
Life Is a Ponzi Scheme (2009) - NilsIRL
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2687779/
======
lordnacho
This being a biology journal, I was kinda expecting an even larger
perspective. If you look at how biological ecosystems work, just about every
creature reproduces way more than what is sustainable. Someone did a
calculation that if the first cell had kept splitting at the rate it had,
there'd be a ball the size of the solar system by now or something crazy like
that.

The reason it doesn't happen of course is that you run into resource crises.
Any species that keeps doubling at their natural rate will run out of food, or
it becomes food for others.

Coming back to society, it's as if we just aren't prepared for a shrinking
population. It's hard to make preditions against a variable that's always gone
one way, but is showing sign of turning. How much of the economy is really
just size? What's gonna happen when that reverses?

This will probably be a major political theme that lingers in many advanced
nations. Fewer young people to work, but also fewer votes than the people who
benefit. Immigration as a potential cure, but for how long, and at what cost?
I tend to think it's already a kind of underlying dynamic, just not the one
that appears in the headlines so often.

~~~
barrkel
As long as the pie is increasing in size, people can tolerate getting a
proportionally smaller slice. If the pie stops growing, that becomes
untenable.

I think the answer is somewhere in wealth taxes, which are much harder to
implement effectively than income taxes, but will be necessary for
redistribution in a world with static or declining incomes.

To put that into context with population pyramids, to support the old people,
young people will need to get a bigger slice of the pie. That means less
wealth being locked into untaxed distribution schemes that pass down
generationally, whether it's trusts or corporations.

~~~
GarrisonPrime
Wealth taxes would only be a band-aid, kicking the can down the road. The
wealthy aren’t a magically endless source of loot.

~~~
mdorazio
Wealth taxes might be the only way to avoid complete inequality in market-
based systems [1]. _Especially_ if the market is not growing for everyone. The
wealthy kind of are an endless source of loot because the definition of
wealthy is one relative to a median, so you'll either end up with everyone
roughly equal in wealth (is that a bad thing?) or, more likely, over time new
people will enter and exit the wealthy class due to various advantages and
market dynamics so that there is an endless supply.

[1] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-
ine...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/)

~~~
Isinlor
You should define what you mean by wealth. What does it mean that you will
loot wealthy people? Will you eat shares of a company for breakfast? Will you
burn cash in stove to warm your house?

Wealthy people _control_ resources. You can take control from them, but it
will not create more resources. One, fundamental resource is human labor. This
resource will decline in proportion to the total human population whether it
will be controlled by wealthy people or not.

Someone will need to physically do the work that needs to be done around old
people. And there will be more old people, than there will be young people.

~~~
mdorazio
I'm not really following your question. The idea of a wealth tax is pretty
straightforward. You take stock of a person's assets, take a percentage of
that figure (say 1%) and send them a bill for that dollar amount. How they
choose to pay that bill is entirely up to them - they can borrow against their
assets, liquidate some of them, or use cash on hand. I don't really see how
control of resources factors into the equation.

~~~
Isinlor
Control of resources factors into the equation, because dollars are
intrinsically worthless. If money have intrinsic value, why not to print 1 000
000 000$ on a bill and give one to everyone? Suddenly everyone would become a
billionaire.

Your example is less extreme, but it is still about redistributing control.
Redistributing dollars redistributes control of what people do, and how other
resources are allocated.

This is related to the article, because moving control of people does not
create more people. As population will be getting older, there will be more
old people that less young people will need to take care of. This is a fact.

You could argue that redistributing wealth will lead to more efficient control
of resources, and so it will make it easier to provide care. But it is still
fundamentally about control of diminishing resources and increasing needs.

BTW - I'm Polish and my government tries to literally pay people for having
children. Around 30 000$ spread across childhood (take into account that Poles
earn a lot less than Americans), and while it put a small dent in fertility
rate, the number of children born in Poland is currently lower than before
introducing that program.

------
baxtr
A very good read in the Journal Genome Biology explaining in simple words how
Ponzi and Madoff made millions, and then, describing his idea:

 _Now, the reason you 're reading about this here, is that I just realized
that life itself is basically a gigantic Ponzi scheme, and the pyramid is
dangerously close to collapsing. In the developed world, we have evolved a
society in which a relatively small number of old people have many of their
needs cared for through the financial contributions of a larger number of much
younger people. And that made sense, because for over 12,000 years the age
distribution of the human population was, in fact, in the shape of a pyramid,
with a huge base of young children rising to a smaller number of teenagers and
a still smaller number of young adults, and so on up to a tiny tip of the
elderly. But sometime in the 1950s, as the birthrate declined and life
expectancy continued to increase, the pyramid started to be shaped more like a
column. Within the next 40 years it will become one, and then it will slowly
invert._

I can recommend a full read, it’s worth the time.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
If the young people's contributions can be largely replaced (or rather,
supplemented to the necessary aggregate contribution) by technology, does it
really matter? There'd be no question of a ponzi scheme.

You can sort of already see it happening. Productivity is greater than ever.
But wages have decoupled from productivity, because it's not human labour, but
rather technological inputs that have become the drivers of productivity.

I won't sit here and predict that we'll have healthcare, food & beverage and
cleaning robots within a decade and we'll only have leisure left. But we're
definitely moving in many small ways to singular superpowered humans, who use
tech, that can replace entire shifts of employees.

Take machines like these:
[https://www.tennantco.com/content/dam/tennant/tennantco/prod...](https://www.tennantco.com/content/dam/tennant/tennantco/products/machines/scrubber%20walk-
behinds/t600-t600e/images/t600e-orbital-env-hospital.jpg)

Replacing half a dozen people doing the same manually.

I mean who am I kidding, there's a billion examples like this. Yes, we still
have to do our laundry clean, but we have washing machines that do 95% of the
work. We still have to drive our busses, but 95% of bus ticket sales are now
automated. At some point we'll probably get to that last 5%, too.

I'm pretty confident that the demographic age inversion will not be as
catastrophic as a ponzi scheme falling apart. Because we the productivity of
young (and hell, old) people has a technology multiplier that's ever
increasing.

~~~
martin_drapeau
I believe you are right. Tech evolution has always been our saving grace, from
the discovery of fire, to the invention of agriculture, ships to conquer new
worlds, etc. I don't see the end of the world - I see opportunity, lots of it.

------
rathel
Slightly off-topic, but how should I as a person in late 20s deal with the
fear that every piece of evidence suggests my generation (and subsequent ones)
will be totally screwed in the future?

Global warming, economic inequality (like property prices), post-truth era,
surveillance state and unsustainable social welfare (as explained in OP)?

It really can't get out of my mind.

~~~
enkid
Gain some perspective. It's historically a very pretty common idea. People
have been writing about how the world is going to shit since they could write,
and yet most people's lives have been getting better most of the time. Why do
you think you are better equipped at predicting the future than those folks?

~~~
roenxi
Although gaining some perspective is good advice, there is a tacit assumption
here that the world just happens and that the tide of history ebbs and flows
as it will. Long periods of peace and prosperity happen partly from luck but
also partly because key people make them happen. I think it is interesting to
consider Bismarck [0] in relation to World War I. We need people like that in
high offices trying to promote peace.

Times of stress are exactly the right time for people to stand up and say
"wait a minute, I don't see how this can end well - lets try something
different" and "if we keep doing this, eventually it will end badly - lets
pick a different route". Or even "what exactly are we relying on and what are
our options if something happens"; which can be surprisingly useful as a
conversation starter. If people can't answer that one in the good times they
certainly don't have a plan for when there is a crisis.

We've entered a really dangerous period where the people who remember WWII and
the aftermath are dead or dying. A lot of quiet actors were shepherding the
post WWII era - the last era of relative peace - and just assuming it works
out from now going forward is not a strategy. And that is before even starting
on the resources questions about how much of society can be sustained for 3
generations.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck)

 _EDIT_

> People have been writing about how the world is going to shit since they
> could write

The first person I know to complain like that in writing was Socrates who
lived to see the fall of Athens/Athenian hegemony in 404BC. He wasn't exactly
wrong.

~~~
glofish
> _The first person I know to complain like that in writing was Socrates who
> lived to see the fall of Athens /Athenian hegemony in 404BC. He wasn't
> exactly wrong._

What? Wasn't he completely, utterly wrong though?

Isn't life today incomparably better in general?

Now, of course, you could argue that for one particular group of people life
will never be as good as it used to be at one particular point in history ...
but that misses the point - overall humanity is much better off.

~~~
peteradio
Humanity is jumping the shark but we've never been higher!!!

------
dmurray
Productivity gains can increase faster than demographics change. Keynes
predicted that we could move to a fifteen-hour working week and keep living at
1930s standards. He was right, but collectively we decided to work about the
same and consume more instead. In the next fifty years, perhaps our standard
of living won't increase as much, but it won't crash purely because of
demographic changes.

And focusing more on preventative healthcare doesn't address the problem,
either. As the author points out, 50% of healthcare spending is spent on
people with less than 30 days to live. If you "prevent liver failure" or
whatever, people live a year longer and die of heart failure instead. There
isn't a realistic direction for medical research that prevents all diseases
requiring care, and leaves everyone 100% healthy until one day they are dead.

~~~
Dumblydorr
I think we can still do a lot, as some diseases of the elderly are chronic and
kill them very slowly and expensively, ie neurodegenerative disorders. Others
like heart failure or an infection might kill a very old person somewhat more
quickly. So, if we prevent the long, drag out, very service intensive
illnesses, it may lighten the load.

------
dash2
How the hell did this get published in Genome Biology? Is it a scam journal or
something?

This isn't biology. It's economics - amateur economics. There's a whole field
on the public economics of social security systems. The amazing insight this
guy is touting has been common knowledge for, oh, twenty years. You don't even
need to be an academic. Just read The Economist once in a while.

Sheesh.

~~~
buboard
It's in their 'comment' section. Perhaps they had a special issue or something
with opinion piees

------
jackcosgrove
Life seems to have evolved on Earth to expand greedily, because leaving
resources on the table just means another organism will use them.

Life on Earth also seems to have solved this problem with predation, where the
greedily growing organism becomes a resource for another, newer organism.

If life on Earth were a pyramid scheme, then blue-green algae would be the
rulers of the world because they were the early adopters in the scheme. Except
there is no legal system that would consider the blue-green algae first in
line for payout. It's a free-for-all.

Instead a very late entrant, humans, are the apex predator and are taking
resources from every other organism that came before. It's the opposite of a
pyramid scheme.

Our social systems make a noble effort to recognize the contributions of those
who came before and support them, and increasingly we are extending this
support to the larger biome upon which our civilization is built. However
that's a fragile conceit of the current age, and will go away if the
civilization itself is threatened.

Who is enforcing the laws which transfer wealth from the young to the old?
Elderly police officers?

Life will find a way.

------
mannykannot
There is a possible way out, in that wealth is not a fixed resource.

A ponzi scheme treats it as if it is at best that, in that it does nothing to
grow it. Economies can grow it, however, as shown by the history of the last
six centuries, in which global wealth grew even on a per-capita basis, dispite
all the dumb things we did during that time to destroy it.

What we need to do is to give people more wealth-generating and wealth-
preserving work to do (which includes educating them to their full potential
at sociey's cost.) There's plenty of scope for that just in ameliorating and
preparing for the coming climate crisis.

The biggest obstacles to this (and they are very big) are the difficulty of
doing this without having projects subverted to enrich a tiny minority, and
the unwillingness of those with some wealth to support such projects on the
grounds that they will take away what little they have.

------
eecc
Some assumptions going on here: 1. That older people won’t be productive and
there won’t be any appetite in the market for this continued production. 2.
That current health costs are justified and that won’t diminish with progress.
3. That future lifestyles will require current level of individual
consumption.

There are scenarios - albeit on the Trekkie optimistic side - where we will
achieve longer, healthy, productive, sustainable and fulfilling lives through
technical and social ingenuity.

~~~
Razengan
> _social ingenuity_

Implying lots of messy politics for which we as a species really haven't shown
to have a good handling of, historically and currently.

~~~
MiroF
It's only going to get crazier once the boomers are gone.

------
miltondts
"We could, of course, handle this cost imbalance by draconian decisions about
life and death, but that is probably a political (and maybe ethical) non-
starter.."

Well at least giving people the choice to terminate their lives in those
circumstances should be permitted and doesn't seem too problematic.

"I believe that it is pointless to increase the human lifespan unless the
quality of life for the elderly is also increased."

This is not very worrying because people working on these approaches seem
convinced that it's not possible to increase lifespan without increasing
quality.

~~~
Merrill
As a result of political processes in the USSR and following its collapse, the
life expectancy of Russians decreased significantly. Substantial numbers of
elderly Russians, including WW II veterans, died early. I don't think ethics
had any influence on the outcome.

------
pcurve
"Seventy-seven percent of the Medicare decedents' total healthcare
expenditures occur in their last year of life, a staggering 52% in the last 2
months, and 40% in the last month."

That's a lot worse than I thought.

The inverted pyramid age distribution mentioned in his article is already
happening in some countries

~~~
shantly
AFAIK this distribution of expenses is why "Medicare for all" isn't _that_
much more expensive than just "Medicare + Medicaid" (which is to say, public
health care spending as it exists already). Consider also how many of the most
expensive younger folks, being the ones with major chronic illnesses, are
already unable to work and on Medicaid. Everyone else is relatively healthy,
on average, and so pretty cheap to cover. I'd bet by far the largest remaining
expenses among that mostly-healthy-and-not-already-covered-by-public-programs
segment are pregnancy, births, and first month or two of care for sick or
premature newborns.

~~~
pcurve
You are right. I did some digging. Cost of premature birth cost 26 billion per
year.

Last 6 month end of life care 170 billion.

We are so desensitized to figures in billions because we regularly hear about
companies market cap approaching 1 trillion and people with wealth of 100
billion.

But entire tax revenue is only 3.3 tril.

------
foxhop
It's not just health care, the house market is the _same_ way. Houses are
built and sold to people who occupy them and then sell them to younger
generations for more and more money. The assumption is that you will always
find a person below you to sell to. This strategy has worked for a long time.

~~~
buboard
Yes exactly, and the fact that the boomer generation has a lot of votes has
led to gridlock internationally: they promote regulations that keep the prices
artificially skyrocketed or prevent house auctions from happening as is
happening in many european countries.

~~~
Dumblydorr
Not to mention they have these huge 4500 sqft McMansions built and are then
shocked millenials arent interested I'm them, relative to the modest and older
and more affordable houses nearby.

------
Dumblydorr
I often think about the massive changes the US will experience when the
Boomers die off. They are more religious, more Republican, likely to be
climate deniers and conspiracy theorists...but they also contain an
immeasurable amount of knowledge and skill.

In the Irish folk music world, 2/3 of the musicians I play with will be gone
within 20 years. We as the younger generations must inherit and pass on their
knowledge and skills, lest we lose many things of beauty and tradition.
Thankfully, we have YT and audio recorders and books upon books, but we also
must keep the face to face, aural tradition alive.

~~~
madengr
In the 60’s, the boomers were socialist hippies, and now they are conservative
Republicans?

The millennials now complaining about inequality, will become conservatives as
they age and acquire wealth.

As a gen-X (who’s generation just put their nose down and worked), I hope the
millennials grow out of their mentality of victim hood, as they have a larger
voting block.

~~~
MiroF
> The millennials now complaining about inequality, will become conservatives
> as they age and acquire wealth.

Wealth acquisition among millenials is not tracking the rate of boomers in the
60s.

The trend today has been towards increased consolidation of large companies
and an associated decrease in economic mobility, decrease in wealth share of
those not in the top echelons, the repeal of common-sense regulatory
frameworks like Glass–Steagall.

It seems short-sighted to say that all generations are bound to follow the
same path as the boomers, when economic conditions today are radically
different from those in the 60s.

------
nopinsight
This is a key reason why technological advances in automation will be
seriously needed. Robots with commonsense that can help support the elderly's
everyday and healthcare needs, AI & office automation that meaningfully
reduces the time spent at work so people can contribute more to their
community, better remote collaboration tools to reduce commute time, etc.

We need to make the pie bigger, or at least retain its size, with fewer people
working. A silver lining is that most people's strengths tend to be
complementary to robot's and software's.

------
Invictus0
1\. Predictable for a bio journal to conclude that biomedical technology is
our last hope, but the better solution to me would appear to be a
sociopolitical one.

2\. The author assumes in his calculus that each human produces approximately
the same productive output with his labor; with automation, that is not the
case.

3\. The pyramid inversion is a transient phenomenon in that, eventually, we
can expect the age population graph will even out to become columnar or only
slightly inverted. It will not be a problem forever.

------
falcor84
> Seventy-seven percent of the Medicare decedents' total healthcare
> expenditures occur in their last year of life, a staggering 52% in the last
> 2 months, and 40% in the last month. We are basically spending a fortune as
> a society for healthcare for very old, very sick people that does not
> increase the lifespan of the individual by more than 30 days, if at all.

That's almost a tautology, right? Pretty much the inverse of the survivorship
bias.

Life-saving procedures are expensive because they are difficult and risky and
almost by definition likely to fail, since once medical science is able to
"manage" one kind of medical challenge, they immediately have to deal with the
next one that would kill the person who was saved. In that sense, it should be
obvious that most money is spent just ahead of people finally dying. It's
almost that cliche of how you always find your keys in the last place you
looked.

------
luxuryballs
This makes me think of those articles where they talk about people retiring
from the US to places like Chile where their retirement dollars take them much
further. Will be interesting to see if this trend increases and what impact
“exporting your elderly” will have on the places importing them.

~~~
chalst
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is not exactly a plausible answer to your
question, but it has some relevant wry humour. E.g., the entrepreneur's
business plan: "And it is not just for the British, there are many other
countries where they don't like old people too!"

------
qwerty456127
That's what I always say: increasing the human lifespan is absolutely
pointless (if not completely wrong) without improving health and ability of
the ageing people. Invent a way to keep me physiologically and mentally young
for longer and I'm totally in it, but don't spend resources on inventing ways
to just prolong my miserable existence when I become old. That's why I (not
old yet) already invest a lot of time and money in physical and mental fitness
and "biohacking" to increase my chances to maintain functional self-
sufficiency and resourcefulness until I die.

So I suggest people should mainly invest in research on how to keep people
young and functional as they age and let lifespan prolongation emerge just as
a bonus.

------
gamesbrainiac
I just love how the author snuck in this little story about arbitrage:

> (For those of you thinking of funding your research this way, forget it: the
> cost of collecting and transporting the cans eliminates the profit. However,
> about $10 million worth of empty bottles and cans do get smuggled into
> Michigan from neighboring Ohio and Indiana, which do not require a deposit
> on beverage containers. Returning those out-of-state bottles and cans in
> Michigan does make a small profit. Michigan lawmakers have proposed
> requiring that beverage manufacturers put a code on all bottles and cans
> that are sold in Michigan, and that automated bottle return machines be
> programmed to read the code so they accept only containers originally sold
> in Michigan.)

------
ikeboy
If you assume lifespan keeps increasing but productivity stays flat then sure.
If productivity increases at least as fast as the ratio of workers to
retirees, then a smaller number of workers can easily cover a larger number of
retirees.

------
breck
> " I believe that it is pointless to increase the human lifespan unless the
> quality of life for the elderly is also increased."

The relevant industry term used more frequently lately is "healthspan".

------
tim333
>Our only hope as a species lies with biomedical research.

That'll just have people live longer. The big thing which may help a lot is
AI. It's quite possible we'll have robocarers by the time I go gaga.

------
mogadsheu
It seems like the author is mostly talking about social security, rather than
life itself. He also seems to be taking the stance of rerouting funding from
other govt health spending such as disease research to social security.

While I don’t disagree with the author’s intentions, I do find his rhetoric
and writing style pretty disappointing. Mentioning a general 12,000 year old
trend of population growth as a supporting argument, and using a title that
vague feels clickbaitey and loses credibility in the message to me.

------
netfl0
Interesting read. This hardens the argument we need continue to rapidly
develop automation technology. If the productivity of robots were considered,
the pyramid would look very different.

~~~
jfk13
> we need continue to rapidly develop...

No, "rapidly develop[ing]" anything is not a solution. We need to get humans
as a species to shift our (subconscious) thinking away from the goal of an
ever-increasing number of humans with an ever-increasing "standard of living",
enabled by ever-rising "productivity".

We're living in what is essentially a closed system with limited resources and
carrying capacity. If we think we can always overcome the limits of one
resource by more development of another, we're deluding ourselves and likely
on track to make the crash worse when it finally comes.

Exactly what the long-term, sustainable capacity of the Earth may be is of
course unknown, but I think there's a strong possibility that we are currently
exceeding it.

~~~
netfl0
> We need to get humans as a species to shift our (subconscious) thinking away
> from the goal of an ever-increasing number of humans with an ever-increasing
> "standard of living", enabled by ever-rising "productivity".

If you more closely analyze my post, I think you’d see we may agree.

------
rshnotsecure
I suggest looking into the work of Peter Turchin.

Turchin, following up on many precious writers who’ve noticed certain cycles
or repeating themes in history, has posited that there is an ebb-flow to
history that is about 80 years, about the lifespan of a human.

What drives this flow, in this theory, is majority one force. The rise in
birth rates during good times, followed by the trouble of environments and
economies to absorb the new individuals, eventually leading to some sort of
new adjustment among all players.

~~~
imafish
Great news for me as a european. I’ve heard the 1940’s were a blast.

------
eyeball
“the population pyramid would change dramatically if we had a global
thermonuclear war or a planet-wide plague, but we probably won't be so lucky.“

You first buddy.

------
RickJWagner
Yes, but the smaller number of workers will be vastly more productive. They
have automation, and the accumulated knowledge of those before them.

------
nabla9
Aging population has huge consequences for the economy.

For example, product innovation may slow down because older people adopt new
technology slower.

~~~
MiroF
All of our insights about "older people" have to be kept in the context of
"this generation of older people."

------
1000units
* Life is an emotional Ponzi scheme.

We enter adulthood and realize that life is without meaning or worth, but
remain in emotional debt to those who raised us, our families, our friends, or
anyone else who made an emotional investment in us, and who would feel sorrow
if we were to kill ourselves. Thus we cannot kill ourselves if we wish to
bring no sorrow upon those who invested in us, even if we think life not worth
it for ourselves – we must live to repay our emotional debts, and to justify
and satisfy others’ investments.

Most then address their emotional debt by starting families and having
children in whom to make emotional investments of their own. They make
themselves emotionally solvent by creating emotional equity in another human
being, who will in time come to realize the meaninglessness of his own life,
but who will himself be indebted to his parents. Individuals thus satisfy
their emotional debt by drawing down on the emotional debt of their children,
who must then address their own emotional debts in turn. And the process
repeats itself.

It may be Pareto optimal to escape the continual process of debt repayment and
painlessly destroy the human race. _

~~~
pdfernhout
In the book "On Caring", philosopher Milton Mayeroff wrote: "Through caring
for certain others, by serving them through caring, a man lives the meaning of
his own life. In the sense in which a man can ever be said to be at home in
the world, he is at home not through dominating, or explaining, or
appreciating, but through caring and being cared for."

Given you acted to write something, what does it show you care about?

In "thinking about thinking", it is very easy to drift from observations to
speculations and from insights to overgeneralizations. A variation on that is
something Bertrand Russel suggested, that every philosopher at some point
makes an (usually unacknowledged) assumption and then proceeds from there.

Your observation (generalized) that a person's feelings about other people's
feelings affect our behavior seems true (especially for parents and children).
That is perhaps a variation of the theme in "Descartes' Error: Emotion,
Reason, and the Human Brain" by Antonio Damasio that all reason rests on
emotion (with emotion giving us a reason to reason)?

Albert Einstein says something similar in "Religion and Science":
[https://sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm](https://sacred-
texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm) "For the scientific method can teach us
nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other.
The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which
man is capable, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle
the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is
equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to
what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what
is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our
human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments
for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the
longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary
to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only
by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of
truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide
that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration
toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of
the purely rational conception of our existence. But it must not be assumed
that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of
ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end
certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end.
Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere
thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make
clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the
emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important
function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one
asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot
be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a
healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and
aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as
something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their
existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through
revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt
to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."

Depending on feelings and assumptions about the possibility of moral progress
and the nature of the universe, were the human race to vanish, perhaps a long
process of growth would just begin all over again for it or something like it
eventually? And would such a possibility change the presumed optimum you
outline?

Also, on reducing suffering as an optimization criterion, always remember the
motivation triad (as explained well by Douglas J. Lisle such as in "The
Pleasure Trap") of maximizing pleasure, minimizing pain, and minimizing effort
-- where our brains try to optimize all three simultaneously (along with other
objectives).

On the general topic of suicide prevention, you may find of interest some
resources I collected here: [https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-
Organizations...](https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-
Organizations-Reading-List)

Especially the point here from David Conroy: "Suicide is not chosen; it
happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain. That's all it's
about. You are not a bad person, or crazy, or weak, or flawed, because you
feel suicidal. It doesn't even mean that you really want to die - it only
means that you have more pain than you can cope with right now. If I start
piling weights on your shoulders, you will eventually collapse if I add enough
weights... no matter how much you want to remain standing. Willpower has
nothing to do with it. Of course you would cheer yourself up, if you could.
Don't accept it if someone tells you, "That's not enough to be suicidal
about." There are many kinds of pain that may lead to suicide. Whether or not
the pain is bearable may differ from person to person. What might be bearable
to someone else, may not be bearable to you. The point at which the pain
becomes unbearable depends on what kinds of coping resources you have.
Individuals vary greatly in their capacity to withstand pain. When pain
exceeds pain-coping resources, suicidal feelings are the result. Suicide is
neither wrong nor right; it is not a defect of character; it is morally
neutral. It is simply an imbalance of pain versus coping resources. You can
survive suicidal feelings if you do either of two things: (1) find a way to
reduce your pain, or (2) find a way to increase your coping resources. Both
are possible."

Here is a summary of key ideas from Mayeroff's book in more blunt language:
[https://thoughtcatalog.com/kyle-eschenroeder/2016/11/this-
is...](https://thoughtcatalog.com/kyle-eschenroeder/2016/11/this-is-the-magic-
of-giving-a-shit-and-how-it-makes-your-life-more-meaningful/) "In 1971 a
philosopher named Milton Mayeroff wrote the manifesto on giving a shit. It’s
titled On Caring (for us, On Giving a Shit) and we’ll pull from it to help
understand how giving a shit can change our lives and how we might learn to
give higher quality shits."

As mentioned there, Mayeroff also wrote: "No one else can give me the meaning
of my life; it is something I alone can make. The meaning is not something
predetermined which simply unfolds; I help both to create it and to discover
it, and this is a continuing process, not a once-and-for-all. "

Also related: [https://www.wikihow.com/Find-Meaning-in-
Life](https://www.wikihow.com/Find-Meaning-in-Life)

Or, as Richard P. Feynman said: "Fall in love with some activity, and do it!
Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore
the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply
enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do
the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep
up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you
from doing anything at all."

For example, your post shows you care about philosophy as well as reducing
suffering -- and there are a lot more ideas and actions you can explore
starting from those two areas. If you do so, please keep in mind the extra
complexity of the motivational triad and other possible human objectives. And
along with "The Pleasure Trap", please also perhaps reflect on the book
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose" by
Deirdre Barrett and the essay "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" by Paul
Graham as they explore the dark side of modern society and technology relative
to human inclinations adapted for a more tribal culture within an environment
with different abundances and scarcities. As Stephen Ilardi writes about in
"The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs":
"We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-
isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life."

All the best in discovering and/or making meanings in your life -- including
from loving caring.

------
QuesnayJr
This is a well-known concern in demography. See, for example, the Wikpedia
page on dependency ratio:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_ratio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_ratio)

------
spodek
> _I just realized that life itself is basically a gigantic Ponzi scheme, and
> the pyramid is dangerously close to collapsing. In the developed world, we
> have evolved a society in which a relatively small number of old people have
> many of their needs cared for through the financial contributions of a
> larger number of much younger people._

He's not describing a property of _life_ or even _human life_ , but of an
economic system shortsightedly based on economic and population growth and
externalizing costs.

Human societies have lived without growth in many places and times for
hundreds of thousands of years (and collapsed after growth many places and
times).

Change the system's underlying goals and you change the outcomes. I'm working
to replace the beliefs from growth to enjoying what you have and from
externalizing costs to stewardship.

We can change those goals. If we don't, we're only forestalling the inevitable
result of any Ponzi scheme.

~~~
harryh
This has nothing to do with growth, but a change in the ratio of working age
people to retired age people.

------
nyxtom
Add in the other variable that the workforce is increasingly being automated
out. Fewer people actually looking for a job (total non working adults). One
“hope” is that maybe we get something like the autodoc from that movie
“Passenger”?

------
coldtea
Young people get raised (for free if I'm not mistaken) from age 0 to age 18
(or more in modern society). That's on top of taxes, savings, etc, their
parents pay. And raising a modern kid is far more expensive than in the 1900s
or 1950s, not to mention also paying for college (which happens in many ways).
Not to mention the eventual wealth inheriting (house, land, etc) which also
happens in many cases.

Are they then supposed to coast along with no responsibility to helping
support anyone but their own?

With a retirement age at 65, 65+18 = 83 or around the life expectancy (and in
many cases lower).

Shouldn't that be in the calculations? Or young people just came from Mars and
never had anyone do anything for them?

Yes, animals don't have to help their parent animals. But animals are ready to
walk in a few days, and sent off to their own in a couple of months or so...

~~~
mikem170
As a thought experiment: What happens if a society stops having children?
Eventually all of the adults become too old to work. They might have money in
the bank, but there's nobody to grow food, pick up the trash, etc.

The concern in this conversation is that with declining birth rates and
increased life expectancy there either needs to be an increase in worker
productivity or a drop in living standards. In 1950 there were 16+ workers
contributing to social security per beneficiary, in 2013 there are less than 3
[1].

I'm not sure what to think about measures of our productivity gains in that
time. Is worker productivity measured based on GDP? Does that account for the
difference between food and entertainment? Maybe young people in the future
will not have the money for as many toys. What about crumbling infrastructure?
And increased government debt? The young of today live in an world that is
economically and demographically quite different than a couple of generations
ago.

Your argument that everyone got a free ride for their first 18 years doesn't
account for the above concerns.

[1]
[https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html](https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html)

------
EugeneOZ
> _And the population pyramid would change dramatically if we had a global
> thermonuclear war or a planet-wide plague, but we probably won 't be so
> lucky._

It was very interesting to read, thanks for sharing!

------
jeffrallen
This needs a 2009 tag.

------
nappy-doo
Sigh. This guy's a Rhodes Scholar, but gets it all wrong. Social Security and
Medicare are not Ponzi schemes or pyramid schemes (There's a difference
between Ponzi and pyramid schemes, but for the sake of argument, let's pretend
they're the same.)

Medicare and Social Security are just a tax. Collectively we've decided we'll
all take care of our old and infirm. We spend the money we take in every year,
and besides the occasional Congress deciding to raid the Social Security trust
fund, we just take care of people. As a percentage, are the number of people
paying in decreasing, sure, but there's a number of quick solutions: either
move the age at which you can collect, or keep the benefits fixed (or even
shrink them). Solvency returned.

HN: Don't fall in to the trap. People are trying to convince you that SS and
Medicare are insolvent, doomed to fail, etc. They are not. They are some of
the most successful, and helpful programs the US has ever created. They are a
simple wealth distribution model, where we've decided there's a basic level of
livability that humans can't fall beneath. Don't fall into the trap of
believing oligarchs and libertarians. The two programs have ushered in the
boom since the great depression, and allowed access to healthcare for people
who otherwise would just die.

~~~
ikeboy
They mainly redistribute wealth from those with low life expectancy to those
with high life expectancy.

It's been calculated that for certain groups with particularly low life
expectancies (for instance, African American men), social security is actually
a net loss for them, as they pay in more to the system than they take out, on
average.

~~~
nappy-doo
That's a specious argument. For example, I might not have children, does that
mean I shouldn't pay school tax? No, we all pay the tax, whether I directly
benefit from them or not. It's a social contract.

Allowing for special classes is the problem, not a solution. It is the
collective good we are striving for. Otherwise, we end up in a situation of
the tragedy of the commons, and no one wins.

Perhaps, instead, we should also focus on extending life expectancies for
African American men, rather than allowing them to not contribute to Social
Security.

~~~
ikeboy
The alternative is privatized social security with payments based on the
market price of an annuity.

It makes no sense to redistribute wealth from those poor in years to those
rich in years. You can require everyone to pay in without also having a
backwards redistribution program.

~~~
nappy-doo
We have that. It's called Social Security. There's nothing to say I will live
long enough (under your plan) to collect my just deserves. In other words, I
have been taxed under my whole life, and never saw a benefit.

Just replace the word "annuity" in your plan, with "public trust" and you have
social security.

~~~
ikeboy
We don't have that. We have some populations that are charged significantly
more than market value for their annuities and some that are charged
significantly less. Social security is a combination of mandatory purchasing
of annuities plus redistribution; we should nix the perverse redistribution
aspect.

------
tyzerdak
If old people will buy goods that young people produce money will cycle

------
lazylizard
I think global warming will fix that. No problem.

------
a3n
> it's always more expensive to treat an illness than it is to prevent it.

It's also more profitable to treat a long term condition than to cure or
prevent it.

Just sayin'.

------
ilaksh
[https://sens.org](https://sens.org)

------
wadkar
[2009]

/ping dang

------
HashThis
The ROOT PROBLEM comes from the insight that I've seen.

The GOOD NEWS: The healthy part of our economy:

* GDP grows 5.5% YoY (Yay! for population and productity growth)

* US Government revenues grow 5.5% YoY

THE PROBLEM:

* US National Debt increases 8.5% YoY (average over the last 40 years)

* US Money printing increases 8.5% YoY (averaged over the last 40 years. by Monetary base)

8.5% problem increases YoY > 5.5% growth of health

~~~
thebigspacefuck
Something I’ve wondered, is there an amount of money that can’t be spent
without changing the meaning of money? If I have $1 I can spend it right away
on something tangible, like a can of Coca Cola. If I have $1 Trillion, it
would be hard to spend on tangible products. I could probably buy the Coca
Cola company and the secret recipe but not a Trillion cans of Coke. The value
of money exists on a spectrum. The spending habits of the wealthy and poorest
of us reflect this. The wealthy invest and save, but the poorest live paycheck
to paycheck. The time spent owning the value of the dollars changes the more
of them you have. You may own stocks, but the value can change wildly based on
public sentiment, unlike my can of Coke. So where on the spectrum does this
printed money go? If it goes to the poorest, it would be spent right away and
directly likely leads to inflation of the price of consumer goods. If it goes
to wealthiest, it may trickle down in the form of stock prices or investment
capital that allows businesses and jobs to be created which at some point may
lead to the price of a Coke going up. An 8.5% increase in printed money hasn’t
led to 8.5% increase in inflation, so what’s the equation that explains this?
I’m also not sure how it makes sense to do this math in percentages.

