I couldn't find an uncensored version
this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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You're not thinking about this in a way that will lead you to useful conclusions.
First is the care aspect. Do you think it takes half the number of care workers to look after 100 people with dementia then it used to in 1973? I don't think so. So if you have an ageing population, you need to allocate a higher and higher share of your population to caring for them if you want to maintain their standards of care. That means the rest of your population has a lower standard of living. So, either way, some portion of the population has a lower standard of living.
Second is the total output problem. Elderly people still need to eat. They use electricity and all other resources while, if retired, producing none of them. What this amounts to is that, as the population ages, productivity per person decreases, while consumption per person increases. This, again, means living standards drop somewhere.
Thinking about money is misleading. Money merely allocates units of production, but the problem is a restriction on units of production (in the form of working people).
people seem to be constantly forgetting the very real threat of a mass unemployment crisis induced through automation. WW2 was essentially caused because of people's dissatisfaction, there were fewer jobs than people, and people couldn't find work, and that caused havoc. now i see people here dumbly arguing "nuh uh, we need more workers to sustain the system" to which i say, have you ever considered that the number of jobs over time is, in fact, not constant?
You haven't responded to anything I said about the balance of production, or what I said about decreasing living standards. At the risk of throwing more words into the void:
High unemployment is very bad. But that doesn't mean an economy is fine as long as everyone is employed: if there are important jobs that can't be done, that is also bad. And because workers are not all the same, that means it's possible to have high unemployment in one sector (e.g. all software developers get laid off because of AI) at the same time as having not enough people in another (e.g. we don't have enough nurses in our hospitals).
You can hope that this will balance out and that you can retrain your software developers to go and be nurses. What you do at your peril is assume:
The last point means that you in fact cannot just shift your workers around like this, and instead need a long period of shuffling around where some software developers are unemployed and killing themselves due to depression, others are training to be nurses, others are training to do something completely different, accepting lower pay because they're going into a sector without high vacancies, causing some people in that sector to seek better opportunities elsewhere, and so on, until - hopefully - the sectors are balanced.
If you can do the same work with fewer people, that may lead, over many decades, to fewer hours worked per person, effectively increasing the dependency ratio (interpreted not, as it normally is, as "workers to non-workers" but "hours worked to hours not worked"). It did after the industrial revolution - it took a long time, and many lives ruined by poverty.
Issues with pensions are already happening.