[krakatau1]

Of course it's a Ponzi scheme since it promotes freeloading.

People without children also expect to receive pension while escaping the effort and time to raise the next generation.

When you did this at family level the result was pretty evident, in your old age you were alone and vulnerable. Doing this on national level hides this effect.

[skywal_l]

You are using a moral vocabulary to describe a social program. You already lost the point.

I encourage you to read about the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-op [0] which I find enlightening. It's not about pensions but about liquidity yet it is an interesting insight into why assigning moral values to what is basically an "mechanical" system made to improve the life of people is not just wrong but useless.

[0] https://slate.com/business/1998/08/baby-sitting-the-economy....

[krakatau1]

I have read it. I know what liquidity trap is. That's not the problem. It's incentives. Incentives matter and people in western countries are not incentivized to have children and money isn't all that matters.

People care about reputation, social standing, glory and their conscience. All of these can act as incentives. When we say that incentives matter non economists only hears that people respond to price signals but what economist really mean that, holding everything else constant and giving a price signal people will do it more or less of it.

Economists often focus on monetary incentives because they are observable and usually easier to change in a model. For example if we say that doctor salaries go up more people will want to be doctors. This is misunderstood that doctors are motivated by money rather than the non-monetary motives to be doctors but this really means that holding the non-monetary satisfaction of medicine constant, increasing the monetary satisfaction will make medicine more attractive relative to other professions. The clear example for this are doctors in USA and Cuba. The difference in monetary compensations is huge relative to other professions but non-monetary motives are still high enough for people in Cuba to want to endure ardous learning to be a doctor.

I fully realize it's a lost battle. The genie is out of the bottle. I'm just annoyed that it's happening. I live close to a city that 2000 years old and all that time population either managed to grew or stagnate but never this.

[yakak]

There's no reason people in high energy consumption countries should be encouraged to have children. Immigration is a cleaner ponzi scheme that helps reduce suffering among people who already exist instead of making people for apparently greedy motivations.

[DoingIsLearning]

Why not just allow people the option of privatizing their retirement contributions and stopping this eternal cycle that only would have worked with a bottom heavy population pyramid.

[yakak]

Getting closer to stable population seems fine with me, for significant decline I question whether the push towards saving and investments are a real solution. Sharply declining workforce would render a lot of the earlier amassed capital worthless and devalue the remainder as all capital would be in surplus for the needs of available labor. Our current paradox with automation would really have to come to an end.

[ipaddr]

You pay in over your career. Your kids are paying for themselves. The only group who are freeloading were your grandparents or great grand parents