GRIPh colloquium: Dan Halliday

Please find an invitation to the last GRIPh colloquium of the year, on 4 June. It will be given by Dan Halliday, University of Melbourne, currently visiting Hamburg’s New Institute (note that the colloquium with Serena Olsaretti has been postponed to 29 October). Abstract and title are inserted below. 

As always, you’re warmly invited to join us for drinks and dinner. For the latter, please let Lisa (l.m.herzog rug.nl) if you plan to come along, and if you have any specific dietary requirements. 

Population Aging and the Labour Burden

Practically all developed economies are confronting the phenomenon of population aging: Due to increased longevity and decreased rates of reproduction, the median age is being gradually pushed upwards. This is placing increased strain on a range of institutions and policies whose design has assumed that population age will remain roughly constant. This raises certain justice issues. These include worries about political inequality, as when retirees come to constitute a large bloc of voters, warping the incentives of elected governments. There is also fiscal unfairness, as services accessed disproportionately by retirees must be paid for by taxes that tend to be paid by working age people, who will eventually miss out when these services need to be cut. Solutions have been proposed for these problems, and these inform the way in which societies will manage the ‘demographic transition’. But what’s so far been overlooked is something that such solutions don’t directly address, namely, that population aging means that more work will need to be done by fewer people. Reforming taxation, fiscal spending, and so on can adjust the distribution of the benefits and burdens across the life course. But this assumes that the necessary work still gets done. The smaller birth cohorts of the future workforce might still struggle to meet these demands, or do so only if their labour market opportunities are radically altered. Taking this seriously shifts our attention to different dilemmas of population aging, and creates space for new proposals, some of which I will try to identify.