Reply to With declining birth replacement rates around the world …

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]… is it morally/ethically right to push more social programs? Are babies born just to generate taxes for social programs that they may never live to qualify for?

As a society, we need to support each other / work together but is there a different model that can work so that babies are not just Oompa Loompas for the government?

Do politicians look at policies in terms of how many workers we have and how many workers we need to support every social policy?[/quote]

Declining birth rates are the result of higher standards of living and higher human capital investment requirements.

Declining birthrates are not a problem is the increases in productivity outpace the decline in population.

If the next generation can do twice as much with half as many people, then we we would get twice as much with half as many people.

Think of how much better our kids are at math than we were.  How much better at programming, engineering, etc.  Sure there are the ebureats driversbut for the most part our kids will be far more productive than we are and that will support us into our retirement.[/quote]

The problem is that has to work twice as much to support fewer people. If it takes working 40h/week to support one person today, it will take 80h to 120h per week to support one person in the future. (I’m using made up numbers to explain my point.)

Industrialization was supposed to make us work less, computers were supposed to make us work less. But working less never happens. We just have to work more more more. Well, some of us have to work moee and more. [/quote]

It still takes a similar amount of effort to look after someone with dementia or to look after a baby as it did before. Not too many productivity gains there, and the needs of older people are increasing.[/quote]

And until machines learn how to take care of babies and old people, we need people. Throwing money at a problem doesn’t help if there are no replacement workers.

Can you imagine having a networth of $10M as an old person but not being able to find anyone to take care of you? Eventually there won’t be any immigrants to replace people in a country because other countries will be in the same situation and won’t have emigration.

Governments are not people. They are ideas. [/quote]

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