Bloomberg. You failed in your demographic duty and now you won't be able to retire.

The journals have really been pounding out the electrons recently.  Just a couple of weeks ago some complete twit at The Wall Street Journal was happily musing about how we'll all be chained joyfully to our desks until we are desceated corpses at age 200, as we noted here:

Lex Anteinternet: The Wall Street Journal and the Rosy "End of Retir...: On one hand, you can read in the New York Times about how there's a growing number of while collar men in their 50s who have permanen...

At the same time, the New York Times was wringing its hands at people who were forcibly retired in their 50s.

Now, Bloomberg is telling us that you didn't have enough babies and so now you are stuck working, you sot.  As Bloomberg puts it:

The pressures on older Americans to work will likely only become greater in the coming years. This is because the young, working population needed to support retirees will see slower growth, and possibly outright shrinkage.
As recently as 2009, the U.S. had unusually high fertility rates for a developed nation. The total fertility rate — the number of children a woman can be expected to have over her lifetime — was about 2.1 children per woman, which is the level required for long-term population stability. But since then, the rate has fallen to 1.8 in 2016, implying long-term population shrinkage:
Much of this is due to a fall in fertility among Hispanics, whose birth rates are converging with those of other groups. The Great Recession was undoubtedly a trigger as well; permanently lower expectations of income and wealth made child-rearing seem like a more financially daunting prospect.
Fewer kids means, eventually, fewer young workers to support an increasing population of retirees. This will result in less money being paid into the Social Security and Medicare systems, requiring either cuts in benefits, a higher retirement age or ever-ballooning deficits. Past experience suggests that Americans will be asked to work longer.
The U.S. bounced back from falling fertility once before, in the late 1980s. But as economist Lyman Stone has written, there are reasons why history may not repeat itself. High and increasing costs of housing, child care and education show no sign of reversing. The need for ever-higher levels of education in order to thrive in the U.S. job market is causing families to delay childbirth, which results in fewer children. Stone projects that U.S. fertility rates could fall as low as 1.5 or 1.4 — the levels that prevail in Japan and some European countries.
There is one more source of population growth that the U.S. has traditionally depended on — immigration. Low-skilled immigrants make it easier to raise kids by providing cheap child-care services. High-skilled immigrants earn more and pay a lot of taxes, while using few government services themselves, meaning that their fiscal contribution is enormously positive:
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But low-skilled immigration to the U.S. has declined, meaning that more expensive child care is on the horizon. And high-skilled immigration may soon taper off, as President Donald Trump’s policies and rhetoric make the country less hospitable for the world’s best and brightest.
In other words, the U.S. may soon find itself without its two big long-term population boosters, and wind up as a graying, shrinking nation, with young people burdened with supporting ever-more old people, and the elderly themselves forced to work long into what used to be the golden years.

Oh bull.

There are reasons to lament declining birthrates, but the "nobody will ever get to retire" line of reasoning is not one of them.  Indeed, as we pointed out earlier, the bigger problem is automation which is removing a larger and larger number of jobs from the economy and which is now not only wiping out "labor" type jobs but which is also wiping out white collar jobs.

Every time you get an automated phone answering system, or check out at the grocery store with an automatic checker, or check into a flight with an automatic system, or shoot, order something on the Internet, you are participating in this.

The one thing that automation appears unlikely to intrude on, however, is the writing of "the sky is falling" on retirement articles.  It takes, so far, a real human being to do that.