Comments on: Greg Mankiw Wakes Up: Demography Does Matter

By: Edward

Edward — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 13:48:38 +0000

“Isn’t it worth investing in simplifying the writing style in order to communicate the ideas?”

Ok Noel, you win, I will try harder next time :).

By: Noel Maurer

Noel Maurer — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 23:39:57 +0000

There’s a lot of interesting stuff over here, Edward! Thanks for the hat tip.

But regarding sentence structure: I think you’ve got some interesting ideas. They may even be correct. If they’re not communicated well, however, then they’re impossible to judge. Isn’t it worth investing in simplifying the writing style in order to communicate the ideas?

By: Edward

Edward — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 23:31:06 +0000

Hi Noel,

Nice to see you over here.

“Have you thought about sticking to a more rigid social science style?”

Well I will take this as a compliment. Didn’t they use to say about Derrida “now why can’t this guy write normally”.

But probably this would be far too presumptious of me. Maybe I it would be nearer to the point to own up and admit that I am just severely challenged when it comes to the syntax of sentence construction.

Or I could simply answer “Yes, I have, but I decided against it” :).

By: Noel Maurer

Noel Maurer — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 18:38:09 +0000

Edward, your writing style is deucedly hard to follow. I honestly sometimes can’t parse your arguments. Have you thought about sticking to a more rigid social science style?

By: Edward

Edward — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 23:49:57 +0000

“Considering that, investment into medical research now could have extraordinary importance later on.”

This is all very much to the point. As I say where the dependency ages are is not a fixed issue. I have two more posts in mind, one on life expectancy and how and why it has been rising and one on the biology of ageing. Just bear with me a little, and maybe some of this will be clearer.

There are two important questions:

1) How long can we work, and how productive can we be while we are working.
2) How much can medical advance lengthen our active lives, and how much can it simply help us resist the impact of age related disease a little longer.

A lot depends on the answers to these two questions.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 20:10:28 +0000

Isn’t looking at the ratio only too narrow a view?

It seems to me you need to figure in the degree of dependency. A healthy senior citizen with a modest pension living at home is cheap. Somebody with advanced Alzheimer’s disease in a nursing home will be an order magnitude more expensive.

Considering that, investment into medical research now could have extraordinary importance later on.

By: Edward

Edward — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 15:09:39 +0000

One further point I could add. Dependency ratios. These are not carved in stone. They can be flexibilised by changing retirment ages. But the extent to which we can do this is related to our biology and to the dominant level of technology, this is what I am trying to get at in the ‘Pyramids’ post (and there will be more to come on this, the problem is finding time to write). This is why I think the US demographer Ronald Lee has it wrong (see links in pryamid thread), we have to look at the social, economic and physiological factors which influence the conventions which influence dependancy rations and inter-generational transfers: no-one, for example, really now becomes self supporting at 16.

The problem is that the theoretical work which is needed in order to understand how all this works has really not yet been done.