In any case, that solution doesn't scale. Every form of retirement savings is just a way to earmark the production of someone else's kids (so long as human labor is needed for things, that is). If you invest in Google stock in lieu of having kids, you better hope that everybody doesn't get the same idea because then Google would have nobody to work there, and its advertising affiliates would have no working-age people to advertise to.
>Having a kid is very robust against something like hyperinflation, lol.
While I don't know what the statistics are I don't like the idea of having children in part because of the assumption that they would want to help care for you later in life.
As much as I like and dislike my parents I'd sooner move to the otherside of the world than help them though old age.
This is a common mode of thinking, but I personally find it bizarre. The modern American generational structure is senselessly inefficient. We impose large taxes on workers so their parents don't have to live with them, and then those workers turn around and pay huge amounts for child care because their parents don't live with them.
Uh, once Social Security goes bankrupt the practical value of having children will be the same as it always has been: someone to help take care of you when you're old and feeble. And on a macro scale, there is tremendous practical value in ensuring there are 18-25 year old consumers in a couple of decades. Facebook stock would tank if it ever became the case that it's primary demographic was a monotonically shrinking set.
Also, why are college kids today so bad at job hunting? "I applied to 25 paid newspaper internships and got rejected from every single one... So, I got a job at a work camp in Arctic Alaska..."
The only way to job search as a fresh graduate is to treat it like it's a job itself. When I was job hunting during law school, I'd bang out that many applications in a day. I know a lot of people who didn't operate that way: they'd apply to a job a week or so as they found something they thought was perfect (and take forever crafting the perfect application). Those people struggled. Hint: if you're a fresh graduate, and your job search strategy doesn't involve a spreadsheet to keep track of the huge volume of applications you're submitting, you're doing it wrong.
Yes, there aren't enough jobs for fresh graduates out there (outside software engineering anyway). So obviously if everybody treated job searching seriously it wouldn't help anyone. But as long as most grads are like this guy, you have a leg up by not being like this guy.