Which is pretty much guaranteed by the fact old people are living longer. Of all the outcomes from a world population of 8B, the “population slowly declines because people have less babies” is absolutely the best one.
Unfortunately a world in which people spend decades too old to meaningfully work and requiring increased medical care is a demographic nightmare; unless AI forces society to restructure almost entirely away from employment economies anyway.
Right.
It hasnt been. Some issues in Japan. I worked until I was quite old- and I still do volunteer work-, and people are working later and later. 70 isnt too old to work today.
For office workers maybe not. Lotta folks even in advanced economies still do hard physical labor. Not so nice or easy for them.
yeah youre right. i dont wanna be forced to have children, i dont want any
Not compared to “our population is 2X and we only have enough food for X”. Which is inevitable if the population keeps growing.
Yes. And getting more so.
Mixed bag though.
Some, like me, knowledge workers, are choosing to work later. We are of higher SES, have no significant disabilities, and can afford to retire if we wanted to.
And of course some are able to keep working but choose not to.
Others are in physically demanding jobs that have paid less well. They can’t afford to retire but they also have accumulated physical ailments and really should. But they keep working because they have no choice. Until they really cannot.
I don’t see how we could get the population up to 2X if there’s only enough food for X in the first place. Yeah there could be a global catastrophe like an asteroid strike or AI robot locust plague, but those aren’t inevitabilities.
Or crop failures due to weather in much of the world in the same year?
That’s not inevitable either; but the way we’re going, it’s all too possible.
People not having a real retirement and being forced to work while old and sick is a sign of social malaise, not something to be happy about. It does in fact demonstrate a problem with a rapidly declining population.
I have a real retirement, and still worked late in life. More and more people are making that choice.
You are assuming that it’s a choice for them.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0001457518305694
- 53% are not working and don’t want to work.
- 23% are working and want to work.
- 19% are not working but want to work.
- 4% are working but don’t want to work.
Among those who cited “personal fulfillment,” maybe they retired only to find that they were bored being at home. In some cases, people who are working after retirement will go back to their previous career while others will start a so-called “encore career” — doing something new that appeals to their passions.
So, sure some people are working later as they have to, but more are working later as they simply want to.
Your link is to an article on seatbelt use among Arab males.
Oops
Note that many who said they were working and want to work were doing so for financial reasons, which calls into question how people interpreted “want to work.”
Some were, but some simply wanted to. So, it depends.
and note this-
Finally, there is that 4% of survey respondents from high-income countries like ours who are working but don’t want to be. This is truly a difficult situation to see people experiencing.
So, yes 4% are working but dont want to, however, 23% are woking but DO want to.
ISTM it makes sense, if average lifespan and “healthspan” (i.e., how long people continue in reasonably good health before encountering debilitating geriatric medical problems) are both increasing, that the default “workspan” or extent of working life before standard retirement age will also increase.
I recognize, however, that that’s a pretty big “if”. And if we do want or need more older workers, we shoild be looking into ways to facilitate “tapering off” more taxing job responsibilities as workers age.
In particular, we could probably integrate low-hours part-time work by younger/fitter elderly into supporting geriatric care for older/sicker elderly. (This would also have something of a public-interest watchdog aspect: the “younger-olds” have a large stake in helping ensure that the policies and practices of caring for “older-olds” are humane and effective.)
It’s not an “if”, in the US at least lifespan is decreasing, not increasing.
Life expectancy at birth in the United States is now 76.1 years, the lowest level since 1996, according to a recentCDC report.
Provisional data showed there was a 0.9 year drop in 2021. Paired with a 1.8 year drop in 2020, the U.S. experienced the biggest two-year decline in life expectancy since 1921-1923.
Under the circumstances I expect it to continue to drop. More disease, more poverty, more pollution and food contamination, worse medical care, increasing violence and so on are going to be the future for a long time. The damage done would take many years to fix (to the extent it can) even if we started now, which we won’t.
Well, you were wrong as far as the years immediately following 2021 are concerned, at least.
I don’t disagree that there are many current factors that we can expect to increase downward pressure on life expectancy, though.