[xerxesaa]

We have an aging population and many places have a flat birthrate. We need to solve how to deal with this consequences.

Who will care for these people? How will we deal with the consequences of flat population growth? How will we deal with the stock market's expectations of perpetual growth when the underlying population itself is not growing (and especially since productivity has also been relatively flat)?

[ssss11]

This aging topic is very important. Re: stock markets, economies need to shift from eternal $ growth to share holder wallets, to providing equitable outcomes for all people and the planet - that will be very interesting to watch, i can’t see it going well.

[defrost]

Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered

    is a collection of essays published in 1973 by German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher.

    The title *Small Is Beautiful* came from a principle espoused by Schumacher's teacher Leopold Kohr (1909–1994) advancing small, appropriate technologies, policies, and polities as a superior alternative to the mainstream ethos of "bigger is better".

    Overlapping environmental, social, and economic forces such as the 1973 energy crisis and popularisation of the concept of globalisation helped bring Schumacher's *Small Is Beautiful* critiques of mainstream economics to a wider audience during the 1970s.

    In 1995 The Times Literary Supplement ranked *Small Is Beautiful* among the 100 most influential books published since World War II.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful

[dools]

You might be interested in the work of Steven Hail and Gabrielle Bond. There's an online course they run through Torrens University that covers a lot of this stuff:

https://www.torrens.edu.au/courses/business/economics

[bequanna]

> to providing equitable outcomes for all people and the planet

The top 10% who hold essentially all the wealth in the world have very little interest in that goal.

[atoav]

Given limited resources exponential growth will always hit saturation. It is time we structure out economic systems in a way that aknowledge this reality.

[TheFreim]

> We need to solve how to deal with this consequences.

I'm hoping that we start to see an increase in pro-family policies. A couple rough ideas to look into would be decreasing taxation (or giving refunds/payments) based on how many children a productive family has, providing financial support so families can buy homes, and promoting wage increases so a single income can support a family to allow one to work and the other to focus on raising the children.

[hayst4ck]

Housing policy is dead simple (not easy): build more homes.

The problem is, when you build more homes, the price of homes go down.

Great for people that want homes and people who are just joining the workforce. Not great for grandma and her retirement planning.

If you frame your housing policy around anything but building more, then housing is fundamentally zero sum. If it is zero sum, that means those couples with a children are being subsidized at the cost of that 20 year old new grad or people who earn minimum wage without a family. Those people look at their finances or their mental health and make decisions about their future. So if people new to the work force are subsidizing those with children you could be harming their mental health to the point where they don't want children.

Why would any sane person bring children into a world that is almost guaranteed to be worse for their children than it is for them? I wouldn't.

So from a systems thinking point of view, the only cogent housing policy is to build more homes.

[reducesuffering]

> providing financial support so families can buy homes

You mean building more homes. If there's X homes, and Y families get 10% subsidy, they're all still buying the same X homes for 10% more. (roughly)

[shortrounddev2]

I see people always talking about the economics of starting a family, but they're missing the real reason for low birth rates: opportunity cost borne by women.

Women who choose to have a child put their careers back several years at the age when they are making the most important advancements in their careers. They choose not to have children because doing so doesn't just mean they have to pay a bunch of money in childcare costs, it means they will likely never achieve the dreams and goals they set for themselves. It will become much harder for them to travel, climb the corporate ladder, create things, and be someone. Many women want to achieve all these things and then have children later in life, but it becomes biologically infeasible for them to do so.

This is harder to solve. We can force maternity policies with hiring mandates, but that would be VERY expensive for smaller businesses (having to pay 2 salaries to get the work of 1 for a year or more).

I'm just not sure what other policies exist to solve the opportunity cost issue. You can give people as much cash as you want but government can't give away free self-actualization

[xerxesaa]

I lived in Singapore for a little while and this was one thing I noticed they did there. For example, by giving preference in subsidized housing to people who were married and further preference to those who had kids.

In the U.S. (and broadly, the western world) we seem to have a really hard time using economic incentives to encourage certain behaviors. I think it's partially because we don't want to implicitly judge a given lifestyle choice as better than another.

However, I think there is much we can learn from a place like Singapore. Singapore simply does not stick to any single political dogma - they choose a mishmash of policies based on the outcome they want to achieve.

[carlosjobim]

That is a down-right evil idea, in my opinion. It means those who cannot find partners to make families are further punished, making their chances to create families even lower. They're turned to a literal slave caste to provide for other people's families.

Remove taxation on young and productive people instead if you want to help them create families.

[yieldcrv]

> How will we

By adjusting which price to earnings multiple we want to tolerate, just like we always do

Or take a bearish position if it happens to match your risk tolerance at the time

The stock market will be fine, people will trade shares, who cares if the market price is greater or less than today’s

[Denatured9654]

aging population who accumulated a lot of wealth. so that'll take care

[orlin_georgiev]

Wealth is just paper and bits in a database if there is nobody to hire to take care of you in old age