Your investments and the government pension are financed by the active work of someone’s children. If there won’t be enough of them around your retirement will not be as comfortable as you planned.
Retirement is still dependent on children. Before it was your children. Now it’s a collective mass of children.
Which messes up the incentive structure. People with many children are subsidizing those with fewer/none.
What an extraordinarily perverse view of recent history. Who do you think built and maintained the socioeconomic systems that allowed women to focus on creating and raising children? You could even more easily twist your perceptions such that men have been forced to work hard and short lives serving the whims of women who have enjoyed the luxury of sitting around making babies, singing nursery rhymes, and gossiping over afternoon tea with their friends.
Women have stopped making babies. So men have stopped wanting to make civilisation. We are indeed seeing the consequences of the collapse of this social contract.
Could you or someone enumerate them?
Because I'm having a hard time thinking of anything that wasn't supported or enabled with women.
This statement completely ignores how our current world is shaped by white supremacy and the patriarchy. Women were prohibited from taking part in anything expect raising children (which even today is seen as contributing nothing).
Women who dared venture outside the home had their work ignored or credit stolen. Eunice Foote and Rosalind Franklin are two obvious examples.
Later, textiles, telecoms and computing were powered by women labour and they were expected to stay in their lane so the men could take credit and the money.
> Women have stopped making babies.
Couples have stopped making babies.
Raising your child will run you ~300,000 USD, in addition to the massive opportunity cost from time investment. Given that social security is funded entirely through taxes in that tax year, it's a bit much to expect the children of 53% of the population to care for 100% of the elderly when the willfully childless 47% of the population did not put in more upfront in some other way. As birth rates drop, the ratio of workers to retirees will skew worse and worse, and the entire safety net will collapse progressively.
Alternatively, we can encourage and incentivize child rearing. Yes, that means that the willfully childfree will need to pony up resources for those who want children. What would you prefer: pay now for the continuity of the safety net, or the collapse of the safety net?
This isn't true, or wasn't true for a long time. SS long had a surplus that it lent to the federal government (a lot of the US debt is debt that is owed to SS). It stopped booking a surplus a few years ago, which means that it is dependent on the government paying back what it is owed, and eventually that will be gone, at which point SS will basically be, as you say, living paycheck to paycheck (or probably be insolvent requiring a cut in benefits or an injection from the general fund).
The rise of AI and automation messes everything up. We don't technically need to have more children, we could even shed a few billion people to a new stable smaller population point. The problem is equitable distributions from AI and automation so that unneeded labor isn't just left to die.
For example, in 2005 Social Security had a 172B surplus, but the US government had a deficit of 318B. Social Security's 172B surplus was spent by the US government in the same year for government services on the people of 2005. The money was spent on voters, taxpayers, and citizens in 2005, but the liability was recorded against people who hadn't been born yet.
You've referred to a fiction, but reality is as I've stated. The US government loves creating fictions, but that doesn't mean we visit the Vietnam Police Action Memorial.
I think it's only fair that save for my own retirement.
You could make a different bet, e.g. invest into whatever infrastructure they'll need to take care of aging population. But your savings fund likely invests in luxuries for aging big spenders, so...
I am rather curious how this plays out long-term, since there is no investment instrument for "please build train / underground closer to my house".
Who will work in these companies? Who will buy their products and fuel their revenues?
> How many children my neighbor has impacts my social security payments or other retirement disbursements in no tangible way.
All the retirement savings you have, whether state-managed or private-managed, are just some coupons for your share in the economy of the future. If the economy of the future shrinks your coupons will be worthless.
The number of kids you and your neighbor have not only have an impact on your retirement, these kids are your retirement.
The investment happens when somebody sells you the shares in exchange for fiat used to pay off the workers. Who do you buy your shares from? That's where you invest.
As for the first part, holding fiat or assets convertible to fiat when fiat has been issued with interest and must be eventually repaid under threat of confiscation of assets. :shrug: It's basically a game of chicken.
Ownership of assets, like home ownership, also contributes towards the totality of a pension.
In that sense, not owning a home, having to pay rent in old age, is a form of impoverishment. If that rent isn't offset by other sources of income like financial investments.
I'd be worried about expected financial growth of any retirement fund over the long term if population is flat or declining.
Infinite productivity growth is just as detrimental to society as cancer is to the body. We need more sustainable economic models.
The home ownership is real, but you can't feed of that. You can live in your home yourself if you'd like, but if you plan to rent it out for profit you'll need young people to work and pay the rent.
And financial market growth depends in a large part on consumption growth. And consumption growth depends in a large part on population growth (at least in a given market).
There are two ways to get a population to grow. One is have babies at above the replacement rate. The other is immigration.
I agree that economic policy needs to adapt to keep a population growing and healthy, but as of right now I am finding it hard to see any signs of this(in the US at least).
If you take out infant mortality the life expectancy wasn't all that different from what it is today. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2625386/
That's misleading because most of the reason life expectancy was so low back then was childhood deaths. If you made it to adulthood at all, you probably would live almost as long as people do today.
Yeah, but a very large part of that low life expectancy at birth was the very high rate of child mortality that the poster above you references.
Funny thing is, it's still the children who pick up the tab in both of these cases, just someone else's children.
As capitalism has yielded to materialism, men and women have forgotten to prioritize the sacrement of marriage.
I'm not here to boss anyone in particular around, but one must judge the tree in general by the fruit.
Wtf are you talking about? It's a man-made contractual obligation used to strengthen financial and political strength.
Marriage is entirely unnecessary in today's world.
Sure, you can point to other factors, e.g. China's One Child policy; war: but the idea that Really Smart People are going to just wave some policy at the problem is laughable.
What works is boys growing into men, girls into women, and families precipitating from actual marriages between them. Pro tip: parenthood is JOY!
The idea that technology has obviated Biology whistles past its own graveyard, voting down anyone daring to point out anyone daring to point out something as obvious as the sunrise.
(And, hey, if Destiny has had other plans than supporting your direct parenthood, the adoption is an eminently honorable alternative.)
We achieved the conservative wet dream of the nuclear family in the past via oppressive policy. We forced women into subservient positions where they can’t gain financial freedom, and we persecuted sexual minorities like homosexuals.
Returning to that is bad. We all decided that that sucks. Not just women, men too. Gender roles suck ass. I don’t want to be a provider, and women largely don’t want to be domestic slaves.
We gave people more freedom, and turns out that means a lot of people don’t want the white picket fence life.
I mean, what’s the actionable policy here? Restrict women from having bank accounts? Criminalize homosexuality? Kill transgender people? Would that… fix anything? I don’t think so.
Even just the foundation is rocky. Were things better in the past? I don’t think so, no. Maybe if you were a successful white man, but even then, you’re probably better off in the modern, progressive world. For everyone else though, you know, the majority, it was a trap.
I don’t want to work in the mines and come home to a depressed wife who made a sad looking depression casserole. That’s not the life I want and, evidently, not the life a lot of people want. So, here we are.
This is not a top-down policy prescription. It is plain, simple, bottom-up wisdom. Nothing I'm saying here has to do with external law. Rather, internal common sense.
To your point, and as Strother Martin succinctly put it in Cool Hand Luke: "There's some men you just can't reach."
The actionable policy is to pursue the basic truth of "form follows function".
Which is what we have right now. So, great, we’re all on the same page.
The karma expense is significant, but worthwhile.
This only makes sense if you start from the perspective that the lack of a nuclear family is the cause of problems.
That's a very clear bias that isn't really reflected by reality. This is outdated conservative logic.
In other words lack of of the nuclear family is 'a' problem.
Whether this lack is 'the' problem is pushing my argument a bit farther than I would.
Now, you have both parents in the workforce - even with generous parental leave the mother loses a lot of opportunity in the prime of her career.
Then you have to pay for childcare if both are working (or lose out on one income if they aren't), food, clothing, schooling, extracurriculars. And you're competing in the workforce against all couples with less children. And then when you get old you aren't relying on your children to look after you - this is frowned upon, and you get paid out from your investments or the government pays you a pension. Basically most of modern life is set up economically against having children, and the main reason to is purely the biological drive.
I think all these factors need to be taken into account when devising economic incentives for people to have more children, and the current levels in any country are too low to have enough of an effect.