Of the Boomers i know about 30% plan on never retiring even though they could easily.

The USA is much better off demography than Europe or much of Asia.

You also should take into account that Bill has been a permabear for a long time (looks at the world through cracked roughed up glasses LOL).

[quote=no_such_reality]Four million boomers will die in the next four years by 2020. Then the pace of deaths picks up.

Meanwhile the last of the 80 million millennials come of age in 2019. And we currently have another baby boom size population under 15 years of age today.

Bill is wrong. It’s going to be economic boom times as the biggest wealth transfer from boomers to the rest occurs as they fight the evitiable and transfer any remaining wealth to their grandchildren.[/quote]

I would add to that, no matter what our population is growing, and no matter what more housing (development) must be added. that will add to the economy in and of itself.

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Yes, I think we’re on the cusp of a very interesting deflationary period. I say deflationary, but I think it’ll be a wild mix of inflation and deflation. Things like food, energy, water and housing will experience inflation while manufactured goods and many services will deflate.

We’re not there yet, but you can see the forerunners. IBM’s Watson to replace much of the purpose of doctors, financial advisers and business ‘professionals’. While personal service jobs which can’t be automated such as hospice care become every greater in demand. With the 99% having less and less, the deflationary impacts are nil, 76% have literally nothing, living paycheck to paycheck. 95%, have less than two million and of those many of yearly consumption patterns that will blow through any savings quickly.

I can see a scenario were capital is in a race to the bottom of providing ever cheaper good and services while physical labor is robust with much more stringent people controls. IMHO, the big fights in the future will be about immigration and the continue importing of ‘cheap’ labor.

[quote=dumbrenter]
The productivity might increase in coming decades, but if the increase is from robots and computers, what does that do with the welfare spending? Because Robots don’t pay taxes. Do you think the tax tab will be picked up by the companies that use them?
Or do you expect we will go thru another cycle of adjustment as from farms to industries?[/quote]

How this plays out is anyone’s guess. But personally I think that capitalism as an economic system doesn’t work in the future. (I know that sounds extreme, and in general I’m a believer that things are getting better, not a doomsayer so don’t take it as some pronouncement about the end is nigh.)

My suggestion is to think of it this way. Robots/computers filling many/most of the jobs means lots of low cost production. When you think of it that way, honestly it’s not a problem but a good thing. However, now the question comes as you point out, how do we distribute this production? My personal fear is that we (all us humans) go through a very difficult time politically as we transition from our current system of capitalism to some other system. How that plays out, how smoothly vs how chaotic that change is, what are the details of that new economic order? Beats me. But the world has changed in the past, and it will change again in the future.

One thing I would stress however is that pronouncements about how this coming wave of robots and computers plays out is largely a guessing game. And much of it will happen without people seeing it coming.

Which brings me back to what Bill Gross is doing. He’s making guesses about what the future holds based on taking the current trends/systems and extending them forward. Personally, I think there is way too much disruption in our futures for that to be a valid methodology. All I’ve done is found a likely disruptor and thrown it out so you can see how easily his guess goes awry. My guesses could just as easily go awry.

XBoxBoy