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Comment by reducesuffering | Hacker News Reader

> including retirement

I think social safety nets are an under-reported cause of this. 80 years ago, children were your retirement plan. Long term stable value pensions and 401ks, along with government ensured healthcare and social security, weren't a thing. If you got to 70 without kids, you would eventually not be able to work and probably die poor.

Now, almost everyone thinks not having kids could be an option, because of course they'll have some savings (the rest of society's labor), and government healthcare, and the government won't let them become destitute.

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Yep. This is the problem I've been zeroing in on as well.

Socialized retirement destroys most of the incentive to sacrifice your youth to grow and raise new people. Why sacrifice your youth and money being a parent when you can leech off the labor of other people's kids in retirement?

I think we'll need to eventually experiment with things that try to give some disproportionate benefit to people who have kids. e.g. everyone gets some minimal socialized retirement and healthcare, but your benefits increase above that baseline in proportion to how many children you raised. Maybe your benefits increase at 3+ kids and decrease with 0-1 kids.

In theory those benefits are already there in the form of social (and potentially economic) support from the kids.

The challenge comes if the kids hate you and refuse to acknowledge you - something which has been being encouraged more and more by western society, BTW.

Historically, people would secretly understand (yeah, they are an abusive alcoholic!) but call you a bad kid and tell you to suck it up and deal with it. Since otherwise they’d have to deal with it. Going no contact is increasingly normalized.

Probably why many societies, especially conservative ones, lean so heavily on filial piety type concepts and frown on people cutting off their parents. especially when those parents are a burden or huge pain in the ass to those around them. Like Chinese mother-in-laws.

I can’t imagine that proposal going over well with the LGBTQ contingent either - which near as I can tell gets a lot of the angst from conservatives precisely because they’re ’having fun’ by opting out of the system and doing what they want instead of ‘comply or die’ like the rest.

The issue of course being that when there is a population crunch, there is no ‘rest of societies labor’ free, like there would be with a normal population age curve.

If the crunch is big enough, anyway.

Same with the tax base used to fund gov’t healthcare and similar programs.

That said, Japan has… problems. But they aren’t apocalyptic. At least not yet.

> The issue of course being that when there is a population crunch, there is no ‘rest of societies labor’ free, like there would be with a normal population age curve.

Yeah. For that reason, old age pensions should be tied to how many kids you've had, not how much money you paid into the system during your working years. If you have no kids, you get no pension. If you want to support in old age, you need to contribute to the next generation's labor pool to provide that support. Otherwise, you need to work to support yourself.

Hah, and I thought ‘forced natalism’ was the controversial one!

Or, the more subtle approach - inflation. Hmm, wait a minute….

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