Do you intend to become elderly? Perhaps not so great news in 50 years when you are looking for a nursing home.

This comments feels a little ambiguous, and driving replies for two separate issues.

At a societal level, is an imbalanced population pyramid a problem? Yes, and many countries are solving this by opening up immigration options.

Should an individual opting not to have children be expected to have negative consequences in old age? IMHO, no.

> opening up immigration options

Unless they are getting immigrants from off world, that is at best a game of musical chairs. Birth rates are plummeting globally.

This is misleading. Birth rates globally are still above replacement level. Even if they weren't, immigration still provides opportunities for people to move from areas of higher relative birth rate to areas of lower relative rate, should they choose to.

Global warming alarmism is similarly misleading, the current climate can easily support human life.

It's called climate change for a reason.

Birth rates are depicted over time for a reason.

it's not really misleading at all. Places like Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, India, Bangladesh, and Malaysia all had birth rates below replacement in 2021.

Sure, you can still find nice big numbers in places like Niger in sub-saharan Africa, but even they are starting a sharp decline. And they are starting with a low base. Their entire national population is only the size of the greater NYC area.

What you're describing is tragedy of the commons. No negative consequences to not having children, but big negative disproportional cost to the parents raising them. With disproportionately privatized losses and socialized gains.

People often say you shouldn't have kids for your own retirement. In the ultimately hypocrisy, they often mean kids will be for everybody's retirement (when they're forced to pay social security taxes as adults).

The economic incentive is to let others have kids and shoulder disproportionately the costs, while you can free ride and "not have negative consequences." Immigration doesn't solve this problem at the system level as removing children from foreign tax pool into our domestic pool shifts benefits from one elderly person to another.

> Should an individual opting not to have children be expected to have negative consequences in old age? IMHO, no.

The question is then who will care for these people when they get old? Other people's children? So other people should have children, put the effort to raise and educate them for your benefit? This is a very egotistic view.

I would argue that expecting your children to care for you is actually far more egotistic than merely expecting a social safety net for all people to exist.

I did not say that in any means, shape or form. I said that all people need someone to help them when they are old, so all people have some responsibility these "someone". The "someone" are children of people, so society needs people to have children that will become adults and be part of society; all people, if possible (medical conditions are usually the accepted exception).

No problem. GPT-42 powered humanoid Tesla robots will be looking after us by then. Probably better conversationalists than your kids anyway /s

this but unironically

Personally, I plan to die in the climate wars.

Having kids isn't likely to change that

a child is a ridiculously expensive, time consuming, and undependable insurance policy

Got you, fam: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59577162

Have enough investments and fiat to not be the poor sucker who can’t pay for help end of life as the young, productive cohort compresses.

Outcomes aren't great for old folks who go into homes without having someone on the outside looking out for them. I don't know if you've seen the recent stories but a little cognitive issues and you'll be signing away everything you've earned to the home itself or one of it's employees. It's quite common.

Having kids solely because you want someone to look after you when you're older seems like an extremely selfish reason to have kids

"Solely" is doing a lot of work there and making a great deal of assumptions.

Yeah but that was the whole point. You're telling someone who already doesn't want kids why they should want kids, but you're giving them only one reason. If they do so, it will only be for that reason

Not necessarily. Suppose that person has multiple reasons to want kids and multiple reasons to not want kids. They analyze the pros and cons and figure that the cons slightly outweigh the pros so they choose not to have children.

If later they learn something unpleasant about nursing homes, or pension plans, or something else relevant to their expected quality of life at their old age, then that might tip the scale towards having children, even though it is only one of many reasons.

The last reason that tipped the scales towards a decision is not necessarily the only one or even the most important.

Why would I care what happens when my IQ degrades to one below room temperature?

Similarly, if I go into vegetative state I hope someone will use my organs for some good cause, not try to keep me alive by any way possible.

Unless you’re investing in canned soup and ammo, you need young people working for those retirement “savings” to be worth anything.

The modern retirement system is merely an additional layer of indirection over the traditional system of kids taking care of their elderly parents.

Yeah, if the number of people shrinks, so does the size of a market, and so do revenues of companies. If you own stocks, those will be worth less. If the number of people shrinks, so does the demand for living space, and the value of your apartment goes down. Etc.

Young, productive workers and consumers will exist somewhere globally, it’s a matter of capturing some of that productivity as investment return. If it all goes to hell, sure, the rows in a database are going to mean very little and you’re going to fallback to fuel, food, and firearms until the end (unlikely).

Not all markets are equally accessible by public companies as is the case with the US. Often you have a lot of private companies, companies owned by people close to the government, etc. Also, in coming decades, declining birth rates will be a global concern, not just one of the developed countries plus russia (and OMG does russia have this problem right now).

And hope when you age out, you keep your mental faculty strong enough you don’t get taken advantage of.

Or just don't be afraid of getting old. We all gotta die at some point. It only takes a week to starve and I can handle that fine.

There will be a lot of poor suckers. A lot of pension schemes and even social security in the US rely on having younger workers paying into it. It's a huge part of how people do retirement planning.

If your answer is that you are not planning on counting on it for the future then a lot of people will ask why not stop paying into it and keep the money taxed for yourself? It is a significant tax. You CAN actually stop paying into it and then make yourself ineligible for payments out which includes spousal benefits being cancelled. You CAN conscientiously object, it is a provision of the SSA law.

If a lot of young people saw that, they would withdraw from it and put the trust right now into a deficit which would adversely affect the people withdrawing from it right now.

I think there is a non zero probability of this happening regardless for different, uglier political reasons but it doesn't make a lot of sense for people to be forced to pay into something with no promise of ever getting something back.

I'll just make enough money to pay for a good nursing home

Your money will have to be worth something and nursing homes to still exist in a world without children. Imagine everyone stops having children tomorrow and make a point for that case, then accept some will have a few kids - that is an improvement but is that enough?

I'll rather hang myself then going to a nursery home now and even more so in the future. I'm living a happy life and looking forward to tomorrow - and yet I am dead serious about that. I've seen enough people in those places. Did you notice that one thing you learned while growing up and maturing was that you started to notice when the party is over and it's time to leave instead of hanging on until the very dire end - it's the same thing with life.

Also neither is yourself getting children or other people getting some a guarantee for a dignified existence in a future nursery home nor is such utilitarian thinking a good basis for deciding on whether or not to bring someone into the world.

Humans will eventually go the way of the Dodo - and that's okay. Because we are not special. Not at all.

Something like 95% of suicides fail and then they'll toss you into a home or someplace terrible to keep you from doing it again.

So I have to suffer a lifetime of kids just for this vague possibility? No thanks.

Not to belabor this point, nor reply to myself. But my mom is 85 and totally capable of shopping and helping herself and her brother just died at 91. He was also capable of doing basically anything you would need to survive daily.

I remember visiting for the first time my great grandmother when I was 6 years old. She was 99. When she saw her great grandson topless with shorts (hey it was the tropics) she reached forward and gave me a massive purple nurple and laughed. She was still shopping daily and moving around.

So I'm not really sure what scare mongering tactics in favour of parenting you are trying to propagate here.

Don't have kids just because you are expecting them to take care of you in old age. That's just cruel.

The situation is a bit more complex than that, but in any case, that's a rather weak rationale for not committing suicide.

Here is a better reason: You'll be dead quite soon in any case, so unless you're in agony, you may as well enjoy your final days here. Think of some of your favorite activities and pick one. Rinse and repeat.

Sound shallow? Maybe, but I've spent an awful lot of time contemplating the question.

Sorry if I did a poor job of conveying, but my comment was never intended to rationalize committing suicide or not committing suicide. It was to illustrate society generally doesn't respect these wishes, that these wishes often fail, and that ending up in an institution staffed by our juniors may be less of our own choice than we may think.

Agree. Ending up in a situation where suicide was not possible is probably one of my greatest fears.

Assisted suicide (death in friendlier terms) like we have in Canada is only going to become more permissive and other pleases will continue to adopt such laws.

In the future when people have real options this is less likely to be an issue.

Not really, vasectomies are a 15-minute out-patient procedure these days. No one who doesn't want kids should be relying on this.

Don't cut yourself on that edge.

I’m hoping this was said in jest but this is definitely not great news for you, and will only make the demographic cliff even steeper.

Assuming you at some point want to be alive when no longer young this is something to be alarmed by, as there simply aren’t going to be enough work-capable people around to keep the machinery of society functioning while still supporting those who have aged-out of the working aged population, unless your plan is to Logan’s Run anyone that shows signs of senescence (which probably isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time).

The machinery of society will presumably evolve to match the number of work-capable people. Automation will likely increase, efficiencies will be found, some services will be cut.

From my perspective (I'm in my 50s) things have been spiraling out of control for a while now. Do we really need a couple of dozen flavors of Mountain Dew? Must I be inundated with advertisements for crap I'll never buy even when going to extraordinary lengths to minimize them? Do we all need a three bedroom house with a three car garage? Do I really need a 200 game backlog on steam?

Are three car garages common?

To be fair, and I’ve said this elsewhere, I think it’s inevitable that we’ll see consistent declines in real estate prices over the next five decades anyway - solely because of the steady tide of newly-vacant houses coming to market due to the collapsing replacement rate - so I doubt the constant construction of new and bigger houses can continue anyway.

I live in a semi-rural area. Three car garages were always seen as the over-the-top status symbol when building a new house, at least back in the day. This is probably a local thing.

The machinery of many societies, including the most powerful ones, is one where an owning class keeps most things for themselves, yet expects the non-owning class to want to contribute children to it and pay for it themselves. No thanks. If the owning class cares so much it can start doing things like making having a family much less economically stressful.

All power to you not wanting to reproduce, why shouldn't other people reproduce? You don't like people?