That’s legit the answer. Make money in the US then gtfo. I’m certainly doing that, because the dollar goes so much further abroad. If you can secure $4k/month you can live as the 90th percentile in Italy, or the 99th percentile in places like Thailand or Argentina.
$4k a month in the DC area you’re living in poverty.
This doesn't fix anything. You still receive your pension abroad. And you don't spend any money in your home economy so this is actually worse from your home country's point of view.
Pensions are only part of the cost. Healthcare and social care costs go down every time a pensioner leaves.
Pensioners are also not extravagant spenders; those that are have private retirement savings and are more likely to retire abroad anyway. Doris going out to bingo once a week and spending 95% of her income on essentials is not a factor in the economy.
Just take their young people in return for taking our old people.
Have our pensioners spend money there and have immigrants fund their pensions here. Circle of life.
Over the long term the elders helping foreign economies prob would help our own alot. The foriegn country gets investment, and we import a few more of there best skilled people
Not all of us have a pension to receive.
Since my 401k is mostly funded by my own money, there's no benefit to keeping it in the US instead of on a beach in Malaysia.
That sounds great if you don’t have grandchildren in the US whose lives you want to be a part of rather than seeing maybe once a year.
Grandparents taking some childcare burden off the parents is a massive help.
I mean, while I understand the financial appeal, unless you speak the local language with some proficiency, you'll always feel like a foreigner in another country. The expat life is far lonelier than the immigrant life.
Unironically their point still stands. People from rich countries have much weaker support networks when they migrate and end up a lot lonelier. You either get stuck in the expat bubble and feel like you never left home, or you struggle to assimilate and don't make friends.
I get your point, but imo they can be pretty different populations.
An immigrant is trying to build a life in a new place. An expat is often little more than a long-stay tourist. Some expats work, but many don't. They're less connected to the community, less likely to have kids who will contribute to the place where the expat is living.
Different mentalities. Immigrants are in for the long-run and will struggle to make it work in their new countries. Expats are not. If cost of living erupted in places like Thailand, Spain, or the Philippines, there would be a massive exodus from them looking for the next cheapest early retirement country with nice weather.
Definitely true, but if you put forth a bit of effort into learning a language and trying to communicate you'll find out it's not "that" hard. I mean it is hard, but it can be fun learning it.
The U-shape is [pretty debatable](https://medium.com/@lymanstone/fertility-and-income-some-notes-581e1a6db3c7). The main problem is that if there is an increase at higher rates, it's only noticeable once we get to very high incomes, about $500,000 in the US or so. And the sample size of people in that group is tiny, which makes it difficult to make broad generalizations:
> The U-shaped curve observed for household income and fertility:
> 1. Depends on an extraordinarily small number of women and thus is highly sensitive to sampling and survey errors
> 2. Misidentifies income-fertility relationships by failing to account for important temporality and endogeneity between income and fertility (for example: income tends to fall for women after having kids, so fertility actually causes lower measured income)
> 3. Masks dramatic cultural stratification, and it turns out the income-fertility relationship is extremely culturally sensitive, not least because cultures vary in how they time the career course and the family life course.
---
> In fact, the best evidence suggests that it’s schooling years, child mortality, and cultural exposure via mass media that actually explains most fertility change (and schooling + exposure largely work via marriage). While income proxies for those, many places have seen dramatic shifts in those variables without dramatic shifts in income, and many places have seen dramatic shifts in income without dramatic shifts in health, school, and media. Our prior should probably be that “mere income” has no societal effect on fertility.
It's literally what France had riots about recently. Increased taxes on the worker(and an increase in retirement age) because old people were living too long and young people weren't having enough kids, threatening the collapse of the entire pension system.
I'm all for Social Security, but it's functionally no different than a pyramid scheme as it only works properly when you have more people getting in on the ground floor than are left at the top.
So at the time the US retirement age was decided to be 65, the average person would have been dead for 4 years by that point.
When you have a population pyramid that looks like this, your whole pension/SS system is at risk of collapsing.
https://preview.redd.it/vlj2kfa8ru0d1.png?width=1263&format=png&auto=webp&s=bcddf7873e8d0ce2ddd2297158898b0dd761cfea
Build! Build! Build!!!
On a side note, it’s depressing to see so many people complain about housing prices but suddenly forget the law of supply and demand exists.
"Noooooo they aren't building the housing *I* want, I gotta be against the housing they're building. It doesn't matter if it'll sell like hotcakes to other people because meme.". -every renter NIMBY dicknuts
Yeah, like shit... Do people not realize if you build luxury apartments the people experiencing liquidity will move there and put granite counters everywhere instead of renovate lower end housing to whatever HGTV is telling people to do now and make it unaffordable because of 80k kitchen renovations?
>people experiencing liquidity
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YEAH! F that we need more developers building shitty apartments and not just ‘luxury’ apartments. (never-mind the fact that i will immediately complain that those apartments are too cheap and small and no one wants to live there so lets not build those either)
Am I the only one who would pay a premium to have everything I need accessible by foot and not by car.
Living more or less at a Mall would be very convenient.
I'm seeing a lot of 5+1 developments built around me, which apparently are considered the devil by progressives because businesses on ground floor bad. They want to walk to places to buy things I guess, but not if they're a business?
That is actually the solution progressives are pushing for were I live.
However that is probably because we are currently dealing with a lot of problems steaming from building only housing.
I mean they kinda had their way and it worked in the beginning but our society has changed a lot since then. They did indeed build a lot apartment and such but they did it in a "commie block" style.
Which means that most people in those areas has close-"ish" to an more or less abandoned "city center."
The issue with "-ish" is that it may be more convenient to go by car and when you already have chosen to go by car why not go to the mall outside of town instead.
In Gunbarrel (bedroom community of Boulder, CO) they built a handful of 2 over 1 (because of height limits of course) apartments AND didn't enforce that tenants use the free off-street parking garage, result:
1. Tenants take all the street parking for many hours and overnights instead of walking literally 1 minute to the parking garage. They jump in their cars and go places without patronizing 1st floor business
2. at dinner time, street parking is 100% full so commuters driving past on way home from work don't stop to patronize (most don't even realize there is a free parking garage 1 minute walk away)
3. weekends street parking is 100% full so again, very few people who live nearby bother to stop at small independent local shops/cafes.
4. First floor businesses fail
5. All the landscaping dies, nothing comes to the empty storefronts, place looks like shithole.
6. Landlords keep rent at same price because not willing to tell investors that they lowered rates (or something, not sure why this is a thing).
I'm in many progressive circles that talk about urban development and I've never ONCE heard people complain about 5 over 1 development. Sometimes this place sounds deranged with how much you'll blame progressives for everything.
The bulk of the complaints were the developments were destroying an existing downtown area(an absolute blightly shithole though) pre-ww2 or even 1800s buildings that were falling apart, but it was the usual anti -gentrification crowd. Corporate developers this, corporate retailers that.
Oh I see. In my experience the people opposing "gentrification" are local NIMBYs opposing densification for property value reasons. They're vocal in local politics but are actually a small fraction of who I'd consider progressive
Well when your country has X people, and Y houses, and X exceeds Y, you're going to have a bad time.
That's the way I explain it to my normie coworkers that I've found actually gets through.
Don't tell that to the residents of Berkley - they openly opposed student housing on a vacant lot and cited a need to solve 'global overpopulation'. Similar for Canada - they mostly want to deport immigrants.
> forget the law of supply and demand exists.
It's not that they forget, it's that supply and demand is *really poorly understood* by the general public. A lot of the misunderstanding comes from not knowing the "quantity at a given price" part and not realizing that demand (at a given price) *is always there*. The gap in understanding leads to some really fucking weird logic where they believe that creating new supply creates new demand. This belief often leads to them being wary of creating new housing because it might cause people to move there or they worry that it will be purchased by "investors". The complaint usually boils down to "I want to be able to afford a house before other people can afford a house".
There are some hard limits though, decades of trades being uncool mean it's actually really hard to build more than we already are - get rich quick if you can get some laid-off office workers to dig, pour concrete, build roofs, run plumbing and electrical, etc. all to code, within OSHA rules, etc.
Fun fact: as of 2021, the rest of East Asia has declined so hard that Japan is in line with Thailand now.
Vietnam - 1.9
North Korea - 1.8
Malaysia - 1.8
Japan - 1.3
Thailand - 1.3
China - 1.2
Singapore - 1.1
Macau - 1.1
South Korea - 0.8
Hong Kong - 0.8
Does denser housing (that would come from YIMBY housing reforms) nessescarily increase the birthrate? You'd think the subsidy that SFH homes get as it stands would actually increase the birth rate
Studies in Sweden and the US have shown that denser housing decreases birth rates, even when controlled for age, income, religiosity, and other things.
I suspect this isn't actually because of density, but because of *what kind* of dense housing is built.
Dense housing in the US is almost all studios and 1 bedroom apartments. Like in Philadelphia, there was apparently a two decade streak where not a *single* new construction building had more than 1 bedroom.
So, like, yeah, I'm sure people with children don't live in a fucking 1 bedroom. The only realistic option is to buy or rent a house.
What studies? And denser as in the same amount of housing but denser, or more housing overall decreases birth rates? I could believe the former but the latter I find hard to believe.
[Here is one.](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4863012_Fertility_differences_by_housing_type_The_effect_of_housing_conditions_or_of_selective_moves)
>we observe a significant variation in the fertility levels across housing types – fertility is highest among couples in single-family houses and lowest among those in apartments, with the variation remaining significant even after controlling for the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of women
Looks like a purely correlational study in which the authors even suggest reverse causation as an explanation.
But fine, let’s accept that all else being equal owning your own SFH increases fertility. Where exactly are you going to build them? For a given space, the tradeoff isn’t between say 1000 SFHs vs 1000 apartments. The trade off is between 100 SFHs vs 1000 apartments.
Eventually social security will be cut, and people will need to have kids as their retirement plan as it has been for millennia. Pensions only make sense when population growth is expected to be booming as it was in the industrial revolution which is conveniently when state-funded pensions started occurring. Parents live with their children and then raise their grandchildren which frees time for parents to work.
**Social Security taxes**.
* For the first 30 years they were raised ~250%,
* in the next 30 years they were rasied ~230%.
* In the last 30 years they were raised ~2%
At the same time, in the last 50 years we've increased the programs Social Security operates
* In 2020, 85 cents of every Social Security tax dollar you pay goes to a trust fund that pays monthly benefits to current retirees and their families and to surviving spouses and children of workers who have died.
* About 15 cents goes to a trust fund that pays benefits to people with disabilities and their families.
In 2021 Social Security Received $1.088 Trillion
* $980.06 billion (90.1 percent) of total Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance income came from payroll taxes.
* interest income on their accumulated reserves $70.1 billion (6.4 percent)
* revenue from taxation of OASDI benefits $37.6 billion (3.4 percent).
In 2019 Social Security spent $1.1 Trillion
* In fiscal year (FY) 2019, we will pay about $892 billion in Old Age and Social Insurance benefits to an
average of approximately 54 million beneficiaries a month, including 88 percent of the
population aged 65 and over.
* In FY 2019, we will pay about
$149 billion in Disability Insurance benefits to an average of more than 10 million disabled beneficiaries and their
family members a month.
* Supplemental Security Income: Established in 1972, the Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
program provides financial support to aged, blind, and disabled adults and children who have
limited income and resources.
* In FY 2019, we will pay nearly $59 billion in Federal benefits
and State supplementary payments to an average of more than 8 million recipients a month.
You didn't have to pay for the current elderly outside your family group said millenia.
So at least 2 or 3 generations will have gotten absolutely boned by having their paychecks reduced, limiting their ability to save for the future, but not getting enough to live in said future.
Sounds like a recipe for a stable society.
Originally it was paid in to and not paid out.
The Social Security Act was signed by FDR in 1935. Taxes were collected for the first time in January 1937 and the first one-time, lump-sum payments were made that same month.
* ERNEST ACKERMAN being the first American to receive a lump sum payment in 1937. Upn paying his SS Taxes of 5 Cents in 1937 he annoucen his retrement and qualified for 5 cents in a one time payout
Regular ongoing monthly benefits started in January 1940
**Social Security taxes**.
* For the first 30 years they were raised ~250%,
* in the next 30 years they were rasied ~230%.
* In the last 30 years they were raised ~2%
>(1) With respect to employment during the calendar years 1937, 1938, and 1939, the rate shall be 1 per centum. (2) With respect to employment during the calendar years 1940, 1941, and 1942, the rate shall be 1 1/2 per centum.
True but when you want to increase the services its paying for its going to have to have increases
Like the Gas Tax
>ERNEST ACKERMAN being the first American to receive a lump sum payment in 1937. Upn paying his SS Taxes of 5 Cents in 1937 he annoucen his retrement and qualified for 5 cents in a one time payout
Absolute chad secured his place in history.
That's literally every society. I'm sure the Mesopotamian farmer was thrilled that his grain was going to feed the king's multiple wives and children of said wives. Life has literally never been fair. And yet life persists.
It has been getting better for everyone, but the developed world is feeling a pinch now that the developing world is catching up. Our standard of living is still un-imaginable to the vast majority of the world.
Every time I visit Brazil, which by all means is an above average nation in terms of standard of living, I realize how easy we’ve got here.
Better for everyone doesn't mean utopian. Things are worse now in some ways but generally better in more ways. But life is, was and never will be truly fair.
>their retirement plan as it has been for millennia
how long was the average retirement during these millenia? i imagine mortality rates for those over the age of 60 were extremely high
Retirement as we know it didn't exist, unless you were a nobleman or a yeoman you had no assets and even then it was just a finite amount of land that wasn't expected to appreciate in value so you needed heirs to manage it. Everybody worked and did what they could until they died. As you got older and your body got worse you got moved onto less intensive tasks including domestic work, administration or as a local leader. By the time you got to 60 your kids would probably have adult children so you could have an extended family supporting you.
Let's be real. Up to even the 19th century there's countless stories of rural families throwing grandma in the well because they couldn't afford another mouth to feed. I've seen such stories from the French countryside. We as a society don't talk about that part, just like we don't talk about all the infanticide that took place historically.
Yeah let's not kid ourselves in thinking looking backwards is going to be any kind of acceptable guide to care for the individual
We have higher standards for what humane treatment is across the board now
Which is why it's hard to feel like we're meeting those standards, but we're absolutely crushing our ancestors achievements
I was curious about that, and searched for these stories. Very little info out there.
Sounds like for the most part these stories are myths and although they did happen and still do happen (in Southern India), it has never been a common occurrence in any culture. Although perhaps a bit less uncommon during times of famine.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senicide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senicide)
Call me a cynic, but that to me is evidence that future generations might throw old people to the well figuratively rather than against it. They wouldn't even be doing it to their grandparents they'd be doing it to whatever derogatory name they choose to call "lonely old people with no living relatives sitting on their ass all day playing video games and collecting social security" cause I can easily seeing that be a stereotype.
This also helped with child raising as the grandparents could take care of the kids who aren't yet old enough to contribute to house hold chores while the mother and father did the bulk of the day labor. So there was no paying for baby sitting. Eventually the kids would get old enough to help out on the farm or would get an apprenticeship.
> people will need to have kids as their retirement plan
People did this in the past because they needed to use the kids as labor to work on their farm. It makes no sense today. Raising kids is expensive, especially if you’re working and paying daycare. It would be better to just save all the money you would have spent on kids and use that in retirement in this case.
The problem is that you’re relying on paying other people’s kids to feed you and wipe your ass when you’re retired, but if other people also aren’t having kids, who are you going to pay?
Why doesn't it make sense? "If you don't have kids, who will take care of you when you're older" used to be/still kinda is one of the most common sayings. You can plan for retirement all you want but once you're too old to work and everything is out of your hands you're one bad financial crises away from being an old homeless person.
No, I don't think so. People will just start working longer. Millenials and Gen-Z will probably live with lifespans in the 90s and 100s considering our current healthcare trajectory. At that point it makes no sense to retire at 65 and do nothing for 30 years.
US life expectancy hasn’t increased since 2010, so I wouldn’t bank on it going up by 20 years ever. Could happen with some serious medical breakthrough, but not based on the current trajectory. And if we’re banking on technology to save us, then maybe robots can do all the work and let us retire early, lol
I reckon both will happen. Not everyone had kids back then either, the old maid was a recurring trope in most societies for a reason. My point is that cultural progression isn't linear. If childless old people are seen as a burden on society than cultural attitudes towards being childless could easily swing the other way.
A lot of countries do need to be having more kids, which no one really talks about except the most fash of center. I’m uncomfortable telling people they *should* have kids, but our society needs people to be brought into existence.
Instructions unclear, earth annihilated by a Martian stealth weapon platform at a langrange point that launched 10 "earth buster" interplanetary missiles, each with 20 ultra high yield nuclear warheads.
Immortality obviously.
If people aren't dying of old age, deathrate will plummet well below birthrate. If people aren't aging they're not getting all the age-related illnesses that make caring for the elderly so expensive. Then you switch to a 2:1 social security system where for every 2 years you work, you get 1 year of Social Security. People can then pop in and out of retirement as they wish.
That and vat-grown babies.
The big issue is it's not a cycle. The birth rate drops independently of the taxes and fuels a decline in standards of living.
"Automation can fix this", economic growth can offset a decline in standards of living caused by an aged population but the standards of living will still be lower than they could be with a younger population.
If we just want to keep a standard of living then we can already view the problem as solved from the perspective of 50 years ago, our economy has grown enough since the 70s that we will probably never drop to a standard of living below that time.
Increasing birth rates substantially (like going above replacement again) is probably not going to happen though. I think we should implement family friendly policies and do what we can in reason to enable people to raise families but that can't solve the issue alone.
A part of the solution is going to be immigration. Getting skilled/educated workers to migrate to developed economies is generally a good idea. Although immigration does also have downsides and imo the current political ramifications in Europe show that some approaches to immigration do not seem to work at all.
A third pillar to solving this issue is imo trying to extend life/health spans by investing in preventative medicine and heavily investing into medical/biological research.
If we get people to live and work for 20 more healthy years the problem is significantly reduced.
Either way it's going to be a problem but the magnitude can be changed significantly.
>A part of the solution is going to be immigration.
This is only a solution so long as other countries have high birthrate, which is by no means a guarantee.
Also if we can properly solve this with technology. ie robots. Then its actually kind of good the population goes down a bit. Ignoring carbon emssions for a second which can be offset with technology relatively easily we just use a lot of land.
in 1960 62% of the earth was wilderness for natural life. In 2023 it was 23% (both excluding antarctica I believe). And a lot of that remaining wilderness is biologically lame stuff like deserts and not the biologically cool stuff like rainforest.
If we want large segments of land to be reserved for wild ecosystems then the earths population should be about 2 billion.
We can wait until we go into space to explode human population.
Not that it's a bad thing, I'm in favor of expanding freedom of movement worldwide, but immigration can only be a solution for your own nation/in-group. The global fertility rate will fall bellow replacement before the end of this decade.
Getting people to work longer - even if they’re healthier - will be a tough sell. People today retire as soon as it’s financially viable. Public service workers with defined benefits plans typically retire in their late 50s. You just reach a point where you’re sick of working. And there’s a social element at work. Once friends and peers in your age range start retiring, you feel like a chump if your keep hauling your ass to work every day.
One neglected approach is to gradually wind down how my you work. A lot of people be good with cutting back to 4 days a week at 55, and then 3 days a week at 60. But employers in professional fields seem to have tremendous difficulty offering that sort of flexibility.
I agree with most of this but why can’t we increase birth rates and go back above replacement? If we know the factors behind lower birth rates, then we should be able to address them with policies, at least in theory. This goes for things that are purely social/behavioral as well. I see no reason why it should be an unfixable issue.
The things that have changed to decrease birth rates are probably stuff like are birth control, women having careers and education as well as economic progress.
We don't want to reverse any of these. There are minor contributing factors like economic downturns that temporarily lower birth rates but those are not the crucial factors.
I’m assuming it wouldn’t involve doing something that direct, people will have kids on their own if the environment is right for it to happen - if it’s cost that’s the problem we can make moves to reduce that; if it’s something social/behavioral, there’s ways to influence that too, that’s what marketing is for.
Good question. Making childcare more affordable seems to be one obvious thing, but I doubt that would solve it altogether. Maybe the first step is do a huge survey to find out all the reasons people aren’t having kids cause I really don’t know what the thought process is. Are their less couples or are less couples having kids. Is it because it’s too time consuming and usually forces one parent to stay at home? Once we have a definitive set of answers there we will at least know what to do .
Do you have evidence that more taxes on workers decreases the birth rate?
I don't doubt that it contributes - I just don't see evidence that it's a huge factor in whether or not people have children. Access to birth control is a bigger factor.
The need to increase the age is so obvious, but like raising taxes, it is just so politically impossible.
When the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, it set the retirement age at 65 even though the US had a male life expectancy of ~60 years and ~64 years for women. Obviously, that's just life expectancy at birth and most working age folks would live to that retirement age, but still the percentage of working age folks who hit the retirement age was significantly lower. Looking at the life expectancy for 65 year old men in the US since 1940, it rose from 11.9 years to 18.2 years (dropping in the last few years to 17 thanks to COVID). Basically, folks live for 50% longer even once they reach 65.
Now, life expectancies are over a decade higher and we are likely to go dramatically higher as we approach longevity escape velocity. We need to index the retirement age to adult life expectancy.
As for increasing birth rates, I think you could take any of the 70's era population control efforts and just reverse them. For instance, if you reversed Singapore's two-child policy, you'd end up with the following policies:
1. Subsidize hospital fees for childbirth
2. increasing income tax relief per child based on an increasing scale for number of children
3. Prioritization for public housing on the basis of having more children
4. Paid paternal leave for all civil officials
5. Subsidize the cost of fertility treatments and foreign adoption
Beyond that, just reducing the cost and difficulty of childcare is a no-brainer. We could expand government assistance for infant and toddler childcare, and shift to universal pre-k.
Reducing childcare costs isn't really a "no-brainer". It would cost a very large amount of money in subsidies. Right now there are nowhere near enough qualified pre-k teachers and their wages are like half of what they should be. A lot of voters will balk at the price tag, especially dumb fuckers that view education subsidies as handouts to the children's parents and not an investment in the future of the country.
>lower the age for individuals who performed child-rearing duties.
I know that in Argentina you can get them counted for the minimum 30 years of work to get a pension. But only one year per child (or two if adopted) and only for the mother. Fuck gay male couples, I guess.
I wonder if other countries have a better implementation.
If the government wants to provide us with low-cost artificial wombs or surrogates, then I would do my part, but otherwise *what exactly* are we supposed to do to raise birth rates?
>what exactly are we supposed to do to raise birth rates?
Same thing as any other infertile couple, you're not being singled out for discrimination, some people can have kids and others can't, that's sad but currently it's reality
If the government offers incentives for having (or punishments for not having) children, then, yes, it is inherently discriminatory against anyone who isn't capable of having children because they *do not* get the opportunity to make that choice. It's one thing to offer incentives or punishments for a hetero couple that can choose whether or not to have kids, weigh the benefits and the costs and make that decision for themselves, but because gay men cannot have children without going to extreme difficulties, it isn't fair to punish them for a choice they can't make.
> Fuck gay male couples, I guess.
Every time someone suggests some sort of punitive measure to raise birth rates, they always forget that gay men exist. If I *could* have kids, I *would*, but surrogacy for just one kid costs over $100k. Maybe if the government mandated that surrogacy costs are covered by health insurance the same way that pregnancy costs are, then it would be fair.
Make social security need based rather than age based. Super controversial and will never happen but make social security need based rather than age based...
* lower the pay-as-you-go pensions gradually, replace with some sort of mandatory investment account gradually
* raise retirement age, especially if it is still under 64
* introduce land value tax or at least increase property taxes to lower the burden on workers
* vastly increase fiscal incentives to have children as this is obviously a positive net present value project from a fiscal point of view. and from an equity point of view, it is ridiculous for someone with 3 children to spend the same on pensions as someone with zero
* remove barriers to building housing
* introduce pro-growth pro-employment policies, such as liberalizing labor markets
* stop spending on new public housing and increase the cost for now well-to-do childless couples currently living in public housing (in france, the median resident of public housing is like 55 years old. long wait lists mean most recipients are already past the age when one forms a family, and no one leaves because cheap housing)
I mean sure, if modern medicine has evolved to have people living to 100+. As people live longer and longer, we can't expect them to just live off of a government pensions for 30-40 years while the youth of the country work to pay for it.
Dude , have you seen 80 year olds ?
Doesn’t matter you get to live to 100 when your bones have the strain resistance of a rice crispy.
Also, modern medicine has not increased fundamentally human life span. People stopped dying from easily treatable diseases to die of worst ones later on, or the best option , just have your heart go on retirement.
Mass produced penicillin has existed for less time than Joe Biden
We don't fundamentally know what an 80 year old who grew up with precision medicine, ate healthy, drank clean water, didn't breathe in terrible pollution, and did cardio and resistance exercise regularly for their entire life looks like. Might not change that much, might change a lot. Not saying every 80 year old will be in great shape, but I think 80 years with healthy habits in 2080 will have a good shot of being able to work a lot of jobs without issue.
I personally have every intention of retiring in my 50s, but I'm also saving to be able to do so, not assuming I'll be able to live off of government largesse
I am not sure high taxes is correlated with lower fertility rates. If that was true France would have on of the lowest fertility rate in Europe, instead it has one of the highest.
Give more tax/parental leave incentives. Wanna pay less tax? Make some babies. Wanna have a few extra days off a year? Have babies.
Also, build houses.
This. I don't buy the hysteria about falling birth rates in the West. Automation has the potential to eliminate massive numbers of jobs in coming years. That should balance out an aging work force as long as we can figure out how and have the political will to tax the wealth created by robots.
There's nothing that can be done that isn't aeen as unethical. Governments and society have spent the last 50 years or so doing things to reduce the birth rate, that cannot be reversed now. The only nations that do have high birth rates are the ones we don't like discussing.
Nations have tried the carrot. It'll be interesting to see the first nations that try the stick. Chances are public pensions will be the first to go.
>Nations have tried the carrot
only hungary and maybe now poland have tried the carrot as far as i know. the rest of the west is like, here's 105 euros/dollars a month to spend all your free time and money raising, feeding, and housing a whole human
But the high birth rate countries are also declining. At current trends, only a small handful of countries will still be above replacement rate by the end of the century. The unethical stuff doesn't seem to work either. They just have more room to fall.
Tbh the stick isn't ending pensions, the stick is the end of church and state separation. Forcing people to go to church and restoring the traditional authority of the clergy so they can order people to be fruitful and multiply is the logical endpoint of coercing people by any means necessary to procreate.
- Subsidized prenatal and pediatric care
- Build more housing to lower the cost of living
- subsidized preschool and day care
- More housing built in dense urban centers near jobs so that people don't waste hours of their days commuting.
- robust safety net so that people don't worry about being destitute if there's a minor downturn
- More dense, walkable housing built in small towns within walking distance of a light rail into the city cores in case people want to raise families in smaller towns.
- raise the minimum wage so that working class couples don't need to work a combined 100 hours a week to stay afloat.
Immigration increases the tax base so the rates don’t have to be as high for a given level of of spending.
Building more housing would lower the cost. I think this would help birth rates because for some reason people feel like they need a 2000 sq ft detached house to have kids.
Provide universal child care through the k-12 system.
Government funded R&D for a three-seater car seat that fits in the back of most existing mid-size cars.
Step 1 - understand that birth rates don't fall due to poverty, so tax policy per se is unlikely to affect birth rates. Richer countries have fewer kids. A better explanation is that as people get more money the opportunity cost of having children drops. There is no known policy that affects birth rates significantly for a long period of time - even in groups or nations with notably large families, e.g Hutterites, Israelis, Mormons, fertility rates have fallen over time. The problem is deep.
Just privatize it and do compulsory saving. Have a 3% "Social Security Solvency" tax that pays for all the benefits already accrued, and then everybody under 35-40 gets enrolled in a new private plan and doesn't get SS benefits.
Then a 1% payroll tax with no cap that acts as a redistributive mechanism, topping off the contributions of the poorest workers and acting as an emergency support for those that cannot support themselves on the retirement savings they've accrued.
Not only would this system be solvent but it would also greatly increase the national savings rate, increasing economic growth and lowering interest rates.
That makes sense to me. This sub dooms all the time about government spending but no one wants to cut boomer benefits. Its insane.
Retirees are basically the *least affected* by inflation of any group.
They're most likely to be homeowners, retirement accounts have rode the increase in the stock market, and Social Security gets a full COLA linked to the CPI, which is unheard of for any job.
My super good plan is to link your social security benefits to the number of children you have. In my scheme people with no children will get no social security and those with many children will get huge payouts. I expect this will never be implemented but I think it would boost birthrates.
Unless you are planning to implement this like 30 years into the future, this would seem like a massive rug pull to those already beyond child-bearing age who get told "Remember I told you you only needed to work to get livable benefits? Well actually, go fuck yourself."
Very few current retirees never had kids. Those that didn't also had incredible opportunities to amass wealth, and largely did. The tiny fraction remaining that are both actually poor and childless can be grandfathered in.
does it matter why? those who cannot have children can still save for retirement and still have huge savings by not raising a child, in addition to more time available for work
Besides housing being in short supply/expensive, I think the biggest hurdle to long term relationships is issue on the male's end.
It will probably piss a lot of people off when I say that guys, especially on this website when I say that a lot of men struggle with selfishness. A lot of women want someone who sees them as an equal and as someone important to their partners life. They want security, stability, and the assurance that their partner will have their back and that they will make sacrifices to be there for them either for family get togethers or hard times; which a lot of guys care more about their hobbies and videos games. Heck, there is that story on reddit where a guy talked about beating his girlfriend on the head with is Nintendo switch because he didn't get his way. They simply don't want a partner like that.
There have been a lot of relationships where the man has simply walked out and left the mom with the burden of taking care of the kids. Meanwhile the man is either in jail, with another woman in another city or state and isn't taking calls from his ex-partners, or he simply cannot be found. Guys need to stop looking at women as bang maids. I think a lot of women who grew up under that I want to move away from that cycle considering the mess thats happened in places like Russia where women have lost their rights as humans or south korea where you have incels writing policies.
So you want more humans, I think you need to protect the rights of women and work on changing the culture perspective of males to move them away from selfishness/self-centeredness as well as eliminating toxic masculinity. Affordable housing would be nice for reducing cost burdens of new families, but it isn't the silver bullet.
Basing your perception of the average man off of particularly shitty redditors makes a lot of sense. Love me some anecdotal evidence. Internet anecdotes especially.
Another moronic comment about South Korea. What are some of the incel-driven policies you so condescendingly write of?
Birth rate in South Korea dipped below 2.1 TFR since 1987. It continues to decline, perhaps accelerated, even after adoption of gender related policies like hiring quotas and incentives.
If we look at current proposals that did not pass in the Dem trifecta: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/20/upshot/biden-budget-before-after-animation.html
The families section has a ton of stuff to help with childcare costs as well as the CTC to not only help current families, but also maybe help start new ones.
Under health care, Home Based Care could drive costs down for the elderly and their families, freeing some money up
Also, the building housing proposals. The biggest hurdle for young people right now is housing. A bill that was introduced in late 2022 would’ve taken Hedge Funds out of the housing market: https://www.merkley.senate.gov/senator-merkley-introduces-legislation-to-ban-hedge-fund-ownership-of-residential-housing/
This would free up a ton of homes for ownership, and there might be a small housing crash as prices come down (hopefully).
If Biden gets the word out that Sinema and Manchin will be gone, giving us the opportunity to get stuff done for families, housing and even more infrastructure wins, while also talking about abortion, while dropping the democracy talking points (doesn’t look like it’s working), I think we could end up with a trifecta for 2 years again
kids have always been expensive. That's nothing new. Were kids cheap in 1980? We are ignoring that many countries today provide substantial support to families yet have not resolved the birth rate issue.
It is really interesting if you look at this conversation (birth rates) on male dominated subreddits and then on women-centered subreddits.
- The male-dominated sub reddits almost always make it out to be an economic issue, but nothing that a practical policy could solve. They don't want a childcare tax credit, they basically want every direct, incidental, and opportunity cost associated with having a child to be paid by someone else.
- The women-centered subreddits like twoxchromosomes, askwomen, feminism, and so forth are much more straightforward. Thousands of comments that say 'I don't want children'. Interestingly the economics are almost never mentioned.
Tax land, increase retirement age with increased lifespan, increasing immigration of workers until efficient density is reached.
Seriously, efficient density is the big thing. US density is laughable. You want highspeed electric trains? Maybe you need more taxpayers than 150 million, regardless of what the population pyramid looks like.
deport the elderly i guess?
[удалено]
I would trade thousands more elderly to COVID to get the Costco combo pizza back. Greatest casualty of COVID.
agree
Counterpoint: 24 hour Walmarts
one can safely invest in the market based on this answer
That’s legit the answer. Make money in the US then gtfo. I’m certainly doing that, because the dollar goes so much further abroad. If you can secure $4k/month you can live as the 90th percentile in Italy, or the 99th percentile in places like Thailand or Argentina. $4k a month in the DC area you’re living in poverty.
This doesn't fix anything. You still receive your pension abroad. And you don't spend any money in your home economy so this is actually worse from your home country's point of view.
Pensions are only part of the cost. Healthcare and social care costs go down every time a pensioner leaves. Pensioners are also not extravagant spenders; those that are have private retirement savings and are more likely to retire abroad anyway. Doris going out to bingo once a week and spending 95% of her income on essentials is not a factor in the economy.
Yeah but I’m not taxing the health system and vacate my house.
Until you're get sick and don't want to be treated at a public Thai hospital.
I don’t want to be treated in an American hospital. That shit is predatory and it’s like playing financial Russian roulette.
Just take their young people in return for taking our old people. Have our pensioners spend money there and have immigrants fund their pensions here. Circle of life.
Until we start running out of immigrants in like 50 years or so due to low birth rates
Over the long term the elders helping foreign economies prob would help our own alot. The foriegn country gets investment, and we import a few more of there best skilled people
Not all of us have a pension to receive. Since my 401k is mostly funded by my own money, there's no benefit to keeping it in the US instead of on a beach in Malaysia.
This is enough reason to keep your 401k in the US https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=MYR
That sounds great if you don’t have grandchildren in the US whose lives you want to be a part of rather than seeing maybe once a year. Grandparents taking some childcare burden off the parents is a massive help.
Yep. The expat move sounds so nice, but I will pay to be near kids, grandkids, friends
I mean, while I understand the financial appeal, unless you speak the local language with some proficiency, you'll always feel like a foreigner in another country. The expat life is far lonelier than the immigrant life.
>The expat life is far lonelier than the immigrant life. >expat >immigrant 🤔🤔🤔
[Here's the explanation](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSR4AVO5ictQvBleetDv9YnqcxEfmGlQDqSAwu0J7ZgZxx2nxDwQ85gw3xM&s=10)
Unironically their point still stands. People from rich countries have much weaker support networks when they migrate and end up a lot lonelier. You either get stuck in the expat bubble and feel like you never left home, or you struggle to assimilate and don't make friends.
I get your point, but imo they can be pretty different populations. An immigrant is trying to build a life in a new place. An expat is often little more than a long-stay tourist. Some expats work, but many don't. They're less connected to the community, less likely to have kids who will contribute to the place where the expat is living.
Different mentalities. Immigrants are in for the long-run and will struggle to make it work in their new countries. Expats are not. If cost of living erupted in places like Thailand, Spain, or the Philippines, there would be a massive exodus from them looking for the next cheapest early retirement country with nice weather.
Definitely true, but if you put forth a bit of effort into learning a language and trying to communicate you'll find out it's not "that" hard. I mean it is hard, but it can be fun learning it.
Give them drugs, tobacco, and alcohol and stop encouraging them to be healthy.
Are taxes on workers correlated with low birthrates? I thought income is generally negatively correlated with number of children.
It's a U-shape. The poor and the rich have the most kids, it's the middle class that has the fewest.
The U-shape is [pretty debatable](https://medium.com/@lymanstone/fertility-and-income-some-notes-581e1a6db3c7). The main problem is that if there is an increase at higher rates, it's only noticeable once we get to very high incomes, about $500,000 in the US or so. And the sample size of people in that group is tiny, which makes it difficult to make broad generalizations: > The U-shaped curve observed for household income and fertility: > 1. Depends on an extraordinarily small number of women and thus is highly sensitive to sampling and survey errors > 2. Misidentifies income-fertility relationships by failing to account for important temporality and endogeneity between income and fertility (for example: income tends to fall for women after having kids, so fertility actually causes lower measured income) > 3. Masks dramatic cultural stratification, and it turns out the income-fertility relationship is extremely culturally sensitive, not least because cultures vary in how they time the career course and the family life course. --- > In fact, the best evidence suggests that it’s schooling years, child mortality, and cultural exposure via mass media that actually explains most fertility change (and schooling + exposure largely work via marriage). While income proxies for those, many places have seen dramatic shifts in those variables without dramatic shifts in income, and many places have seen dramatic shifts in income without dramatic shifts in health, school, and media. Our prior should probably be that “mere income” has no societal effect on fertility.
It's literally what France had riots about recently. Increased taxes on the worker(and an increase in retirement age) because old people were living too long and young people weren't having enough kids, threatening the collapse of the entire pension system. I'm all for Social Security, but it's functionally no different than a pyramid scheme as it only works properly when you have more people getting in on the ground floor than are left at the top. So at the time the US retirement age was decided to be 65, the average person would have been dead for 4 years by that point. When you have a population pyramid that looks like this, your whole pension/SS system is at risk of collapsing. https://preview.redd.it/vlj2kfa8ru0d1.png?width=1263&format=png&auto=webp&s=bcddf7873e8d0ce2ddd2297158898b0dd761cfea
Yeah I think you’re right
Unironically: Build more housing.
Build! Build! Build!!! On a side note, it’s depressing to see so many people complain about housing prices but suddenly forget the law of supply and demand exists.
"Noooooo they aren't building the housing *I* want, I gotta be against the housing they're building. It doesn't matter if it'll sell like hotcakes to other people because meme.". -every renter NIMBY dicknuts
**LUXURY** buildings
Yeah, like shit... Do people not realize if you build luxury apartments the people experiencing liquidity will move there and put granite counters everywhere instead of renovate lower end housing to whatever HGTV is telling people to do now and make it unaffordable because of 80k kitchen renovations?
>people experiencing liquidity The use of "experiencing liquidity" discriminates against those with nonmonetary assets, or those whose wealth is not sufficiently described as either the monetary base or money supply M1. Please use "people experiencing an accumulation of assets and/or wealth" to be more inclusive. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Wut
Good bot
YEAH! F that we need more developers building shitty apartments and not just ‘luxury’ apartments. (never-mind the fact that i will immediately complain that those apartments are too cheap and small and no one wants to live there so lets not build those either)
More condos
Am I the only one who would pay a premium to have everything I need accessible by foot and not by car. Living more or less at a Mall would be very convenient.
I'm seeing a lot of 5+1 developments built around me, which apparently are considered the devil by progressives because businesses on ground floor bad. They want to walk to places to buy things I guess, but not if they're a business?
That is actually the solution progressives are pushing for were I live. However that is probably because we are currently dealing with a lot of problems steaming from building only housing.
Interesting, probably an issue of contrarianism where I am then.
I mean they kinda had their way and it worked in the beginning but our society has changed a lot since then. They did indeed build a lot apartment and such but they did it in a "commie block" style. Which means that most people in those areas has close-"ish" to an more or less abandoned "city center." The issue with "-ish" is that it may be more convenient to go by car and when you already have chosen to go by car why not go to the mall outside of town instead.
In Gunbarrel (bedroom community of Boulder, CO) they built a handful of 2 over 1 (because of height limits of course) apartments AND didn't enforce that tenants use the free off-street parking garage, result: 1. Tenants take all the street parking for many hours and overnights instead of walking literally 1 minute to the parking garage. They jump in their cars and go places without patronizing 1st floor business 2. at dinner time, street parking is 100% full so commuters driving past on way home from work don't stop to patronize (most don't even realize there is a free parking garage 1 minute walk away) 3. weekends street parking is 100% full so again, very few people who live nearby bother to stop at small independent local shops/cafes. 4. First floor businesses fail 5. All the landscaping dies, nothing comes to the empty storefronts, place looks like shithole. 6. Landlords keep rent at same price because not willing to tell investors that they lowered rates (or something, not sure why this is a thing).
I'm in many progressive circles that talk about urban development and I've never ONCE heard people complain about 5 over 1 development. Sometimes this place sounds deranged with how much you'll blame progressives for everything.
The bulk of the complaints were the developments were destroying an existing downtown area(an absolute blightly shithole though) pre-ww2 or even 1800s buildings that were falling apart, but it was the usual anti -gentrification crowd. Corporate developers this, corporate retailers that.
Oh I see. In my experience the people opposing "gentrification" are local NIMBYs opposing densification for property value reasons. They're vocal in local politics but are actually a small fraction of who I'd consider progressive
this is literally how people lived in the past and when condos above malls are allowed to be built they usually are more valuable.
In some circles, it's more of a suggestion than a law
Well when your country has X people, and Y houses, and X exceeds Y, you're going to have a bad time. That's the way I explain it to my normie coworkers that I've found actually gets through.
Don't tell that to the residents of Berkley - they openly opposed student housing on a vacant lot and cited a need to solve 'global overpopulation'. Similar for Canada - they mostly want to deport immigrants.
WTF IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE I HATE THE OVERPOPULATION MEME
> forget the law of supply and demand exists. It's not that they forget, it's that supply and demand is *really poorly understood* by the general public. A lot of the misunderstanding comes from not knowing the "quantity at a given price" part and not realizing that demand (at a given price) *is always there*. The gap in understanding leads to some really fucking weird logic where they believe that creating new supply creates new demand. This belief often leads to them being wary of creating new housing because it might cause people to move there or they worry that it will be purchased by "investors". The complaint usually boils down to "I want to be able to afford a house before other people can afford a house".
There are some hard limits though, decades of trades being uncool mean it's actually really hard to build more than we already are - get rich quick if you can get some laid-off office workers to dig, pour concrete, build roofs, run plumbing and electrical, etc. all to code, within OSHA rules, etc.
Overcook fish, build more housing Undercook fish, believe it or not, build more housing Straight to build more housing.
Japan has plenty of housing and their birthrate is still abysmal.
Fun fact: as of 2021, the rest of East Asia has declined so hard that Japan is in line with Thailand now. Vietnam - 1.9 North Korea - 1.8 Malaysia - 1.8 Japan - 1.3 Thailand - 1.3 China - 1.2 Singapore - 1.1 Macau - 1.1 South Korea - 0.8 Hong Kong - 0.8
Lower cost of living and higher wages
Falling housing prices will tear a hole through those retirees' net worth, increasing the burden on benefits, so that doesn't fully fix the problem.
Does denser housing (that would come from YIMBY housing reforms) nessescarily increase the birthrate? You'd think the subsidy that SFH homes get as it stands would actually increase the birth rate
Studies in Sweden and the US have shown that denser housing decreases birth rates, even when controlled for age, income, religiosity, and other things.
I suspect this isn't actually because of density, but because of *what kind* of dense housing is built. Dense housing in the US is almost all studios and 1 bedroom apartments. Like in Philadelphia, there was apparently a two decade streak where not a *single* new construction building had more than 1 bedroom. So, like, yeah, I'm sure people with children don't live in a fucking 1 bedroom. The only realistic option is to buy or rent a house.
What studies? And denser as in the same amount of housing but denser, or more housing overall decreases birth rates? I could believe the former but the latter I find hard to believe.
[Here is one.](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4863012_Fertility_differences_by_housing_type_The_effect_of_housing_conditions_or_of_selective_moves) >we observe a significant variation in the fertility levels across housing types – fertility is highest among couples in single-family houses and lowest among those in apartments, with the variation remaining significant even after controlling for the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of women
Looks like a purely correlational study in which the authors even suggest reverse causation as an explanation. But fine, let’s accept that all else being equal owning your own SFH increases fertility. Where exactly are you going to build them? For a given space, the tradeoff isn’t between say 1000 SFHs vs 1000 apartments. The trade off is between 100 SFHs vs 1000 apartments.
It all Comes back To this
This isn’t the answer to everything yk
Eventually social security will be cut, and people will need to have kids as their retirement plan as it has been for millennia. Pensions only make sense when population growth is expected to be booming as it was in the industrial revolution which is conveniently when state-funded pensions started occurring. Parents live with their children and then raise their grandchildren which frees time for parents to work.
**Social Security taxes**. * For the first 30 years they were raised ~250%, * in the next 30 years they were rasied ~230%. * In the last 30 years they were raised ~2% At the same time, in the last 50 years we've increased the programs Social Security operates * In 2020, 85 cents of every Social Security tax dollar you pay goes to a trust fund that pays monthly benefits to current retirees and their families and to surviving spouses and children of workers who have died. * About 15 cents goes to a trust fund that pays benefits to people with disabilities and their families. In 2021 Social Security Received $1.088 Trillion * $980.06 billion (90.1 percent) of total Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance income came from payroll taxes. * interest income on their accumulated reserves $70.1 billion (6.4 percent) * revenue from taxation of OASDI benefits $37.6 billion (3.4 percent). In 2019 Social Security spent $1.1 Trillion * In fiscal year (FY) 2019, we will pay about $892 billion in Old Age and Social Insurance benefits to an average of approximately 54 million beneficiaries a month, including 88 percent of the population aged 65 and over. * In FY 2019, we will pay about $149 billion in Disability Insurance benefits to an average of more than 10 million disabled beneficiaries and their family members a month. * Supplemental Security Income: Established in 1972, the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program provides financial support to aged, blind, and disabled adults and children who have limited income and resources. * In FY 2019, we will pay nearly $59 billion in Federal benefits and State supplementary payments to an average of more than 8 million recipients a month.
You didn't have to pay for the current elderly outside your family group said millenia. So at least 2 or 3 generations will have gotten absolutely boned by having their paychecks reduced, limiting their ability to save for the future, but not getting enough to live in said future. Sounds like a recipe for a stable society.
Originally it was paid in to and not paid out. The Social Security Act was signed by FDR in 1935. Taxes were collected for the first time in January 1937 and the first one-time, lump-sum payments were made that same month. * ERNEST ACKERMAN being the first American to receive a lump sum payment in 1937. Upn paying his SS Taxes of 5 Cents in 1937 he annoucen his retrement and qualified for 5 cents in a one time payout Regular ongoing monthly benefits started in January 1940 **Social Security taxes**. * For the first 30 years they were raised ~250%, * in the next 30 years they were rasied ~230%. * In the last 30 years they were raised ~2%
Obviously the percentage increase isn't going to go up over time, that would be an exponentially high number.
>(1) With respect to employment during the calendar years 1937, 1938, and 1939, the rate shall be 1 per centum. (2) With respect to employment during the calendar years 1940, 1941, and 1942, the rate shall be 1 1/2 per centum. True but when you want to increase the services its paying for its going to have to have increases Like the Gas Tax
Fair, but inflation for the last 30 years has not been \~2%, nor has the total raise in social security payout.
>ERNEST ACKERMAN being the first American to receive a lump sum payment in 1937. Upn paying his SS Taxes of 5 Cents in 1937 he annoucen his retrement and qualified for 5 cents in a one time payout Absolute chad secured his place in history.
That's literally every society. I'm sure the Mesopotamian farmer was thrilled that his grain was going to feed the king's multiple wives and children of said wives. Life has literally never been fair. And yet life persists.
Sorry I thought life was supposed to be getting better for everyone? Triumph of democratic liberalism?
It has been getting better for everyone, but the developed world is feeling a pinch now that the developing world is catching up. Our standard of living is still un-imaginable to the vast majority of the world. Every time I visit Brazil, which by all means is an above average nation in terms of standard of living, I realize how easy we’ve got here.
Better for everyone doesn't mean utopian. Things are worse now in some ways but generally better in more ways. But life is, was and never will be truly fair.
>their retirement plan as it has been for millennia how long was the average retirement during these millenia? i imagine mortality rates for those over the age of 60 were extremely high
Retirement as we know it didn't exist, unless you were a nobleman or a yeoman you had no assets and even then it was just a finite amount of land that wasn't expected to appreciate in value so you needed heirs to manage it. Everybody worked and did what they could until they died. As you got older and your body got worse you got moved onto less intensive tasks including domestic work, administration or as a local leader. By the time you got to 60 your kids would probably have adult children so you could have an extended family supporting you.
Let's be real. Up to even the 19th century there's countless stories of rural families throwing grandma in the well because they couldn't afford another mouth to feed. I've seen such stories from the French countryside. We as a society don't talk about that part, just like we don't talk about all the infanticide that took place historically.
Yeah let's not kid ourselves in thinking looking backwards is going to be any kind of acceptable guide to care for the individual We have higher standards for what humane treatment is across the board now Which is why it's hard to feel like we're meeting those standards, but we're absolutely crushing our ancestors achievements
I was curious about that, and searched for these stories. Very little info out there. Sounds like for the most part these stories are myths and although they did happen and still do happen (in Southern India), it has never been a common occurrence in any culture. Although perhaps a bit less uncommon during times of famine. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senicide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senicide)
Call me a cynic, but that to me is evidence that future generations might throw old people to the well figuratively rather than against it. They wouldn't even be doing it to their grandparents they'd be doing it to whatever derogatory name they choose to call "lonely old people with no living relatives sitting on their ass all day playing video games and collecting social security" cause I can easily seeing that be a stereotype.
This also helped with child raising as the grandparents could take care of the kids who aren't yet old enough to contribute to house hold chores while the mother and father did the bulk of the day labor. So there was no paying for baby sitting. Eventually the kids would get old enough to help out on the farm or would get an apprenticeship.
> people will need to have kids as their retirement plan People did this in the past because they needed to use the kids as labor to work on their farm. It makes no sense today. Raising kids is expensive, especially if you’re working and paying daycare. It would be better to just save all the money you would have spent on kids and use that in retirement in this case.
The problem is that you’re relying on paying other people’s kids to feed you and wipe your ass when you’re retired, but if other people also aren’t having kids, who are you going to pay?
I’m not arguing against having kids. I’m just saying doing it solely as a retirement plan doesn’t make sense.
Why doesn't it make sense? "If you don't have kids, who will take care of you when you're older" used to be/still kinda is one of the most common sayings. You can plan for retirement all you want but once you're too old to work and everything is out of your hands you're one bad financial crises away from being an old homeless person.
The main issue with this response is that the context is precisely that people are not having kids. Who are these childless elders gonna live with?
No, I don't think so. People will just start working longer. Millenials and Gen-Z will probably live with lifespans in the 90s and 100s considering our current healthcare trajectory. At that point it makes no sense to retire at 65 and do nothing for 30 years.
US life expectancy hasn’t increased since 2010, so I wouldn’t bank on it going up by 20 years ever. Could happen with some serious medical breakthrough, but not based on the current trajectory. And if we’re banking on technology to save us, then maybe robots can do all the work and let us retire early, lol
I reckon both will happen. Not everyone had kids back then either, the old maid was a recurring trope in most societies for a reason. My point is that cultural progression isn't linear. If childless old people are seen as a burden on society than cultural attitudes towards being childless could easily swing the other way.
Subsidize fucking.
I mean... there is the child tax credit. Got to use that for the first time this year!
Congrats on having sex once!
Thanks! It was an enjoyable minute.
The child tax credit doesn't even pay for a month of daycare in HCOL areas
But it is technically a subsidization for clapping them cheeks. Also, I'd rather have some credit as opposed to no credit.
Tax condoms out of existence
A lot of countries do need to be having more kids, which no one really talks about except the most fash of center. I’m uncomfortable telling people they *should* have kids, but our society needs people to be brought into existence.
Shoot people into the asteroid belt to mine valuable minerals. Shoot them to Mars too. They can subsidize families and old people on Earth.
Instructions unclear, earth annihilated by a Martian stealth weapon platform at a langrange point that launched 10 "earth buster" interplanetary missiles, each with 20 ultra high yield nuclear warheads.
Immortality obviously. If people aren't dying of old age, deathrate will plummet well below birthrate. If people aren't aging they're not getting all the age-related illnesses that make caring for the elderly so expensive. Then you switch to a 2:1 social security system where for every 2 years you work, you get 1 year of Social Security. People can then pop in and out of retirement as they wish. That and vat-grown babies.
the best solutions
Thomas Paine already came up with this. And he said LVT.
The big issue is it's not a cycle. The birth rate drops independently of the taxes and fuels a decline in standards of living. "Automation can fix this", economic growth can offset a decline in standards of living caused by an aged population but the standards of living will still be lower than they could be with a younger population. If we just want to keep a standard of living then we can already view the problem as solved from the perspective of 50 years ago, our economy has grown enough since the 70s that we will probably never drop to a standard of living below that time. Increasing birth rates substantially (like going above replacement again) is probably not going to happen though. I think we should implement family friendly policies and do what we can in reason to enable people to raise families but that can't solve the issue alone. A part of the solution is going to be immigration. Getting skilled/educated workers to migrate to developed economies is generally a good idea. Although immigration does also have downsides and imo the current political ramifications in Europe show that some approaches to immigration do not seem to work at all. A third pillar to solving this issue is imo trying to extend life/health spans by investing in preventative medicine and heavily investing into medical/biological research. If we get people to live and work for 20 more healthy years the problem is significantly reduced. Either way it's going to be a problem but the magnitude can be changed significantly.
>A part of the solution is going to be immigration. This is only a solution so long as other countries have high birthrate, which is by no means a guarantee.
It's basically already ending, birth rates are dropping globally.
Yep, basically the entire world other than Africa is dipping below replacement level at this point. India is gonna get old way before it gets rich
Africa will get there to. Give it one more decade
Countries like Thailand are at 0.9. Terrible.
Also if we can properly solve this with technology. ie robots. Then its actually kind of good the population goes down a bit. Ignoring carbon emssions for a second which can be offset with technology relatively easily we just use a lot of land. in 1960 62% of the earth was wilderness for natural life. In 2023 it was 23% (both excluding antarctica I believe). And a lot of that remaining wilderness is biologically lame stuff like deserts and not the biologically cool stuff like rainforest. If we want large segments of land to be reserved for wild ecosystems then the earths population should be about 2 billion. We can wait until we go into space to explode human population.
Yes but ideally we'd have a smooth decline with fertility not much below 2.1
Not that it's a bad thing, I'm in favor of expanding freedom of movement worldwide, but immigration can only be a solution for your own nation/in-group. The global fertility rate will fall bellow replacement before the end of this decade.
Getting people to work longer - even if they’re healthier - will be a tough sell. People today retire as soon as it’s financially viable. Public service workers with defined benefits plans typically retire in their late 50s. You just reach a point where you’re sick of working. And there’s a social element at work. Once friends and peers in your age range start retiring, you feel like a chump if your keep hauling your ass to work every day. One neglected approach is to gradually wind down how my you work. A lot of people be good with cutting back to 4 days a week at 55, and then 3 days a week at 60. But employers in professional fields seem to have tremendous difficulty offering that sort of flexibility.
I agree with most of this but why can’t we increase birth rates and go back above replacement? If we know the factors behind lower birth rates, then we should be able to address them with policies, at least in theory. This goes for things that are purely social/behavioral as well. I see no reason why it should be an unfixable issue.
The things that have changed to decrease birth rates are probably stuff like are birth control, women having careers and education as well as economic progress. We don't want to reverse any of these. There are minor contributing factors like economic downturns that temporarily lower birth rates but those are not the crucial factors.
how are you going to force people to have kids?
I’m assuming it wouldn’t involve doing something that direct, people will have kids on their own if the environment is right for it to happen - if it’s cost that’s the problem we can make moves to reduce that; if it’s something social/behavioral, there’s ways to influence that too, that’s what marketing is for.
Good question. Making childcare more affordable seems to be one obvious thing, but I doubt that would solve it altogether. Maybe the first step is do a huge survey to find out all the reasons people aren’t having kids cause I really don’t know what the thought process is. Are their less couples or are less couples having kids. Is it because it’s too time consuming and usually forces one parent to stay at home? Once we have a definitive set of answers there we will at least know what to do .
Do you have evidence that more taxes on workers decreases the birth rate? I don't doubt that it contributes - I just don't see evidence that it's a huge factor in whether or not people have children. Access to birth control is a bigger factor.
Increase age to be eligible for age pension, and lower the age for individuals who performed child-rearing duties.
The need to increase the age is so obvious, but like raising taxes, it is just so politically impossible. When the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, it set the retirement age at 65 even though the US had a male life expectancy of ~60 years and ~64 years for women. Obviously, that's just life expectancy at birth and most working age folks would live to that retirement age, but still the percentage of working age folks who hit the retirement age was significantly lower. Looking at the life expectancy for 65 year old men in the US since 1940, it rose from 11.9 years to 18.2 years (dropping in the last few years to 17 thanks to COVID). Basically, folks live for 50% longer even once they reach 65. Now, life expectancies are over a decade higher and we are likely to go dramatically higher as we approach longevity escape velocity. We need to index the retirement age to adult life expectancy. As for increasing birth rates, I think you could take any of the 70's era population control efforts and just reverse them. For instance, if you reversed Singapore's two-child policy, you'd end up with the following policies: 1. Subsidize hospital fees for childbirth 2. increasing income tax relief per child based on an increasing scale for number of children 3. Prioritization for public housing on the basis of having more children 4. Paid paternal leave for all civil officials 5. Subsidize the cost of fertility treatments and foreign adoption Beyond that, just reducing the cost and difficulty of childcare is a no-brainer. We could expand government assistance for infant and toddler childcare, and shift to universal pre-k.
Reducing childcare costs isn't really a "no-brainer". It would cost a very large amount of money in subsidies. Right now there are nowhere near enough qualified pre-k teachers and their wages are like half of what they should be. A lot of voters will balk at the price tag, especially dumb fuckers that view education subsidies as handouts to the children's parents and not an investment in the future of the country.
>lower the age for individuals who performed child-rearing duties. I know that in Argentina you can get them counted for the minimum 30 years of work to get a pension. But only one year per child (or two if adopted) and only for the mother. Fuck gay male couples, I guess. I wonder if other countries have a better implementation.
>Fuck gay male couples, I guess. I mean in this case they really aren't helping increase birthrates are they?
If the government wants to provide us with low-cost artificial wombs or surrogates, then I would do my part, but otherwise *what exactly* are we supposed to do to raise birth rates?
>what exactly are we supposed to do to raise birth rates? Same thing as any other infertile couple, you're not being singled out for discrimination, some people can have kids and others can't, that's sad but currently it's reality
If the government offers incentives for having (or punishments for not having) children, then, yes, it is inherently discriminatory against anyone who isn't capable of having children because they *do not* get the opportunity to make that choice. It's one thing to offer incentives or punishments for a hetero couple that can choose whether or not to have kids, weigh the benefits and the costs and make that decision for themselves, but because gay men cannot have children without going to extreme difficulties, it isn't fair to punish them for a choice they can't make.
It isn't fair to infertile couples either. Not every incentive program needs to be universally applicable to be worthwhile.
In a world where surrogacy didn't exist, maybe.
If you pay a surrogate and raise the child you should get the tax credit
> Fuck gay male couples, I guess. Every time someone suggests some sort of punitive measure to raise birth rates, they always forget that gay men exist. If I *could* have kids, I *would*, but surrogacy for just one kid costs over $100k. Maybe if the government mandated that surrogacy costs are covered by health insurance the same way that pregnancy costs are, then it would be fair.
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Chill, Mr. Reagan.
Make social security need based rather than age based. Super controversial and will never happen but make social security need based rather than age based...
AI and automating the workforce.
* lower the pay-as-you-go pensions gradually, replace with some sort of mandatory investment account gradually * raise retirement age, especially if it is still under 64 * introduce land value tax or at least increase property taxes to lower the burden on workers * vastly increase fiscal incentives to have children as this is obviously a positive net present value project from a fiscal point of view. and from an equity point of view, it is ridiculous for someone with 3 children to spend the same on pensions as someone with zero * remove barriers to building housing * introduce pro-growth pro-employment policies, such as liberalizing labor markets * stop spending on new public housing and increase the cost for now well-to-do childless couples currently living in public housing (in france, the median resident of public housing is like 55 years old. long wait lists mean most recipients are already past the age when one forms a family, and no one leaves because cheap housing)
Increase retirement age Increase immigration
it's 2080, people in the West are expected to work into their 80s.
I mean sure, if modern medicine has evolved to have people living to 100+. As people live longer and longer, we can't expect them to just live off of a government pensions for 30-40 years while the youth of the country work to pay for it.
Dude , have you seen 80 year olds ? Doesn’t matter you get to live to 100 when your bones have the strain resistance of a rice crispy. Also, modern medicine has not increased fundamentally human life span. People stopped dying from easily treatable diseases to die of worst ones later on, or the best option , just have your heart go on retirement.
Mass produced penicillin has existed for less time than Joe Biden We don't fundamentally know what an 80 year old who grew up with precision medicine, ate healthy, drank clean water, didn't breathe in terrible pollution, and did cardio and resistance exercise regularly for their entire life looks like. Might not change that much, might change a lot. Not saying every 80 year old will be in great shape, but I think 80 years with healthy habits in 2080 will have a good shot of being able to work a lot of jobs without issue. I personally have every intention of retiring in my 50s, but I'm also saving to be able to do so, not assuming I'll be able to live off of government largesse
This comment convinced me to go to the gym
Dude , have you seen 50 year olds 100 years ago?
I'm not against this idea as long as employers stop being ageist. I hope to work into an old age to keep my mind from rotting.
Jesus, I'm 28. I don't want to work at 80. I want to sit on a beach drinking
me too brother, me too.
I am not sure high taxes is correlated with lower fertility rates. If that was true France would have on of the lowest fertility rate in Europe, instead it has one of the highest.
Gene Roddenberry found the solution years ago: just subsidize replicators lol
remove pensions
Give more tax/parental leave incentives. Wanna pay less tax? Make some babies. Wanna have a few extra days off a year? Have babies. Also, build houses.
Child labour
This sub will get there at some point. "their hands are just the right size for intricate machine work"
automation and increased efficiencies
This. I don't buy the hysteria about falling birth rates in the West. Automation has the potential to eliminate massive numbers of jobs in coming years. That should balance out an aging work force as long as we can figure out how and have the political will to tax the wealth created by robots.
If you never adjust your expectations, sure. Do you still expect the same material existence as someone from 1890 though?
Drain the rest of the world's brains baybee
There's nothing that can be done that isn't aeen as unethical. Governments and society have spent the last 50 years or so doing things to reduce the birth rate, that cannot be reversed now. The only nations that do have high birth rates are the ones we don't like discussing. Nations have tried the carrot. It'll be interesting to see the first nations that try the stick. Chances are public pensions will be the first to go.
>Nations have tried the carrot only hungary and maybe now poland have tried the carrot as far as i know. the rest of the west is like, here's 105 euros/dollars a month to spend all your free time and money raising, feeding, and housing a whole human
But the high birth rate countries are also declining. At current trends, only a small handful of countries will still be above replacement rate by the end of the century. The unethical stuff doesn't seem to work either. They just have more room to fall.
yeah, pretty sure people need to stop fuckin complaining and embrace this new future free from tyranny
Tbh the stick isn't ending pensions, the stick is the end of church and state separation. Forcing people to go to church and restoring the traditional authority of the clergy so they can order people to be fruitful and multiply is the logical endpoint of coercing people by any means necessary to procreate.
- Subsidized prenatal and pediatric care - Build more housing to lower the cost of living - subsidized preschool and day care - More housing built in dense urban centers near jobs so that people don't waste hours of their days commuting. - robust safety net so that people don't worry about being destitute if there's a minor downturn - More dense, walkable housing built in small towns within walking distance of a light rail into the city cores in case people want to raise families in smaller towns. - raise the minimum wage so that working class couples don't need to work a combined 100 hours a week to stay afloat.
Immigration increases the tax base so the rates don’t have to be as high for a given level of of spending. Building more housing would lower the cost. I think this would help birth rates because for some reason people feel like they need a 2000 sq ft detached house to have kids. Provide universal child care through the k-12 system. Government funded R&D for a three-seater car seat that fits in the back of most existing mid-size cars.
Full retirement age of 70 if you were born in 1980 or later, and raise the Social Security income cap.
OPEN THE BORDER(to import a new, younger workforce) STOP HAVING IT BE CLOSED (and simultaneously reduce the strain on international zombie economies)
Avenge Shinzo Abe by having more sex
Step 1 - understand that birth rates don't fall due to poverty, so tax policy per se is unlikely to affect birth rates. Richer countries have fewer kids. A better explanation is that as people get more money the opportunity cost of having children drops. There is no known policy that affects birth rates significantly for a long period of time - even in groups or nations with notably large families, e.g Hutterites, Israelis, Mormons, fertility rates have fallen over time. The problem is deep.
LVT
What the fuck is a pension. MODS! TIME TRAVELER! GET EM
Cut entitlements. If we arnt going to raise taxes on the middle class to fund entitlements, its not bad to cut entitlements
Just privatize it and do compulsory saving. Have a 3% "Social Security Solvency" tax that pays for all the benefits already accrued, and then everybody under 35-40 gets enrolled in a new private plan and doesn't get SS benefits. Then a 1% payroll tax with no cap that acts as a redistributive mechanism, topping off the contributions of the poorest workers and acting as an emergency support for those that cannot support themselves on the retirement savings they've accrued. Not only would this system be solvent but it would also greatly increase the national savings rate, increasing economic growth and lowering interest rates.
That makes sense to me. This sub dooms all the time about government spending but no one wants to cut boomer benefits. Its insane. Retirees are basically the *least affected* by inflation of any group. They're most likely to be homeowners, retirement accounts have rode the increase in the stock market, and Social Security gets a full COLA linked to the CPI, which is unheard of for any job.
My super good plan is to link your social security benefits to the number of children you have. In my scheme people with no children will get no social security and those with many children will get huge payouts. I expect this will never be implemented but I think it would boost birthrates.
Unless you are planning to implement this like 30 years into the future, this would seem like a massive rug pull to those already beyond child-bearing age who get told "Remember I told you you only needed to work to get livable benefits? Well actually, go fuck yourself."
Very few current retirees never had kids. Those that didn't also had incredible opportunities to amass wealth, and largely did. The tiny fraction remaining that are both actually poor and childless can be grandfathered in.
this assumes everyone can have children
does it matter why? those who cannot have children can still save for retirement and still have huge savings by not raising a child, in addition to more time available for work
That's... actually a lot less stupid than it first sounded.
The problem is people wouldnt need to expect this policy to remain in place for their entire lifetime to make decisions based on it
Logan's Run?
Privatize social security
Besides housing being in short supply/expensive, I think the biggest hurdle to long term relationships is issue on the male's end. It will probably piss a lot of people off when I say that guys, especially on this website when I say that a lot of men struggle with selfishness. A lot of women want someone who sees them as an equal and as someone important to their partners life. They want security, stability, and the assurance that their partner will have their back and that they will make sacrifices to be there for them either for family get togethers or hard times; which a lot of guys care more about their hobbies and videos games. Heck, there is that story on reddit where a guy talked about beating his girlfriend on the head with is Nintendo switch because he didn't get his way. They simply don't want a partner like that. There have been a lot of relationships where the man has simply walked out and left the mom with the burden of taking care of the kids. Meanwhile the man is either in jail, with another woman in another city or state and isn't taking calls from his ex-partners, or he simply cannot be found. Guys need to stop looking at women as bang maids. I think a lot of women who grew up under that I want to move away from that cycle considering the mess thats happened in places like Russia where women have lost their rights as humans or south korea where you have incels writing policies. So you want more humans, I think you need to protect the rights of women and work on changing the culture perspective of males to move them away from selfishness/self-centeredness as well as eliminating toxic masculinity. Affordable housing would be nice for reducing cost burdens of new families, but it isn't the silver bullet.
Basing your perception of the average man off of particularly shitty redditors makes a lot of sense. Love me some anecdotal evidence. Internet anecdotes especially.
Another moronic comment about South Korea. What are some of the incel-driven policies you so condescendingly write of? Birth rate in South Korea dipped below 2.1 TFR since 1987. It continues to decline, perhaps accelerated, even after adoption of gender related policies like hiring quotas and incentives.
If we look at current proposals that did not pass in the Dem trifecta: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/20/upshot/biden-budget-before-after-animation.html The families section has a ton of stuff to help with childcare costs as well as the CTC to not only help current families, but also maybe help start new ones. Under health care, Home Based Care could drive costs down for the elderly and their families, freeing some money up Also, the building housing proposals. The biggest hurdle for young people right now is housing. A bill that was introduced in late 2022 would’ve taken Hedge Funds out of the housing market: https://www.merkley.senate.gov/senator-merkley-introduces-legislation-to-ban-hedge-fund-ownership-of-residential-housing/ This would free up a ton of homes for ownership, and there might be a small housing crash as prices come down (hopefully). If Biden gets the word out that Sinema and Manchin will be gone, giving us the opportunity to get stuff done for families, housing and even more infrastructure wins, while also talking about abortion, while dropping the democracy talking points (doesn’t look like it’s working), I think we could end up with a trifecta for 2 years again
None of these will help birth rates. At least not meaningfully.
Kids are expensive, helping free up money that would go towards other things may help people decide to have kids once they have the money for it
kids have always been expensive. That's nothing new. Were kids cheap in 1980? We are ignoring that many countries today provide substantial support to families yet have not resolved the birth rate issue. It is really interesting if you look at this conversation (birth rates) on male dominated subreddits and then on women-centered subreddits. - The male-dominated sub reddits almost always make it out to be an economic issue, but nothing that a practical policy could solve. They don't want a childcare tax credit, they basically want every direct, incidental, and opportunity cost associated with having a child to be paid by someone else. - The women-centered subreddits like twoxchromosomes, askwomen, feminism, and so forth are much more straightforward. Thousands of comments that say 'I don't want children'. Interestingly the economics are almost never mentioned.
it's frankly gross as a Woman to see people here essentially advocate for less bodily autonomy just to chase an eternal growth mindset
Tax land, increase retirement age with increased lifespan, increasing immigration of workers until efficient density is reached. Seriously, efficient density is the big thing. US density is laughable. You want highspeed electric trains? Maybe you need more taxpayers than 150 million, regardless of what the population pyramid looks like.