> The factors your calculation neglected are, over time:
> 1) life expectancy lengthens, from say 68 to 87.
> 2) retirement age lowers, from 70 to 60
> 3) dependent age lengthens, from 18 to 22
> 3) ratio of parents to children drops, from 2.5 to 1.5
>
> It all adds to to less workers for more dependents for the intermediate
> cycle. In the long run, you are right.
It seems to me it should be the opposite. Declining birth rate preceded the aging population in the US, no? So it seems we should have lost more young dependents sooner than we gained elderly ones. And isn't this generally true, that a rise in prosperity leads to a fall in the birth rate before it leads to a rise in life expectancy? Of course, once you reach Zero Population Growth, all the rise is in the old people. Which would seem to suggest the opposite, that in the long run I'm wrong, but in the short run I'm right. But in the really long run, we're just returning to an earlier state of affairs, and all this scare talk about how can we manage to support all these dependents is just tosh when you compare it to how many dependents workers with huge families were supporting in the 19C, and at a much lower general standard of living. Which is my main point. If I'm right.
By the way, when you broke out those individual factors, does that mean you know how they each feed into the overall age distribution? And is that where you derive this short run/long run idea? Is so, please supply the details. I'd love to follow you on this point. I'd love to know how many children per family equalled how many years per old person in the total ratio of dependents.
> But the demographic cycle is
> changing faster than the ecconomic cycle structurally, so the social
> norms regarding taxes, savings rate and reitement schemes, etc., are
> going to be out of phase with the changing social pattern.
Well it's true that parents seem to spend as much on a single child today as parents spent a generation ago on 3, as if they were dividing the same pot among fewer kids. And arguably that soaks up the surplus. But that's social norms changing too quickly rather than too slowly, no?
Michael __________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com
"Some one has observed that Providence is always on the side of the big dividends," remarked Reginald.
The Duchess ate her anchovy in a shocked manner, she was sufficiently old-fashioned to dislike irreverence towards dividends.
"Reginald at the Carlton" (1904) by Saki __________________________________________________________________________