Paul Krugman makes the argument for austerity

…it’s overwhelmingly likely that these [Social Security] projections will be hugely off in one or more ways.

No immediate moral from me, except as a reminder that all those long-term budget discussions in which people act as if we really know what the state of Social Security will be three decades from now are basically just boring science fiction.

Here is more, and this post too.  I bought, and still buy, that kind of argument when it comes to climate science and it seems to work for some number of fiscal issues as well.  Better safe than sorry.

Note, by the way, that to the extent the “robots” argument is true, some of the decline in work in the short-term will not be reversed anytime soon and thus the output gap is smaller — perhaps considerably smaller — than Keynesians have been claiming.