No, unless everyone who currently chooses not to have children is a sociopath.
And if it does that, so what? Is perfectionism really that important?
And honestly, my proposal isn't so much about increasing the birthrate, but preventing a certain kind of freeloading ("The pensions...they can all burn"). Totally make the conscious choice to go child-free, just understand if you do you may not be able to retire.
> and it’d be especially cruel to anyone with fertility issues.
And if that's really an issue, which I'm not convinced of, because policies are invariably "cruel" like that in innumerable ways, you could always carve out an exception for people who've attempted fertility treatments.
> As social policies go it’d be much easier to simply allow more immigration.
Except that probably would be even more cruel, since it falsely hand-waves that there's enough high fertility elsewhere to sustain a low fertility rich country. It turns out there isn't, so what you proposal requires is either: 1) export the labor shortage to poorer countries that are less equipped to handle it, or 2) maintain crushing poverty in many countries to turn them into baby factories for the immigration solution.
Wow, you misunderstood that pretty badly.
Unless you can make a money-golem, a pile of cash can't take care of you in your old age, labor will. If you haven't had kids, it means you haven't paid into the future labor pool, and it would therefore be unfair for you to withdraw from it once labor becomes too constrained. To do otherwise would be like paying out full pensions to people who never paid a dime into the system.
Regardless, individuals must be empowered to live their best life (if they choose to be childfree) [2] [3] [4] [5], even if it breaks the entrenched system.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population
[2] https://www.axios.com/2024/04/16/young-adult-sterilization-i...
[3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullartic...
[4] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230208-the-adults-cel...
[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/19/growing-s...
The system I'm starting to conceive doesn't seem like a pyramid scheme, but rather something more balanced than what we have now:
1. You contribute into the pension system to support your parents (through a pension), as a societal obligation. After all, they more likely than not supported you when you needed it.
2. You contribute labor to the next generation of society, in the form of children, to make a claim to the society's, labor-dependent, old-age support programs (funded through point 1). Otherwise, you're on your own to support yourself, which would probably consist of working well into what we currently consider the "retirement years," and/or "choosing" euthanasia when that is no longer possible.
> You’re just livestock that didn’t consent to be here.
No one ever consented to "be here," and it would be impossible to do so. That's just a fact of life.
A pretty straightforward fix would be to make pension eligibility contingent on fertility: no kids, no pension benefit. Of course, you'd still have to pay into the system, regardless.