Yes, they can play with inflation and debt, but at the end of the day, it's just a question of people resource and time allocation. Money is just a proxy.

There will be a market clearing price for that work, and these accounting mechanizations are simply sussing out what that price is (in comparison to other broad societal work to be done).

If caring for the elderly is made more valuable than say, slinging JavaScript, that’s where some of the labor will go.

Sure, but the fact that your savings or pension plan contributions "should have" been enough for a certain amount of care can't guarantee that it will be enough for all or even half of it when the time comes; it's perfectly plausible (and with certain worker/retiree ratios even inevitable) that the market clearing prices will have to be higher than what would be enough for most people.

And the key factor is that if everyone (or their government) saved twice as much, that wouldn't help because if the worker/retiree ratios are the same, then twice as much retirement savings should simply lead to a twice higher market clearing price for that work due to "these accounting mechanizations".

>then twice as much retirement savings should simply lead to a twice higher market clearing price for that work due to "these accounting mechanizations".

You assume:

* The labor market isn't flexible, that higher pay won't attract new workers

* There isn't a wage at which workers would be satisfied meeting their basic needs.

And this makes your conclusion that the labor would simply absorb additional funding too rigid.

> * The labor market isn't flexible, that higher pay won't attract new workers

Why yes, looking from a whole market macroeconomic perspective, we should assume that the labor market won't magically generate an arbitrary number of new workers just because the pay is higher - the total number of potential workers is set by demographics and cannot rapidly adjust due to market pressure. The pay rate does affect the labor participation rate, but there isn't that much room for maneuver there, the changes in proportion of workers-to-retirees are much larger than what you can fill with non-working potential workers.

Well, one way that does get new workers is massive immigration of working-age people (which is the strategy used, perhaps unintentionally, by some countries), but if their birth rate and life expectancy is similar, that only postpones the issue until those immigrants themselves reach non-working age.