[gumby]

The usual complaint is that the pyramid scheme stops working (not enough people working to pay the pensions of the old people). This is simplistic: the real problem is that there aren't enough doctors/garbos/crop-harvesters etc as a proportion of the population. Either way the fix is straightforward: bring in some people who'd like a job.

Some rethinking is required -- in the USA Social Security was put in place when the typical recipient was expected to receive a payout for...less than three years.

I have friends in the "reduce the birth rate" community, and they are at least as thoughless if not more than the "birth rate too low" crowd. In the former case their "diagnosis" is inevitably that the wrong people are having too many kids though they hate it when you point that out.

A higher birth rate in sub saharan africa is hardly a crisis: every person in the US emits 5X the CO2 of a person in Africa. Dropping population in the rich, polluting countries can be a step in the right direction.

(Personally I'm pretty indifferent to either position. As Herb Stein famously put it: "if something cannot go on forever it will stop". Sure, the latency in this case is quite high but people deal with worse all the time.)

[tivert]

> This is simplistic: the real problem is that there aren't enough doctors/garbos/crop-harvesters etc as a proportion of the population. Either way the fix is straightforward: bring in some people who'd like a job.

That "fix" doesn't work when the birthrate problem is widespread. It just moves the problem around so it hits the poorest the hardest.

> Some rethinking is required -- in the USA Social Security was put in place when the typical recipient was expected to receive a payout for...less than three years.

Yes. Social security's payout formula should factor in the number offspring. Anyone who has less than two gets a significantly reduced or no payout, because they didn't sufficiently contribute to the next generation's labor pool to provide the goods and services they payout would be used to buy. The tax payments would be kept but re-conceptualized as support for elderly parents. To make it fair, the government should pay for fertility treatments, and count a certain number of good-faith attempts as children in the formula.

[gumby]

> It just moves the problem around so it hits the poorest the hardest.

Could you expand on this? I can’t think of a scenario where that is the case.

> Social security's payout formula should factor in the number offspring.

Ha, how will you track it? I have no offspring in this country (USA) bc they decided things are better elsewhere. But they were born here.

Germany just does it directly: when your kids are little you have to support them (assuming you can); when you are old and decrepit your kids have some responsibility for your wellbeing.

[tivert]

>> It just moves the problem around so it hits the poorest the hardest.

> Could you expand on this? I can’t think of a scenario where that is the case.

Pretty straightforward: there's no unlimited wellspring of young people from poor countries for rich countries to tap, there is a limited amount. Those poor countries also have declining birth rates, they're just a few decades behind on the trend. It's unlikely there are enough poor young people satisfy the labor demands of all the depopulating rich countries.

So the rich countries suck up all the available young "doctors/garbos/crop-harvesters" from the poor countries. That leaves the poor countries with screwed up, unbalanced demographics (without necessarily even fixing the screwed up, unbalanced demographics of the rich countries), and they're in an even worse position to deal with the problem, since they're poor.

So poor African grandma's doctor moves to American to treat rich American Grandma, and African grandma gets to do without.

> Ha, how will you track it?

How does the government track anything? They come up with rules and definitions and bureaucracy, then implement them.

And the types of records needed to implement the idea for 90%+ of cases have been kept for 100+ years.

[crngefest]

It wasn’t you but GP who started this thread stated:

> sub-Saharan African nations (many of which are on food aid) have fertility well above replacement levels

So which is it ? Are they above or below replacement levels?

> How does the government track anything?

While I get where you are aiming at this didn’t work in China and they have arguably the most perfect surveillance state worldwide - I don’t think this is desirable, the tradeoff in freedom and security is just too big.

[tivert]

> So which is it ? Are they above or below replacement levels?

Is is now or is it later? We're dealing with statistics that change over time.

An idea that depends on certain areas having "fertility well above replacement levels," like using immigration to compensate for demographic decline, falls apart when the fertility in those areas drops.

I'll live to see global fertility at sub-replacement levels at current trends: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/WLD/wor....

Then there's the additional problem of do the numbers even add up for that idea to work in the short to medium term. There are a lot of very large places with sub-replacement or near-replacement fertility right now: Europe, China, India, Russia, etc.

And there are even more problems! Everything above is a one-dimensional analysis, which assumes bodies can be moved around frictionlessly to do labor, and the only question is "do you have enough?". IMHO that still points to immigration not being a solution for fertility problems, but add more dimensions, and I think the idea becomes even more unworkable.

>> How does the government track anything?

> While I get where you are aiming at this didn’t work in China...

What didn't work in China?

The US government already reliably tracks births and parentage, and that would only get more reliable if there was a new financial incentive that it be accurate. That's pretty much all that's needed for my idea. Tracking a "certain number of good-faith attempts" at fertility treatments for fairness could be covered by similar processes to those already used by health insurance.