An increasingly old demographic will sabatoge the future of humanity as they drain enormous resources and abuse democratic processes to reroute resources to their preservation of life over young people and familes.
Young people and families will choke to death under the strain of elders who demand unlimited services, money, support while outvoting them, staying in jobs and houses and giving little to nothing back to society.
Innovation will grind to a halt, families will continue to shrink, work hours will get longer and longer as taxes get higher and higher to pay for and increasingly super old leadership and voting base.
Society will begin to lose hope to solve problems like going into space or fixing climate change as increasingly the elderly population will obsess over themselves and continued life.
It is one of the hardest moral problems we will face in our era.
This already happened with the triple pension lock in GB, mathematically ensuring the bankruptcy of the state.
I know of a senior couple where the husband recently retired after forty years of working in a professional field. They live in a house worth over $750k that is paid off. They have three new or late-model vehicles. Both the husband and wife could, if necessary, work for an income.
They also collect Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance checks after enrolling for them. The common name for this is Social Security.
Why the hell are they able to collect on that? They have the ability to work and assets that could readily be made liquid to fund living expenses.
I want the gerontocracy to end, but I'm also worried what takes its place. Gen Xers like me seem to lack some of the abilities present in our older generations.
We'll probably be more equitable and fair, but will we be as politically effective and organized towards achieving our goals? I sort of doubt it.
They also came up in a time and place that allowed them to build social relationships outside of work. Many Gen Xers and Millennials just... don't have that kind of personal time. I know several people in my circle of friends who don't want to do anything after work because they're exhausted. Bills gotta be paid, and there's more pressure to squeeze more productivity and consumption out of individuals than there was in 1980-1995. A lot of that pressure, oddly enough, comes from the necessity to keep shareholder returns high to keep the retirement accounts of the Boomers flush with cash.
Gen X and Millennials are also less likely to have had kids than the Boomers, so the socialization that came along with having a child (extracurriculars, PTA meetings, etc.) just never happened.
We incentivized, and eventually started requiring, economic output and consumption over building in-person social networks and hosting events outside of work. It was what we considered important.
Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
Venice was the longest lasting, most stable state in Europe.
bell-cot•1h ago
XorNot•1h ago
The fine for not voting in Australia is about $30.
This is...nothing in the grand scheme of things.
But it's enough.
And you don't even have to vote: you have to turn up, that's it.
FireBeyond•1h ago
Forgeties79•40m ago
egypturnash•47m ago
NegativeK•39m ago
Those people would heavily incentivized to protect their ability to vote.
Teever•26m ago
A couple cycles of this will flush the crap out of the system.
throwaway173738•20m ago
euank•10m ago
You can see that in all the voter ID laws.
Just imagine the headlines, "voter fraud made even more profitable, immigrants getting paid to vote illegally".