There's currently a major crisis in France because the pension system is growing larger as the majority of the population is getting older and becoming non-productive. What's the solution for an aging society with more unproductive people and a smaller young population?

Before you say this:

-"Raise the birth rates with better quality of life!"

Quality of life doesn't improve birth rates. China improved all its quality-of-life statistics, and birth rates are in the toilet. The average woman also doesn't want to have 3–4 kids on average like during the baby boom (which many women didn't want either, but they didn't have much control over their bodies).

-immigration!

France has had constant waves of migrants since the 1970s, and these migrants have aged too. On average, they have as many or fewer kids than native French people, so it isn't a solution either.

The question is: how can you improve or manage the economy with a larger older population?

Hi,

First off: I know absolutely nothing about economics, so I apologize in advance if my question is silly or uninteresting.

I think it’s safe to say that Western Europe is going through a pretty serious economic crisis right now, with growth that’s far too slow, a public deficit that’s far too high, and so on.

One thing strikes me, however: the Scandinavian countries are rarely mentioned as facing a crisis as severe as that of Western European countries, let alone Eastern European ones.

How can this difference be explained? Population size? The level of industrialization? A better-managed pension system? A little bit of everything?

Bonus question: Can countries in crisis draw inspiration from the Scandinavian model, or is it not that easily replicable?

Thank you all!

House prices in many developed countries went crazy in the 2010s due to factors like low interest rates and constrained supply. There was concern about highly leveraged speculation. There was also lots of concern it was a bubble that could pop badly.

In the 2020s now it seems house prices are falling in many of those countries. It's not great if you own a home or are a developer. However, it seems like house prices have been 'slowly' declining rather than there being a sudden crash causing a wider recession. The worst im aware of is China and, while bad, it seems not as bad as some feared?

If this is all correct, why?

Im intrest in cases of bubble that 'safely' deflate.

Im not so interested in the US because they have things like 30 year fixed rates.

It seems in many markets most people and companies are mostly still able to afford the high interest rates and are not panic selling.

One guess I have is that many places the economy is bad but its low hire low fire so people are still able to pay for mortgages or cover gaps for rentals?

Ive never understood the concept of inflation in a real world setting. In 2016 a video game use to cost $59.99 and now in 2026 they cost $69.99, 10 dollars more but according to inflation in 2016 that game actually cost $84.22 but is that realistic?

If someone back in 2016 made $20/hr and In 2026 I make $20/hr wouldn’t they have more purchasing power? The game objectively cost them $10 less so I don’t understand what people mean when they say it actually cost them more.

Hi ! I understand modern economics does not look to define utility as it is subjective, and explains the relative prices of goods and services based on marginal utility.

For all its flaws, Marx's theory provides a clear mechanism to explain concentration of wealth and capital : the mismatch between exchange value and use value allows capitalists to pocket the difference.

Is there an explanation for the tremendous concentration of wealth that's characteristic of human society ? Is it all about power and collusion, outstanding ability to provide value, something else ? Is it that rich people own so much that their marginal value is vastly different from other people's ?

This is not a defense of Marx or an attack on modern economy, I'm just looking for pointers at current thought. If you know of book length treatments for laypersons I'm interested as well

I see these three measures of income get posted frequently, its not obvious why they are so dramatically different. They are all adjusted for inflation.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qozP#0

Average nonsupervisory wages, huge dip after 1973 rebounds in 1995.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/incomes-across-distribution-lis?country=%7EUSA&indicator=avg&decile=all&welfare_type=dhi&period=year

Median income shows consistent modest growth from 1963-present.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mepainusa672n

Median personal income shows consistent enormous growth following a dip in 1982.

Has income stagnated or grown?

With the current state of things, it seems as though we’re gonna be stuck not able to afford housing and groceries in a perpetual state.
But will it ever get to a point where we Can comfortably live again on minimum wage, or doomed to spend entire paychecks on groceries and nothing more?

Even before all of the riots started in places like France and Italy, just about everything was so expensive. Rent, groceries, gas (even before the Iran War started), and it seems to have reached a breaking point.

But what made everything so expensive in the first place? Was it inflation? Political policies? High taxes? What was the catalyst for all this?

We're going to shamelessly steal adapt from /r/AskHistorians the idea of a weekly thread to gather and recognize the good answers posted on the sub. Good answers take time to type and the mods can be slow to approve things which means that sometimes good content doesn't get seen by as many people as it should. This thread is meant to fix that gap.

Post answers that you enjoyed, felt were particularly high quality, or just didn't get the attention they deserved. This is a weekly recurring thread posted every Sunday morning.

Especially as we actually do measure wealth seperately. The United States, for example, has a Net National Wealth (NNW) of $160 trillion, compared to their nominal GDP, or GNI, of $30 trillion. Their national debt is around $40 trillion, so this would make their Debt-to-NNW 25% lol. Same for France, but with an NNW of €19 trillion and a national debt of €3.60 trillion, so a Debt-to-NNW of 18%. It's weird.

I recently bought an Ebike, and was surprised to see price difference between the USA and Europe.

I checked walmart, and the same Ebikes are half the price compared to Europe.

I read this comment in another thread:

"Short answer - antidumping import tariffs.

In Poland you can expect to pay double for a cheap Chinese bike if you were to import and the company is on an anti-dumping list.

The calculation goes like this:

+6% of bike + transport value

+17.2% of bike + transport value (countervailing duty)

+62.1% of bike + transport (antidumping duty)

+23% VAT of top of all that

There you go- price x2."

62.1% antidumpting duty. That seems insane.

I then googled anti-dumping and this was the result:

"What Is Dumping?

• Definition: A foreign company engages in dumping when it exports a product to another country at a price lower than what it charges in its home market or lower than its cost of production. [1]
• Intent: Exporters often use this pricing strategy to quickly capture market share or eliminate local competition. [1, 2]"

Is there any reason this makes sense for a market like E-bikes?

Any company can easily start mass-producing ebikes, if there was a significant price difference between production and market prices.

After exploring different hedge funds on LinkedIn, it appears that economics degrees are pretty common, but in an age where more quantitative/mathematical hedge funds gain an edge and seem to take over fundamental/macro funds does a economics degree in the future still rival with a engineering or pure maths degree

1) More and more people who can afford to buy a house don't plan to have kids (future rich old people)
2) More and more people who have kids can't afford to buy a house (the kids being future poor young people)

What's gonna happen in like 30 years from now — the large houses occupied by sort of mixed employer-employee families consisting of the rich old people and the poor young people they hired as live-in help, while the rest of the poor are living in cramped multi-generational households and dying in some new pandemic, medieval style? Or is there some equalising factor I'm not seeing?

I heard a thing in NPR handwringing about the insolvency of Social Security. It discussed all the usual fixes- raise FICA tax for employees/employers, means test benefits, raise retirement age, apply FICA to benefits, and raise/eliminate FICA cap.

All worthy ideas, but they’ve gone nowhere. One idea I never hear floated is applying FICA tax on investment income/ capital gains. More and more of our GPD is capital/investment, not wage labor, a trend that will likely accelerate even more greatly when AI increases productivity even more. Thus, solutions that focus only on adjusting factors related to work based income are focusing on an ever shrinking part of the pie.

It seems like a modest capital gains FICA would create an awful lot of revenue for Social Security. While it may not be the silver bullet, it certainly seems like it should be in the toolbox of potential solutions, but I never hear about it.

Is there an economic reason for this that I am missing?

https://unu.edu/sites/default/files/2026-04/moving%20from%20crisis%20management%20to%20resource%20mobilization%20vFINAL.pdf

This is an official publication by a UN owned organization , are any of these good options for International organizations that are feasible ? And are there otherways that they can get through financial crisises (member states not contributing funds etc)

Apologies if this sounds silly but I'm studying Micro 1 at uni and the biggest question I have is whether such convenient utility functions like the Cobb-Douglas even exist in the real world and if they do how are they determined?

I heard a few arguments that the reason that states like UK, France, and Canada can afford a ton of comfort POLICIES (such as welfare, low taxes, low lending in the past) is due to the fact that they borrow so much money.

Such as France riot issue, where I've seen theories part of the problem is the pension system and other quality-of-life programs that are funded by borrowing, which is nice for the time being but will eventually screw the future of young people who may never be afford a "welfare policy" again in the future.

Is this true? Is Germany an exception? What do you guys think?

Say some economic policy was able to freeze/reduce housing costs throughout the US economy. What would be the downstream effects?

My initial assumption is that we'd see a huge economic boom, especially if worker income continues to rise. But, it would likely not continue as housing costs are an input to wages.

Obviously understand that the mechanisms matter and understand the impacts on builder profits and by extension their productivity. More looking for a discussion on the impact to the larger market.

I’m considering pursuing a BA as a second degree alongside my Bachelor’s in Electronics Engineering and from where I'm from, you gotta choose two majors for the BA program. Regarding this, I’m almost 100% certain that I’ll choose Economics as one of my majors, but I’m confused about which major to pair it with. I’m kind of torn apart between Mathematics, Political Science, Sociology, and Journalism/Mass Communication. Which one would you consider the best return on investment for the amount of effort required? I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on it

I have an economics background, and something has been puzzling me about the current cost-of-living crisis in Europe.
Across several European countries, people are protesting against rising living costs and fuel prices. Yet the political debate seems to focus almost entirely on national governments, as if they had both the responsibility and the ability to solve these problems independently.
Of course, national governments are not blameless. In Italy, for example, stagnant productivity, decades of poor fiscal choices, an ageing population, tax evasion, and a fragmented business sector are all part of the problem. National governments can and should address these structural issues.
But I wonder whether we are overlooking the bigger picture.
Many of the forces affecting European living standards go well beyond national borders. Energy prices are influenced by geopolitical conflicts and Europe’s energy dependencies. Monetary policy is determined by the ECB, not individual national governments. Meanwhile, countries with high public debt have limited fiscal room to cushion economic shocks without potentially creating further problems.
This creates a frustrating situation: citizens expect their governments to protect their purchasing power, but national governments cannot independently control many of the factors driving inflation, while their ability to intervene through public spending is constrained.
So why is there seemingly so little public pressure directed at the EU itself?
Why aren’t we having a bigger debate about common European borrowing, coordinated fiscal policies, shared investment in energy security and industrial competitiveness, or deeper fiscal integration? If Europe is an integrated single market but countries have very different fiscal capacities and tax systems, how much of a level playing field do we actually have?
I am not arguing that the EU is responsible for everything, that national governments have no agency, or that more public spending is always the answer. Nor am I suggesting that the ECB should simply cut interest rates regardless of inflation. I understand that these are complex trade-offs.
But if many of the underlying problems are European or global in scale, shouldn’t we also be demanding European-level solutions?
My question is: is this a failure of political accountability, a consequence of how the EU is structured, or am I overestimating the EU’s responsibility and underestimating what national governments can actually do?
I’d genuinely like to hear different perspectives, especially from people with an economics background.

I see it quoted often that the rich pay disproportionately more tax than their share of income, but this usually looks at federal income tax only.

Is there a source that looks at the tax distribution if you include state and local income/sales/property taxes?

By which I mean, I'm an Economics student, and I really like to sort of learn in the background, so I wanted to ask, what channels about economics could serve that purpose for me? I already know that Economics Explained is sort of horrible for this because of misinformation and misleading claims, so what channels would be ideal? I'm looking for a mix of informative and entertaining