As you’ve just said, the decline isn’t the problem, it’s the global financial system. We should be looking to reform that, not to boost the population: that’s a long-term impossibility in a closed system.

What is one thing you’d reform about the global financial system?

Make a realistic attempt to include ecological externalities in all accounting systems.

End interest payments to banks from central banks.

Levy a micropercentage Tobin tax on all forex transactions.

End Citizens United and make penalties for political corruption much harsher.

For example.

Greatly reduce the role of speculative derivatives

> We should be looking to reform that

By making retirement unfeasible until you are 80? That might be tricky...

Well not really the financial system per se, but people's appetite for better living than we as a species can really "afford" at any given moment. The hedonic treadmill is to blame. Good luck stopping that!

The problem is we don't know what that other system would look like. A lot of countries will try a bunch of different stuff. A lot of them will fail. Catastrophically. Some of them might succeed. The countries further behind the curve will get the advantage of looking at what succeeded before them and use that (if they're smart).

> As you’ve just said, the decline isn’t the problem, it’s the global financial system. We should be looking to reform that...

What organizational 'reform' is going to address the issue that the young and the old survive by consuming the resources of the working age population?

No matter how productive you are, you aren't going to be producing enough tomato's between years 18 and 65 to be still consuming tomato's at 95. They don't last 30 years. If you want a smaller population to support a larger retired population you need to either:

1. Lower the expectations of the larger population set regarding their quality of life. 2. Reduce the size of the larger population, probably by raising retirement age. 3. Utilize capital improvements and investments to increase the productivity of the smaller population

This isn't some issue with the 'global financial system', it's simply a side-effect of people needing to consume some perishable goods and so are dependent on the continual production of those perishable goods even after these people have stopped supporting that production.

[delayed]

It’s not really the “global financial system”, tax-funded pensions are mostly a richer-country thing. In less developed places, young people often “pay” for the elderly without ever giving them a tax dollar, e.g. by staying put to care for an elderly relative instead of moving somewhere with better pay or quality of life.

I'm glad you said "or", because in a lot of cases better pay does not lead to better quality of life, not until you've broken through to upper middle class and beyond and can choose how much time you spend on work or choose to live somewhere nice.

Well structuring the global financial system is one thing, but we really need assume very little about finance. If someone is retired they aren't working, so almost by definition others still working must provide for them.

It's not taxes that's the problem, you can't magically solve the problem by storing cash or gold under your bed.

If you increase demand for labour (more people getting old needing more care, more doctors) and reduce supply for labour (fewer people working), then the cost of labour will skyrocket.

Put 5 billionaires on an island and 1 carer. How much will the carer charge to care for an hour. They auction their time, and the bidding starts at £1m an hour.

History is the process of oil getting into everything. The financial system is a structure for distributing surplus energy founded on growth resulting from accessing a material which can do 500 people's worth of work in a single barrel.

No, this is not the case at the moment. The previous generation HAS paid lots of taxes, social insurance and retirement in order to pay for themselves. So let's not make up fantasies here.

Now will this be true going forward? Not sure, that's where you can argue.

Ultimately, old people need help with ~everything. A stack of dollar bills cannot care for you; it can only be used to pay other people to care for you.

If there are insufficient quantities of younger people to care for all the old people, no amount of money causes the system to work. Quality of life will go down.

Unless we figure out how to get the robots to do it.

I wonder how that got started. Seems like someone must have gotten a free ride in the beginning.