain, even in preindustrial societies. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/10/w…
When options are thin, hope commands a premium. See: lottery tickets. Would you give up planning for retirement just because all of the options were unreliable? I wouldn't, I'd pick the least bad and try anyway.