Andrew Stuttaford’s “Dodging Gerontogeddon: Adapting to an Aging Population” makes a careful case for cool heads on demographics, leaning heavily on a new paper from Daron Acemoglu and co-authors arguing that population decline has historically driven productivity gains large enough to offset the smaller workforce. The trouble isn’t that the diagnosis is wrong — the trouble is that the cure is a fourth-floor walk-up with no elevator, and the people writing the prescription won’t be the ones climbing it.
The real story here isn’t the aging population. It’s what we’re asking the aging population to do.
Let me concede the strong half first, because Stuttaford deserves it. Acemoglu’s research is genuinely interesting. A one-percentage-point lower birth rate correlates with about 26.8% higher GDP per worker across countries from 1950 to 2020. Workers and firms responded to labor scarcity by adopting labor-saving technology. Britain, which dodged the squeeze by importing cheap labor, has been stagnant on a per-capita basis since 2008. The productivity-through-scarcity thesis has real teeth, and the Acemoglu team is honest enough to flag that their data may not cover the speed of change coming in places like China.
Here’s what the column quietly skips past.
Stuttaford quotes Acemoglu’s optimistic conclusion and stops there. He doesn’t linger on the mechanism that produced it. The mechanism was: workers and companies turned to technology to augment a reduced labor force. Fine. But here’s the part that doesn’t make the headline: that adaptation required investment. Investment in new equipment. Investment in training. Investment in the kind of patient, long-horizon capital that takes a decade to pay off. Where did that investment come from in the countries that pulled it off? Mostly from a tax base that was already collecting broadly, from banking systems that directed capital to productive uses, and from welfare states that let workers take the risk of retraining without falling off a cliff.
Stuttaford’s column mentions automation at nearly every turn and public investment roughly never. He wants the productivity dividend from labor scarcity without naming the institutional foundation that delivered it in every case he cites. Japan automated aggressively. Japan also has universal healthcare, a public pension system, and — at its large firms, where the heaviest automation happened — employment norms that kept workers attached to companies long enough for retraining to pay off. South Korea automated aggressively. South Korea also built a developmental state that directed capital, ran universal education, and nationalized health insurance decades ago. You don’t get the Acemoglu result from one of those legs. You get it from the whole chair.
The British comparison he raises is actually devastating to his own argument, if you read it carefully. Britain’s employers relied on cheap immigrant labor instead of investing in productivity. Why? Because cheap labor was cheaper than capital investment. The market did exactly what markets do: it took the path of least resistance. Stuttaford wants to believe that American employers will respond to scarcity the way the Acemoglu data describes — by investing in technology and skills. Maybe they will. But the British case shows that employers will also respond to scarcity by lobbying for more labor, which is exactly the immigration policy Stuttaford opposes. The “free market” path and the productivity path diverge here, and he doesn’t notice.
Then there’s the retirement age. Stuttaford floats raising it from 67 to 70, phased in, tied to healthy-life-expectancy gains. This is presented as common-sense fiscal hygiene. Let me translate the mechanism. A 62-year-old roofer with a bad back and no employer-sponsored health insurance doesn’t retire at 67 because the actuarial tables say she should. She retires when her body gives out, or when she can’t find work that doesn’t kill her. Raising the retirement age doesn’t change that arithmetic. It just means she collects less while her body gives out. The Einav-Finkelstein finding Stuttaford cites — that healthy life expectancy at 60 has risen by 2.4 years — is a population average. It papers over the enormous variation between a tenured professor and a roofer. The professor might productively work to 75. The roofer’s knees are gone by 55, and a higher retirement age means she collects less Social Security while living longer in pain.
This is the part of the demographic conversation that always gets skipped. Optimism about aging is built on averages. Policy lands on individuals. And the individuals most affected by “work longer” are the ones whose bodies are already used up.
Stuttaford is right that healthy aging is the most underrated fiscal story of the decade. He’s right that medical-cost growth has slowed. He’s right that automation can cushion demographic decline. None of that requires the conclusion he’s actually pushing, which is that we should just trust the market, work longer, and stop worrying. The Acemoglu data shows that successful adaptation required more than market reflex. It required institutions. Universal healthcare so workers could retrain without going bankrupt. Public education so the next generation could staff the new machines. Pension systems that let older workers exit with dignity rather than clinging to jobs they can no longer do.
So here’s what I’d build instead. The retirement age should follow job quality, not just calendar time: a roofer at 65 draws full benefits, a desk worker at 67 draws the same. That isn’t sentimentality — it’s recognizing that “work longer” is a real instruction for some people and a cruel joke for others. Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit and Social Security credits for low-wage workers so that extending careers actually pays rather than becoming a mechanism for collecting less while your knees go. And treat the productivity dividend from automation as a public resource — fund it through public options in healthcare, expanded child allowances, or sovereign-wealth-style funds — rather than letting it all accrue to capital owners who happened to own the robots. Stuttaford’s framework trusts that dividend to arrive on its own. History says it arrives only when someone builds the plumbing.
The aging population isn’t a problem we dodge. It’s a problem we distribute. Stuttaford’s column distributes it to the workers whose bodies won’t cooperate. A better column would distribute it more fairly.