Item — HN Reader

Writer of the piece is assuming if you cut the social safety net and welfare state of pensions, people will instead choose to have kids as a safety net. That is not a bet I would make.

My hot take is women will simply form communities to take care of each other until death, and I'm specific about women because they are the ones opting out of having children. They will not be concerned by such an attempt.

https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/east-texas-tiny-home-comm...

https://www.owch.org.uk/

https://untamedseed.com/article/womencenteredcommunitiesglob...

1 comments

I would critique this response. You're citing specific examples; I hesitate to call them 'anecdotes', they're clearly real, but I don't think they are a strong rebuttal vs the statistics of population-wide case-studies in the article.

My bias here is that I tend to agree with the core thesis from the article: "without a state pension to lean on, children become the retirement plan" but with the even more unfortunate asterisk that even sufficient personal wealth is enough to discourage children, as seen by the correlations with birthrates in wealthier country. The "thing we can't say" here is that, bluntly, many people simply don't want kids vs. leisure.

Part of my reason for suspecting this is watching the struggles of various wealthy countries over the last 20 years to improve their birthrates with policies to make having children easier and giving incremental perks to those who do. My hypothesis for why none of these had a tremendous effect is that, simply, the magnitude of cost/benefit for a child is orders past the benefits currently being given.

Consider: For much of human history, your child was your retirement plan, a farmhand, a babysitter/daycare, and potentially a tool to align disparate families in marriage. This is not on the order of tens of thousands of dollars to have these perks in the modern world, they would cost hundreds of thousands into millions.

I totally believe there will be some who form collectives and opt-out, I would likely be one of them, but I have observed our world is not well set up for this sort of lifestyle, and I find most people are normative/not likely to do things off the beaten path.

This is a hard argument to make, I typically lean far more collectivist, and don't like the conclusions this leads me to in terms of what incentives will move the needle vs. not, but I'm struggling to see other paths that sufficiently impact the incentive structure.

As fertility rates are held down longer by individual choices, raising them back up becomes harder. Countries have spent hundreds of billions of dollars attempting with little to show for it. ~71% of the world’s population now lives in countries with birth rates below the replacement level needed to maintain population size (as of this comment).

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/fertility-rate-of-world-pop...

https://xcancel.com/BirthGauge/status/2084906867617079312

Therefore, my mental model is:

1. It would take time to attempt to pass policy to not provide welfare or social safety nets to people who don't have children. The fight would be long, if at all successful.

2. During this window of time, say 3, 5, 10 years to accomplish this, the fertility rate globally will continue to decline. This will further reinforce the fertility trajectory.

3. You succeed and now women have to have children to be eligible for a pension or its equivilent. You will, in my opinion, be faced with revolt from a significant portion of the population impacted by this decision. Humans who are having their autonomy and agency challenged will seek and implement, for lack of a better term, defenses and countermeasures. Memento mori.

> This is a hard argument to make, I typically lean far more collectivist, and don't like the conclusions this leads me to in terms of what incentives will move the needle vs. not, but I'm struggling to see other paths that sufficiently impact the incentive structure.

No paths exist to sufficiently impact the incentive structure, based on all available evidence. No changes will occur to the fertility curve trajectory we are on. Like the momentum of climate change, the best you can do is prepare and adapt for a future that will arrive and that you have no control over.

An analogy to attempting to coerce women to have children that is my "go to" example is Romania's Decree 770, instituted by the communist government of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, restricting abortion and contraception to grow the nation's population. It led to immense suffering of unwanted children left in orphanages by parents who could not or did not want to care for them. Luckily, these events led to the public execution of the dictator mentioned during the Romanian Revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_and_execution_of_Nicolae...