Posted: Sep 10, 2016 1:30 am
Thommo wrote:Bernoulli wrote:If so, then I have no idea what you are talking about. I don't know why you introduced "young people" (unless someone else brought it up and I missed it). I've been talking about skilled immigration.
Yes, people of working age, i.e. young, that's what I referred to. You cannot solve the problem of ageing demography that way. All you can do is postpone it. Because those people are also ageing, they will eventually retire and have the same entitlements.
To fix the problem of ageing demographics you need to reach the point where demographics are no longer ageing, or have eternal exponential population growth. To "balance the books" you need contributions to social security to be set at a level such that a non-growing working population which is becoming a retired population at the replacement rate are contributing enough to fund the full retirements of all those retiring.
If any part of the solution to the problem is to have additional workers (whether born or immigrated) in order to fund retirement, that results in exponential growth because it's a pyramid scheme - the payout per individual exceeds the contribution per individual (after adjustment for inflation and growth).
Having productivity increase indefinitely is a different solution, because productivity per worker is a different variable than number of workers.
FFS, you didn't even read what I said. For the second time, I addressed the exponential growth thing. What's going on here? To explain it again, you don't need exponential working population growth. You just need continuing productivity per worker increases. And as the demographic bubble reduces due to this, then you need less and less productivity growth in the future. If this is going to lead to another 30 pages of idiocy, I'm not interested. If you can't understand what I'm talking about now, you are not going to get in in another 30 pages.