Social Security is Only the Beginning

There is a frightfully interesting article at Policy Review by Stanley Kurtz. And "frightful" is certainly an appropriate adjective to describe it. Kurtz reviews four books that try to describe a coming economic disaster that will be due to population decline. No industrialized country has anywhere close to a replacement birthrate. As European welfare states (lump US entitlement programs here) age, productivity growth will decline if not become negative. Some European countries may face a situation where 60% of the population is over 60. Funding a welfare state for this much of the population is, as environmentalists are fond of saying, unsustainable. Kurtz outlines all the author's disaster scenarios and their calls for change. If these analysts are even partially right, Social Security reform is a pretty minor affair.

Seriously interesting read. Base10 tends not to be so Malthusian. Kurtz dismisses technological innovation, but Base10 thinks far reaching innovations in fields like nanotechnology, fusion power and biotechnology could be as fundamentally transforming as the lightbulb, indoor plumbing, the steam engine or refrigeration. It need not be as bad as Kurtz and the others foresee. But you'd be foolish to ignore it. Base10 suggests that the Democrats who are relentlessly trying to argue that there is no Social Security crisis, would do themselves a great service by reading this article.
- posted by Base10 @ 10:37 AM