Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Because money can be saved and money is often exchanged for productivity, people make the natural assumption that productivity can be saved, but it can’t. There's no where that automobiles or apples can be put with enough storage for use 10 years from now. In a very real sense, you eat what you kill; there is no magic replicator that turns out unlimited goods exactly when you want them at no cost to yourself or society. Populations as a whole must produce what they consume, and even if they were very productive in the past, it doesn't changes the math; somebody, somewhere is producing what someone else is consuming.

The situation where this reality impacts the most is retirement. Retirement is a modern concept; people used to produce until they couldn't anymore, and there was enough excess productivity to accommodate the small numbers of non-producers. Modern sensibilities that everyone deserves to become a consumer-only for the last third of their lives is totally unsustainable. There's the false notion that people earned their retirement, that they somehow saved their overproduction for later but that's blatantly impossible, no matter how much money they've saved. Suppose every retiree has $10 million in the bank, and they’re going to want to exchange that money for production in the future, but if there’s only one worker per retiree, and the worker produces $2K/month and the retiree wants $10K/month in products, how’s that going to work out?