[john_b]

Given 1-4, and the fact that the investment in raising a child is almost entirely borne by the parents while the returns (financial, emotional, social, etc) are distributed more widely, sperm or egg donation programs seem like a logical alternative. It's probably the only circumstance in which you can actually make money (instead of spending it) in the process of creating a human. Genetic factors could also capture some of the correlation that would otherwise be present due to #5 in a nuclear family kind of environment.

Since the value of children vis-a-vis retirement planning is no longer as significant as it once was several centuries ago, it seems to me that there are few good material reasons to have children for most middle and upper-middle class people. Very high income people can reap benefits via inheritance, but most people don't have enough wealth for that benefit to outweight the costs (both actual and opportunity) involved in raising children.

This isn't to say that the non-material benefits of raising children cannot be significant. But these benefits are highly individual and should average out over a sufficiently large sample, so I'd expect large scale societal trends in childbearing to closely follow the financial cost/benefit analysis inherent in the decision.

[rayiner]

> Since the value of children vis-a-vis retirement planning is no longer as significant as it once was several centuries ago

It's just as significant as it always has been--we have just decoupled the relationship and created a free-rider problem in the process.

Every scheme of retirement depends on the existence of successive generations. That is true whether you're talking about traditional societies where children take care of their parents, or modern societies where the childrens' generation makes payments to the parents' generation through either social security taxes, or dividend payouts from equity ownership.

The free rider problem we've created is that everyone is eligible to take social security, even if they haven't produced offspring that will labor in the economy while the retired generation lives off their production.

Indeed, we've also created a free-rider problem along another dimension: we have lots of people in the present who benefit from the governments' taking out debt to fund services and infrastructure, but who won't create any offspring that will pay the taxes that will pay that debt.

[john_b]

Every scheme of retirement depends on the existence of successive generations. That is true whether you're talking about traditional societies where children take care of their parents, or modern societies where the childrens' generation makes payments to the parents' generation through either social security taxes, or dividend payouts from equity ownership.

I was referring to individual-level retirement planning. That is, does it make sense for me to invest in one or more children based on the expectation that those children will directly help me (financially and otherwise) during retirement?

Social security originated in a time when, barring catastrophic wars, it was inconceivable that the U.S. population could ever decrease. It has worked thus far because a productive younger generation has always been able to pay for a retired older generation. However, as far as I know, it was always a program whose ethical justification was that you get back what you put in, plus some return. Whether or not you have children is irrelevant.

Furthermore, if we presume that the ethical justification for social security is that one's children are going to be productive members of society, how can we adjust for unproductive children? Should parents whose children die before entering the workforce be denied social security? What if their children live, but are unemployed for many years? These are serious questions that would have to be addressed, but doing so would simply not be possible in many cases since parents tend to die before the productive output of their children over the course of their working life is known.

This is also true even when applied to future generations as a whole. A future generation can be less productive than the present one, just as one's future child can be less productive than you. If social security is an intergenerational contract that involves a transfer of wealth from the young to the old, then it's an unjust Ponzi scheme that will collapse as soon as demographic trends are no longer able to sustain it.

Ideally, the benefits received from any retirement program, whether public or private, would be dependent upon an individual's productivity over the course of their life. Any other system inevitably involves some centrally managed authority attempting to equitably transfer wealth from one set of people to another, which is a prescription for corruption.

[rayiner]

> I was referring to individual-level retirement planning. That is, does it make sense for me to invest in one or more children based on the expectation that those children will directly help me (financially and otherwise) during retirement?

I understand. I was pointing out what impact our national retirement policies had on individual incentives and how that translated into group incentives.

> However, as far as I know, it was always a program whose ethical justification was that you get back what you put in, plus some return. Whether or not you have children is irrelevant.

That's an abstraction. It doesn't matter if you only "take out" what you "put in." At the end of that day, somebody's kids are producing what you take out. Any retired generation inherently depends on the production of the working generation, and for a generation to retire, there has to be a working generation to take their place, which means having kids. Social security versus investing versus whatever is just a way of accounting for that basic transaction.

> Furthermore, if we presume that the ethical justification for social security is that one's children are going to be productive members of society, how can we adjust for unproductive children?

I'm speak at the group level. It's fairly irrelevant whether one person does or does not have kids, so it's useless to try and account for that at the level of Social Security. However, Social Security as an institution reduces the incentive for everyone to have kids, because they can just depend on the production of the kids of people who did. It's a free-rider problem.

> If social security is an intergenerational contract that involves a transfer of wealth from the young to the old, then it's an unjust Ponzi scheme that will collapse as soon as demographic trends are no longer able to sustain it.

It's a Ponzi scheme, but what makes it unjust? It's the circle of life, man. Your parents took care of you, and at the other end of the cycle you take care of them. The really useful insight is that it's a Ponzi scheme that's unavoidable, at least with existing technology. By and large, the human life is bookended by periods in which people are not self-sufficient and not able to produce. No matter how you abstract the underlying intergenerational transaction, you can't get away from it. We're engaging in the same intergenerational transaction people did tens of thousands of years ago--we just have a different, fancier way of accounting.

[john_b]

It's a Ponzi scheme, but what makes it unjust? It's the circle of life, man. Your parents took care of you, and at the other end of the cycle you take care of them.

This describes retirement in general, which I have no issue with, not social security.

The unjust aspect is that you have no control over the future productivity of younger generations, which provides for your retirement. As an extreme example, how do you think China's population is going to deal with retirement once the full effect of the one-child takes effect on Chinese retirees? They didn't set that policy, but their retirement will suffer from it.

My contention is that a person's retirement should be proportional to their own life's productivity, which it is if you have built sufficient invesments and assets by your old age. I'd just prefer that governments not make promises to entire generations they can't ultimately keep.

[Pwnguinz]

> even if they haven't produced offspring that will labor in the economy while the retired generation lives off their production.

This is the unfortunate fallacy that most make when looking to social security and its apparent dwindling in funding. You are insinuating that social services must come from taxation of individual labor, whereas our economy has successfully and continuously been moving towards a more capital based economy.

In short, where will the money come to fund future social services? More from capital, less from the individual labor of your children.

"But America as a whole won’t have gotten poorer: the money is still there to support the programs, it’s just coming in the form of capital rather than labor income. There would be no problem, at least in economic terms, in continuing the programs by adding revenue from general taxation, maybe even from dedicated taxes on capital income." - Paul Krugman http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/policy-implicati...

[rayiner]

Krugman is using the term "income from labor" and "income from capital" in a tax sense, in the context of payroll taxes, because in the tax code we distinguish between "income from labor" and "income from capital gains." But of course we still live in a world where all income ultimately derives from labor applied to capital. E.g. when Google throws off a fat dividend, that's counted as "income from capital" for tax purposes, and Krugman is saying we should tax that to fund the retirement system. But Google, of course, makes it's money from engineers. If Google didn't have engineers, it wouldn't have any money. If they don't have enough engineers, they make less money than if they do.

Now, we could have a future where capital really does generate production by itself (everything is automated by robots). We're not anywhere near that point yet. For the foreseeable future, even to the extent that profits from Google, Facebook, etc, are counted as "income from capital" for tax purposes, it still depends fundamentally on human labor.

[Pkeod]

Should people be ineligible if they are born infertile?

We could say that we probably won't have enough younger people to take care of the older people as birth rates decrease, but I think robots and AI will be more developed by then that either more people will be available to take care of the elderly and or the robots will do it along with all other service and manual labor jobs.

No matter what happens we will adapt.