Urbanization Has Left the Amazon Burning

Stop people having so many damn kids.

Unfortunately that just isn't practically feasible. You need between 4 and 9 people working and paying between 10% and 20% of their production in taxes or something similar so as to enough goods and services for the retired. Why is that? Well, if the amount one pays up is 10% of his produced goods/services, that means she gets to keep about 90% of his produced goods/services on which to live (exchanging them with other people by way of money, but money is only an abstract number people use to exchange actually livable-on goods and services, which is why I'm saying "goods/services" all the time). So, assuming that person will need to keep receiving the same amount of goods/services after retirement, she'll need someone to come and provide her those same "90% of a produced goods/services", meaning 9 working people each giving up 10% of their own produced goods/services.

Before social security the way you had to do it was straightforward: get 10 kids and they'll provide you the needed goods/services once you cannot work anymore. Nowadays, with social security, this simple, direct relationship, is hidden from the common folk, who just don't notice it. But the need for 4 to 9 people working for each retiree remains, which on a low 1-children-per-couple society means there's a permanent need of 3 to 8 "other someones" for each retiree, which gets filled by immigrants and/or native (and usually poor) huge-families. That's a hack solution though. Once the other people-supplying countries rise on their living standards and their people start having less children, it stops working. And then basically bad solutions remain, with a single good one:

a) "paying" less and less (i.e., providing less actual goods/services) to retirees, thus reducing their actual standard of living;

b) rising real taxes (not the nominal ones that affect only abstract "money" numbers, but actual taxes on actually produced goods/services) more and more to keep paying them what they need, thus reducing their actual standard of living;

c) move tons of people from their current, not-actually-directly-useful goods/services production, back into doing stuff that people really need, thus reducing their actual standard of living;

d) engage on old style "loot and plunder" wars so as to acquire more actual goods (not services in this case) than you can produce, so as to give your people a higher standard of living than they would be able to develop;

e) go back to having lots of babies per couple, thus depleting natural resource even faster;

f) rise the age of retirement so as to keep the proportion stable, what only works if most people take care to actually die at some reasonable age that doesn't stress the balance, otherwise this will become a hack solution too;

And so on and so forth.

There's a possible good solution, which is to invest HEAVILY in robotics, and by proxy EVEN MORE heavily in sustainable energy sources to power them, so that we can at some point replace the currently required exponent growth of goods/services-producing people with tons upon tons of goods/services-producing robots.

That's the only one that will actually allow for a globally-sustainable low birth rate. Everything else will get us into a bad ending.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/XYMGUhHxCq0/story01.htm

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