Re: Population problem? Solved!

From: Kent Paul Dolan (xanthian_at_well.com)
Date: 03/03/05 

Date: 2 Mar 2005 17:10:09 -0800

robert j. kolker wrote:
> David James Polewka wrote:

>> So we'll add another 25-30%, with fewer and fewer
>> young people to innovate and support the safety
>> net! I guess the geezers'll have to pitch in
>> (unless Alzheimered or depressionized).

> Since people in the industrialized countries are
> living longer and healthier lives, they can work
> longer. The only reason was sixty-five was chosen
> as the retirment age in German under Bismark is
> because very few people lived till they were
> sixty-six. In other countries this age was picked
> up for similar reason. Now that men are living
> into their mid seventies (for example, the average
> life expectancy in the U.S. is 77.4 years), we can
> extend the retirement age to seventy five. So the
> geezer can and soon will have to pitch into to
> keep social secuity afloat.

You're really attempting to solve the wrong problem;
and of course coming up with exactly a backward
solution as a result. As automation continues to
make inroads into the need for human labor,
available jobs will grow fewer and fewer, and are
already doing so.

The problem that needs solving is: what social
changes do you make that allow support of an idle
population which can produce abundantly, but doesn't
need human effort for that production? Do the owners
of the machines end up with all the wealth, or do we
change that wealth by social engineering (or violent
revolution, very much a kind of social engineering)
to be something society as a whole, rather than rent
collectors by accident of history, call their own?

Once you solve that problem, the retirement age will
start to slide earlier, not later, and at some point
people will "work for a living" only as a kind of
hobby or for the love of the task.

    We already see the alternative solution in some
    of the big cities in South America, where the
    surplus idle population, mostly unwanted
    children, is murdered by contract, money for the
    task supplied by store owners tired of being
    robbed continually by shoplifters.

    Probably this isn't the solution we want to let
    become the prevailing one by continuing to
    neglect to address the issue of too little human
    employment equating to lives of deprivation for
    the unemployed.

This kind of change is happening fast enough [there
are whole factories in Japan whose need for human
labor is already close to zero, there are robots
already that do intensely personal services like
surgery], that the forecast "collapse of the Social
Security system" may well be overtaken by events,
and instead we'll see the "collapse of working for
a living as a way of life" long before the social
security trust funds run dry.

Solve that latter problem and the solution for the
Social Security funding issue comes along "for
free", since essentially _everyone_ will be on
Social Security, by whatever name.

Meanwhile, though, you, Polewka and others of
limited mental resources will continue annoying us
with Chicken Little imitations, and proposing
draconian solutions for problems that may never
arrive, to serve agendas completely divorced from
the one they pretend to address.

Sadly for the right wingers who think their model of
ever increasing concentration of wealth can be
prolonged indefinitely, historically that hasn't
worked out too well for them, the guillotine being
one obvious downside that has been demonstrated to
be an effective social counterforce to ravening
greed.

This problem of redistributing the fruits of
non-human labor comes down eventually to a choice
between a profound shift to redistribution via
socialism, or a profound shift to redistribution via
street violence or open revolution. No third obvious
_workable_ option seems to present itself, though a
return to serfdom or slavery is an obvious
non-workable approach, as is open massacre of the
unemployed.

Look for growing support by the right wing political
factions, of disarming populations, as a measure of
how obvious the problem has become even to them.

Iraq prior to the most recent invasion was attempting
to make that model fly, with some temporary success
but an inevitable explosion in the long term. Pay
some attention to the near term success of the wealth
hoarding, socially repressive rulers of Saudi Arabia,
as a harbinger of first world events inevitably to
follow.

HTH

xanthian.

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