> From: Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com>
> Subject: statistical fallacy of aging population?
>
> It is a truism in current thought that, as populations age, fewer and
> fewer workers need to take care of more and more retirees. But it seems
> obvious that the same workers are taking care of fewer and fewer children.
> And if kids are dependent from 0 to 22, and retirees from 65-87, it seems
> likely that the ratio of workers to dependents is remaining constant.
>
> Some one else must have thought of this before me. So where's the hole in
> my reasoning?
>
> Michael
>
> John K. Taber:
> There isn't any, your reasoning is right on. I would have to scrounge
> around in millions of bits to find out who said so, but it is said that
> the ratio of *dependents* to workers is near constant, and that the
> ratio of retirees to workers is a red herring.
>
> Possibly it was Baker of EPI or Aaron of Brooks Institute who said so,
> and I think they say so based on Social Security Administration
> actuarial studies. I may not have the details right, but the
> evidence is not deniable even if I don't have it at hand.
EPI has this to say in their "Reading Between The Lines" reature for Nov 16 - 22, 1996: "First, the ratio of seniors to working-age people does not provide a useful gauge of the burden of care placed on working people. A more meaningful indicator is the dependency ratio--the number of people over 65 plus the number of children under 20, divided by the working-age populationþwhich is projected to rise only slightly from its current levels, from 0.71 in 1995 to 0.79 in 2030. It never approaches the 0.95 level it hit in 1965, suggesting that much if not all of the additional needs of the retired population can be met from the reduced demands of a smaller school-age population."
And Richard C. Leone, in "Why Boomers Don't Spell Bust," The American Prospect no. 30 (January-February 1997) adds:
"In the future, it's asserted, there will be too few workers to produce enough to support the social safety net. But when they were kids, the baby boomers posed a challenge that may have been even greater. There were even more of them then, and for 15 or 20 years they produced little. They made complicated demands on the real economy, and society had to respond out of the much smaller economic pie that existed at that time...."
"Odd, isn't it, that no one, including the boomers' parents, recalls the 1960s as an era of economic deprivation?"
"As kids, boomers comprised over 40 percent of the population; today, they are less than 30 percent; in retirement they'll drop below 25 percent."
"The cost of raising the boomers was high; conservative estimates of the average cost of raising a child are about $300,000, in current dollars. (Coincidentally, this number is almost identical to the "insurance value" to a family of Social Security coverage.) But there was no free lunch: Boomers as children consumed goods and services from the real economy, just as they will as seniors."
> Now where is Max Sawicky?
Recovering from a triptophan high, one hopes.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
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