I'm sceptical of this claim. Young people and old people are biologically different, in the aggregate. Obvious differences in physical capabilities aside, arguably even more impactful for the future of a given nation are their psychological differences; i.e. innovation and risk-taking invariably comes more from the younger generations.
Perhaps if you're only considering dollars being circulated in a domestic economy, an abundance of wealthy old folks can potentially offset the lack of youthful societal members. But the developmental direction such a demographic structure pushes its society is unlikely to be good for sustaining itself in the long run.
The problem is in the short/medium term, figuring out how to pay for all these checks that politicians have been writing over the last 50 years.
The problem isn't that "the young" have to support "the old", it's that a lot of promises were made on the assumption of indefinite growth.
Because people saying that are doing accounting with money, not productivity.
People need three things to live in retirement. Food, water, shelter[1], and some degree of medical care. We are not in a demographic collapse situation where society cannot be productive enough to fail to provide the first three to the retired. The latter is the only thing in danger of seeing some cuts.
[1] Housing isn't expensive because building four walls and a roof is expensive. Housing is expensive because there's no upward bound on the cost of a square foot of land in a city.
What if the votes of each age group were weighted to account for the size of that group, e.g. making the votes of 18-20 have the same weight as the votes of 40-42, even if there may be more people in the 40-42 group.
This would prevent an aging population from giving too many benefits to older age groups, and would encourage policies that consider long term impacts more.
Because the principle of "one person, one vote" is widely (and correctly IMO) accepted.
It’s unclear that an age-based distribution instead of geographic distribution would be worse. But it would probably be unrealistic to achieve without basically completely upending existing political structures.
The US is one country and disparate voting power between states(mainly in the Senate, to a lesser extent with the electoral college) is a real problem. I see little reason to make it worse. Although it's useful to rhetoric out how little sense the current system makes
What is actually practiced is 'One collection of zip codes, one vote.'
My proposal is: Multiply the number of house reps and senators by ten (for instance). Each representative now represents a district / state as well as a decade of life (for instance). When voting for an age-graded role, your vote only counts towards the decade of life that you're currently in. You can only run for a position that matches your age range.
This would have a number of advantages: Disrupt two-party dynamics. Increase granularity of representation. It's harder for older folks to take younger folks hostage. Younger folks will feel more enthusiastic about voting for someone who actually represents them.
Probably, you'd want to fiddle with the numbers based on age demographics. 7-year intervals is probably the right number, with a big bucket for people over a certain age. (So, 18, 25, 32, 39, 46, 53, 60, 67, 74+) might be right.
and that's why it'll never happen without a revolution
Whether those public funds and private options will be enough, of course, is a different question.
When you're investing in a private fund, or in real estate, you're still relying on your children. The material wealth you are consuming is still being produced by the generations that come after.
If your children's generation is poorer than your own and if there is less of them, then there is nothing you can do except rely on the children of people in other countries.
The government could just mandate old buildings get destroyed and turned into parks.
Remember, >55% of people are homeowners - they'll vote for anything that will protect the value of their homes - especially if non-homeowners pay for it entirely.
Governments can always find ways to limit the supply of housing. They've been doing it fabulously in most of the West for the last 30 years.
Two reasons why I don't think there will be a supply/demand mismatch:
1) Housing doesn't simply stay there once it has been built. Koreans seem very eager to tear down "old" buildings (anything more than 30 years old), so it's going to be fairly easy to control supply if demand goes down.
2) The number of people per household is steeply declining. Even if the population drops to half of the current level, if there are only half as many people per household, the total number of housing units needed will be largely the same. Smaller units will become more popular, though.
I don't see that. Demand for what? Consumption? Increasing the flow of "stuff" from store/Amazon to the landfill? If we account for inflation, what's increasing?
GDP per capita growth is still growing a few percent (accounting for inflation).
Old people consume 1:1 care. And as medical technology improves, elderly people survive increasingly complex conditions requiring increasingly labor-intensive management. At the same time, work with scalable impact is still getting more valuable, so 1:1 care positions have to pay more to win workers, so 1:1 care gets more expensive (cost disease).
If you're wrong, the consequences are dire.
If you're right, there's not much upside compared to being prepared for being wrong.
That's not a reasonable calculation.
Wait a sec - a population being economically forced to retire later (or not at all) is not one "living well". People are being squeezed.
I’m sceptical of this claim. Demand per capita grows unabated. Working lives are lengthening. A smaller population living well is economically indistinguishable, in the aggregate, from a large one living poorly. Maybe post-industrial civilisations settle into a lower-population steady state than ones requiring lots of unrefined labor.
Yes, dependency ratios will mean re-jiggering the skewed benefits almost every country provides its old at the expense of the young. But that, too, isn’t a bad thing, particularly if it encourages labor force participation.
(There is another comment arguing demographic the dividend’s inverse is a myth. I don’t go that far. I just think it’s a manageable problem versus a catastrophe.)