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I think the underlying assumption here is that the majority of the population won't save nearly enough so they will be forced to work longer and/or drastically cut consumption when they retire.
That is beside my point. There are things you can meaningfully save, mostly durable goods. You can build a house, buy pots and other goods that can last your lifetime. You could store some canned goods and so forth. You can also do this on larger scale of building national capital: highways, bridges, factories that may work a long time.
However unavoidably you cannot save labor. It has to be provided when you need it. Your house and highways etc. need to be maintained, the factory needs labor for production. You can sell your assets when old to current population in presence of rule of law and get labor of youth in exchange. But if there are less workers, then your assets will buy less. That is the problem in any society to be solved.
In the extreme situation of the movie “Children of men”, where all that is left is 70+ old infirm people, they are fucked. There are no firemen and policemen and bakers and linemen and nurses and doctors and all the other essential workers to sell your gold to. The same it happens in wars and civil unrest where your gold necklace will buy you loaf of bread. You will die of hunger in your bed. Technically, you individually could save more, but it would be impossible society wide.
The same logic applies in 50% or 90% young population collapse scenario. That is the point.
Perhaps we're misunderstanding each other, when I say drastically cut consumption then I mean that they barely get any healthcare and no elderly care, most will work until they die. Retirement is consumption.
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It's usually solved by the Grim Reaper. There's more young than old. Crashing birth rates make that a problem, but there's enough slack in the system to allow a build-down of the population (at US birth rates, if not South Korean). Provided the young people don't see the old people with assets, decide they'd rather take than trade their labor for them, and do so. Unfortunately that's likely to be what happens, once the Boomers are out of the way.
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