The ageing population

I don’t understand the underlying logic. Currently we are having this problem called ‘an ageing population’, which essentially means that in a couple of decades or so, there are going to be many more old people than there should be in society (according to some human geographical theorists) and not enough people to look after them. Plus, the fact that the population will be made up of more old people than it does now means that there will be less young people, which means that there will be less workers, which is – roll the drums – “bad for the economy”. I suppose this is because when there are less workers around to push the paper, press the buttons, insert the microchips, clean the hotels and serve the coffee, there will be less profit, and we know how much dem bosses wan dey profit.

But this is the part that I don’t get. If there are going to be more old people, and if the solution is to make sure that there are even more young people, then doesn’t that mean that in another few decades those more young people will become more old people that need even more young people to replace them with? You follow? The way the wind is blowing, if you think catching a cab at 5:45 on a Friday evening is tough now, just wait another 50 years…

I thought the world is already overpopulated (and I’m not even gonna go into an existentialist diatribe about whether life is so great that we need to bring even more poor souls into it, or a feminist rant about how population planning is oppressive to women, or a tirade about how immigration regulations discriminate between different classes of immigrants and create a destructive antagonistic nationalistic environment of foreign versus local). I thought that Singapore has already almost reached its peak population density (although some people seem to think we can squeeze another 2 million people in here – obviously they’ve never tried getting on the MRT at Simei at 8 in the morning).

I just wanna know – if we think we got problems now, aren’t the solutions the government is proposing just gonna make things worse in another 20, 30 years?