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[Sheb]

Re: Turkey, one of the big surprise on the last election was the really strong showing of the HDP, an alliance of Greens, progressives and Kurds. By painting the Kurds as terrorists, I guess Erdogan is also trying to cut the HDP's support.

[Loud Whispers]

It's been a while since I've heard someone handwave the pensioner-bomb away. Do you reckon that with, say, ten pensioners per one working-age person, we'd all be mooching off the fruits of our forebears like those figleaf fuckers in Eden? Because futuretech and nanosanta and whatnot? I agree that the world as a whole would be better-off with slightly less people, but I'm talking about redistributing the current population, not increasing or decreasing it.

In the UK the worst case scenario is 1 pensioner to 4 workers in 2050 or even 1 pensioner to 2 workers. Mass immigration costs Britain more than it gives in by virtue of paying off less in tax, and this is before you factor in population growth induced by higher birthrates in immigrant families, so I don't see how that exactly helps the problem by adding another one to the table. Now if we assume all the baby boomers don't colonize Spain even more and all remain in Britain, worse case scenario the heartless government raises the retirement age even more, the great elderly generation are forced to live off of their own ample resources and by 2070 they'll all have died.

[LordSlowpoke]

Also in regards to supplementing an aging population, weigh that up against the increased costs in infrastructure - smaller populations are actually able to enjoy the fruits of their forebears and I think countries like Japan or countries in Europe should embrace decreasing populations not try to expand them.

It's been a while since I've heard someone handwave the pensioner-bomb away. Do you reckon that with, say, ten pensioners per one working-age person, we'd all be mooching off the fruits of our forebears like those figleaf fuckers in Eden? Because futuretech and nanosanta and whatnot? I agree that the world as a whole would be better-off with slightly less people, but I'm talking about redistributing the current population, not increasing or decreasing it.

contrary to what you might believe, humans in europe are not going extinct

the pension system collapsing is shilled pretty hard by immigration proponents, but the fact stands that as time progresses, less and less people are needed to produce the same amount of capital

Spoiler: i even brought a graph with me this time (click to show/hide)

the above is from australia, but it's not too far fetched to extrapolate it as an image of a western economy in general

so yeah, if you could stop fearmongering like a total populist that'd be great m8

[SirQuiamus]

And the graph goes on and on to infinity and beyond...

[LordSlowpoke]

the sources from the australian bureau of statistics are right there, if you want to talk about them you know where to find google

[Frumple]

... it's so rare to see someone actually cheering increased taxes and a rise in joblessness. Nice, though. It'd make a lot of the world a lot more comfortable in the face of that rising productivity if more folks were okay with that sort of thing.

[Fniff]

It kinda sucks on a personal level, though.

[mainiac]

the pension system collapsing is shilled pretty hard by immigration proponents, but the fact stands that as time progresses, less and less people are needed to produce the same amount of capital

Total factor productivity (same number of workers, same education, same capital, more production) is generally pegged at maybe half a percentage point per year.  So around the time you are retiring it will have accounted for about a 28% rise in incomes.  Not nothing but certainly not going to save us all.

Econometric historical trivia: total factor productivity is in fact so small that for a long time it was debated whether it even existed at all.  It was swamped by the much more drastic changes of going from essentially zero capital (pre-industrial) to massive amounts of capital (industrial) so it wasn't until around WWII that it was considered more then part of the residual (not too terribly different from a measurement error).  It's also extremely volatile for extended periods of time.  For some reason the surge in energy prices in the 70s coincided with an TFP collapse even in energy rich places like the Soviet Union.  This collapse lasted more then a decade.

Normally I'm pretty optimistic for a dismal scientist but I gotta come down as pretty skeptical of the notion that TFP is going to save the world from the retirement crunch.  You would need something along the lines of the singularity.

[Sheb]

His claim was about overall productivity, not TFP. The number of workers is going to stagnate or fall, but you can get more out of your workers by other means.

[mainiac]

Ah I misread because of his distaste of punctuation and capitalization.  Brain trying to string together subjects and objects and whatnot.

but you can get more out of your workers by other means.

Yeah, probably.  But there's not many more gains to be made through educational attainment and new capital investments are always a crapshoot.

[Kot]

you can get more out of your workers by other means.

Gulags ahoy.

[Sheb]

What do you mean by "new capital investments are always a crapshoot"? If anything, the rising tide of automation should hugely increase the productivity of the remaining workers.

[mainiac]

Gulags are actually pretty inefficient.  Although interestingly enough the former ghettos that the Nazis forcibly relocated Poles and other Europeans to did have high per capita productivity to the backwater places of origin the victims were taken from.  Maybe Donald Trump isn't so crazy when he talks about making the Mexicans pay...

What do you mean by "new capital investments are always a crapshoot"? If anything, the rising tide of automation should hugely increase the productivity of the remaining workers.

Humans have a bad track record at telling which technologies will actually translate into new capital intensive sectors and how long it will take.  There was a good quip back in the 90s about how "you can see computers everywhere but the productivity statistics".  Apple has high productivity per worker but is still just pushing 100k employees right now so the overall economy hasn't gotten much more efficient.

Or going back much further, consider electrical motors in factories.  Talk about a killer app!  You can completely redesign your production lines in a much more efficient way because you can put a small electric motor anywhere in your factory.  This was super duper helpful in making more efficient assembly lines.  Electric motors in factories first started showing up in the 1880s.  The model T was the start of the modern assembly line made possible by electric motors but the first one wasn't built until 1908.  Most industrial plants were still not designed to properly take advantage of electric motors until the 1940s.  They had electric motors but the factor layout was still the older belt or steam layout that didn't use most of the advantages that electrification offered.  It took 50 years to actually shift production.

[Loud Whispers]

Gulags are actually pretty inefficient.  Although interestingly enough the former ghettos that the Nazis forcibly relocated Poles and other Europeans to did have high per capita productivity to the backwater places of origin the victims were taken from.  Maybe Donald Trump isn't so crazy when he talks about making the Mexicans pay...

That's darker than the end of a luger barrel

[mainiac]

That's darker than the end of a luger barrel

"By dubbing econ 'dismal science' adherents exaggerate; The 'dismal's fine - it's 'science' where they patently prevaricate".