The old folks home called government

Gerontocomium.

At 66 I admit my feeling are mixed. All in all I think I am actually younger than 20 years ago having grown inwards, retracing my way into the labyrinths of imagination to escape a pseudo-reality I could not endure or accept. In certain respects I am far less cursed with the times as a consequence. The times I shrug off. Jeffers said we endure recurring episodes determined when the ape’s children ran in packs and chipped flint to an edge. That was the 1930’s. He lived in Carmel. Well now is the 2020’s and the children of the ape have degenerated into automatons of mayhem. Lacking skill to chip flint they rockets. I must say that I am not employed, employable, or ecstatic about the world situation but I live in San Francisco which may not be as valuable a target as Silicon Valley.

Population control and population reduction have long been policy at various institutions and think tanks committed to global governance, from the UN to the World Economic Forum. It was a part of the UN’s Millennium goals, and since the dawn of the 21st century, has been part of UN Agenda 2030.

It is important to now introduce a framework for understanding the problem of population in light of economic development. The long standing view is that economic development leads to population stagnation, even decline. The idea here is that education and urbanization are processes which lead towards better knowledge of basic family planning, in tandem with improved access to abortion and birth control.

The underlying postulate is that people naturally do not want to be burdened with children, that children are an affront to freedom in the abstract. The formula is that as people are better educated and have more meaningful work and interesting lives, they know both how to prevent pregnancy and also no longer have ‘primitive’ inclinations towards large family building.

This mythology was built up around a notion that people are fundamentally self-interested in the narrowest sense, to the exclusion of other desires, needs, and impulses. They are presented as the norm such to furthermore create a broader culture which opposes procreation.

Instead, the real mechanism pushing population stagnation in the 1st world are increased pressures of work, and increased costs of living. Rather than ascribing population stagnation to improved conditions of life, these are more related to austere conditions imposed by late modernity. The costs of property, of rents, of food, and also because of the decline in quality of goods through increased planned obsolescence, has placed more economic pressure on individuals and couples. It has led to the requirement that both members of a household are working full-time. And even with this, home ownership in cosmopolitan centers is practically impossible for most. Austerity has also led to stagnation in life expectancy.

This truth is exposed in actual policy papers like “New strategies for slowing population growth” (1995). Here, the doublespeak is evident, with easily decipherable phrases within it; “…reduce unwanted pregnancies by expanding services that promote reproductive choice and better health, to reduce the demand for large families by creating favorable conditions for small families…”. What could possibly be meant by ‘create favorable conditions for small families’?

The word for an old people's home my dictionary suggests is gerontocomium.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/aging-congress-boomers/

Across all senators and representatives, the median age of the 118th Congress is 59 years old. The median senator is 65 years old, a record high; the median representative is about 58, for the fourth Congress in a row. Congress has notably aged since 2001: From 1919 to 1999, the median senator never eclipsed 60 years old and the median representative never surpassed 55.

U.S. population is also far more elderly than in the past: As of the 2020 census, about 42 percent were 45 or older, twice the share in the same age group a century before. Of course, this is partly due to people living longer and having fewer children, which reduces the share of younger people entering the population.

While immigration has augmented the population, 76 million boomers were born between 1946 and 1964, far more than the 47 million in the preceding Silent Generation, and greater than the 55 million and 62 million in the subsequent generations of Generation X and millennials, respectively. Boomers have been described as “the pig in the python” because, over time, they have formed an unusually large bulge in the nation’s population distribution. Their magnitude in the population initially helped slightly reduce the nation’s median age in the 1960 and 1970 censuses before the median started to rise again, as it has throughout the country’s history.

So fine. Now the Federal Bureaucracy.

While the average age of current federal employees is 47, the average age of new hires is 39, and “to many, that won’t seem like much of a difference,” the MSPB has said.

A recent publication breaking down both groups by 10-year age segments shows that—as might be expected—the percentage of new hires exceed the share of the workforce in the two youngest age groups but the opposite is true at the oldest, while they are about equal in the middle.

Specifically, while only 7 percent of current workers are under age 30, 27 percent of new hires are in that age band, and for the 30-39 age band, the figures are 23 and 33 percent, respectively. In contrast, only 14 percent of new hires are ages 50-59 and only 3 percent are ages 60-69, while those age bands account for 30 and 13 percent of current workers, respectively.

Twenty-three percent of new hires and 26 percent of current employees are age 40-49, the MSPB added. (One percent of the workforce is age 70 and above with almost no hires in that age range.)

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