If half of Americans can't afford to retire, is that a lifestyle problem or an economy problem?
I'm part of a generation that will likely be obligated to work until they die. We're not buying houses. We're not having families. We're 'killing' industries because we don't have the money to spend like our parents did. The well is dry and we are thirsty, and their response is to tell us we should have saved the water we were never given.
I’ve accepted that barring some massive inheritance or other windfall I will never retire and will probably not have a meaningful improvement in my standard of living.
It's hard to justify putting more than the minimum into retirement savings when you expect the world to be dramatically different in 20 to 40 years. Not even accounting for climate change, long-term economic models show a collapse of the current system within a few decades.
I'd like to see those models. I don't think they're anything more than the pessimistic guesses that have been made for millennia.
From what I understand, the models say that a combination of overpopulation and increasing pollution will cause significant food scarcity. Here's an article: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicates-1972-mit-prediction-that-society-will-collapse-soon
Most articles try to be optimistic, but seeing as we just completely overshot the Paris Climate Accord targets, I have no hope of curbing pollution or climate change.
Food scarcity has been used as an argument before, it lead to WW2 among other things. And yet, technological advances have kept increasing crop yields several-fold, leading to a population increase that wouldn't've been possible otherwise. There is still food scarcity... for some, while in other places populations keep growing.
Technically, "overpopulation" is at worst a self-correcting issue: it just leads to excess deaths.
Pollution and climate change will lead to more of that, and in an ideal world we'd like to fix it all... but unless we get (cheap) fusion energy soon, to enable climate correction on a massive scale (terraforming)... what we should remember is that, once upon a time, all of humanity was made up of about 10,000 individuals, and we seem to all descend from a single female individual (mitochondrial Eve).
I bet with current knowledge and technologies, humanity could afford to lose 99.999% individuals, and the remaining million would still be better off than those primordial 10 thousand. Society is not likely to collapse.
As a likely part of those 99.999%, we can try and fight that fate, but realistically, what can most of us do anyway? I can play the lotto, and if I win donate most of it to research (and hopefully not some scammer), but otherwise, what else?
I bet with current knowledge and technologies, humanity could afford to lose 99.999% individuals, and the remaining million would still be better off than those primordial 10 thousand. Society is not likely to collapse.
There's a line of thinking that if we backslide far enough (i.e. lose the Internet, lose electronics, and lose electricity generation), there's no coming back to this point. The industrial revolution wouldn't have happened without easy-to-extract coal and oil. Today's reserves require a fairly high level of technological advancement to access.
For what it's worth, I don't think that humanity is going to hit that point of no return.
A single study from 50 years ago that indicates slowing of growth before 2100 is not a good argument for the collapse of the current system.
I mean, I'm not going to spoon feed you every relevant article possible. There's plenty of info online - I recommend looking into how the heating of the ocean and changing pH is going to destroy marine life.
Not asking to be spoon fed. I'm telling you that there are no credible models that substantiate the claim you made previously about the collapse of the current system in a few decades.
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