4 ms·

> With the Industrial Revolution, according to Galor, the value of human capital reached the point that parents chose to have fewer children and invest more in

> With the Industrial Revolution, according to Galor, the value of human capital reached the point that parents chose to have fewer children and invest more in their upbringing. Longer life spans made human capital even more important. As women’s wages began to approach those earned by men, it became more costly for them to leave the workforce to have children, further reducing birthrates. This demographic transition allowed technological progress to vastly outstrip population growth, producing our present world of material plenty. I wonder if some of this is the demographic equivalent of having a fantastic time feasting on your seed corn. IIRC, pretty much all these populations are at sub-replacement level, and some by quite a significant amount.

danuker 5y ago
> feasting on your seed corn Assuming the ratio of the average salary to the average pension in my country stays the same, and that I will work for 40 years and retire for 10 (which is the expected case in Romania, but I expect I'll live longer), the return of the national pension fund is -78.6% of what I contribute. There's no way I will get a meaningful pension, especially given the fact that the country is undergoing depopulation. I have to manage my own wealth.
- lupire 5y ago
  If you tax billionaires, you can have a pension.
  - danuker 5y ago
    There's a handful of Romanian billionaires. There are millions of retirees. This translates to thousands of dollars per retiree. Not enough even if we tax all their wealth.
jltsiren 5y ago
I don't think there is anything particularly new in that. For most of human history, cities relied on migration to maintain population levels. Both because cities were so unhealthy places to live in and because people had better things to do.
qiskit 5y ago
> "With the Industrial Revolution, according to Galor, the value of human capital reached the point that parents chose to have fewer children and invest more in their upbringing." Parents didn't "choose" to have fewer kids. The leaders of industrialized/industrializing nations encouraged/demanded/brainwashed people into having less children - both foreign and domestic. I guess being forced or brainwashed into having fewer kids is the saming thing as "choosing". It isn't that parents chose to have fewer kids and invest more in their upbringing. It's that the elites wanted fewer children so that parents could spend more time at work making more money for them. It's about extracting the most value from a population. Of course the flip side is eugenics. Where we encourage/fund/order the third world countries to have less children. The first major experiment was in hong kong where the british founded the eugenics league in the 1930s and encouraged a 2 child policy on the chinese people there.
- notch656a 5y ago
  It's also worth noting that the incentives and economics for having kids have changed in other ways. Having kids is a privatized loss with socialized gains. The parent is responsible for the costs. Even if one walks away, they are on the hook for 20% of their gross to pay for the upbringing. Socialized gains: everyone benefits from the tax the child pays after the parents finish raising the child. Many elderly and disabled benefit from the social security the tax the child will pay after they're raised. These recipients of social welfare benefit whether they had children themselves or not. It's a massive personal investment, and then once the child is an adult society taps the child as their tax piggy bank, with only the smallest tax offsets to the parent for raising the child. Counter this with the ways of old, where the child's contribution to the elderly was generally done through the family structure rather than through compelled taxes to general public elderly via social security, even those who didn't raise children. This incentive structure means the childless disproportionately benefit from the socialized gains and those with many children, assuming they raised them without welfare, almost assuredly disproportionately do not recoup the socialized gains after subtracting the personal losses. The stakes have gone up as well. CPS, child welfare laws, nosy neighbors, and all manner of other much stricter enforcement have emerged in the past 50 years. Before you could let your child play out on the street alone if they were ready at age, say 7. Now if you do that in the wrong place, many people will call CPS, at no risk to themselves and in fact in an extreme act of unconstitutional perversion you are not allowed to face your accuser who are protected as 'anonymous'. Many people are looking to crucify the parent they see making any perceived error, and the state apparatus has been vastly expanded to rush down and 'save the children' and destroy you in the process. This enforced coddling of children from every perceived outdoor 'danger' destroys the development of the child and improperly robs the parent of the ability to focus on other tasks, further yet destroying the will of the parent to make the mistake of raising another child. Note: there are some caveats to this: obviously the childless pay higher taxes and also K-12 is partially publicly funded, but these only damper the effects.
usrn 5y ago
Yup. I've said in other places that people who can have kids but don't probably shouldn't get social security.
- anamax 5y ago
  > Yup. I've said in other places that people who can have kids but don't probably shouldn't get social security. And you also said that such people shouldn't pay social security either, right? Moreover, they get a refund (with interest) for past payments when the determination is made.
  - usrn 5y ago
    No. By not having kids you save a lot of time and money that should have gone into the future. That's your refund.
    - anamax 5y ago
      So, you want me to pay for my own retirement AND subsidize yours? And before you say "but you'll be relying on my kids", I'll be PAYING for my retirement. Just like you. The difference is that you think that you're entitled to my money to do so.
      - usrn 5y ago
        Yeah that's part of living in civilization. If you don't like it you can go live in Somalia. An alternative would be to just get rid of social security but that seems pretty unpopular. If you're going to have socialism you have to think through the issues like this.
        anamax 5y ago
        Paying for you is part of civilization? Why isn't paying for ME part of civilization? Do you really want to claim that this is socialism?

danuker 5y ago

> feasting on your seed corn Assuming the ratio of the average salary to the average pension in my country stays the same, and that I will work for 40 years and retire for 10 (which is the expected case in Romania, but I expect I'll live longer), the return of the national pension fund is -78.6% of what I contribute. There's no way I will get a meaningful pension, especially given the fact that the country is undergoing depopulation. I have to manage my own wealth.

lupire 5y ago
If you tax billionaires, you can have a pension.
- danuker 5y ago
  There's a handful of Romanian billionaires. There are millions of retirees. This translates to thousands of dollars per retiree. Not enough even if we tax all their wealth.

jltsiren 5y ago

I don't think there is anything particularly new in that. For most of human history, cities relied on migration to maintain population levels. Both because cities were so unhealthy places to live in and because people had better things to do.

qiskit 5y ago

> "With the Industrial Revolution, according to Galor, the value of human capital reached the point that parents chose to have fewer children and invest more in their upbringing." Parents didn't "choose" to have fewer kids. The leaders of industrialized/industrializing nations encouraged/demanded/brainwashed people into having less children - both foreign and domestic. I guess being forced or brainwashed into having fewer kids is the saming thing as "choosing". It isn't that parents chose to have fewer kids and invest more in their upbringing. It's that the elites wanted fewer children so that parents could spend more time at work making more money for them. It's about extracting the most value from a population. Of course the flip side is eugenics. Where we encourage/fund/order the third world countries to have less children. The first major experiment was in hong kong where the british founded the eugenics league in the 1930s and encouraged a 2 child policy on the chinese people there.

notch656a 5y ago
It's also worth noting that the incentives and economics for having kids have changed in other ways. Having kids is a privatized loss with socialized gains. The parent is responsible for the costs. Even if one walks away, they are on the hook for 20% of their gross to pay for the upbringing. Socialized gains: everyone benefits from the tax the child pays after the parents finish raising the child. Many elderly and disabled benefit from the social security the tax the child will pay after they're raised. These recipients of social welfare benefit whether they had children themselves or not. It's a massive personal investment, and then once the child is an adult society taps the child as their tax piggy bank, with only the smallest tax offsets to the parent for raising the child. Counter this with the ways of old, where the child's contribution to the elderly was generally done through the family structure rather than through compelled taxes to general public elderly via social security, even those who didn't raise children. This incentive structure means the childless disproportionately benefit from the socialized gains and those with many children, assuming they raised them without welfare, almost assuredly disproportionately do not recoup the socialized gains after subtracting the personal losses. The stakes have gone up as well. CPS, child welfare laws, nosy neighbors, and all manner of other much stricter enforcement have emerged in the past 50 years. Before you could let your child play out on the street alone if they were ready at age, say 7. Now if you do that in the wrong place, many people will call CPS, at no risk to themselves and in fact in an extreme act of unconstitutional perversion you are not allowed to face your accuser who are protected as 'anonymous'. Many people are looking to crucify the parent they see making any perceived error, and the state apparatus has been vastly expanded to rush down and 'save the children' and destroy you in the process. This enforced coddling of children from every perceived outdoor 'danger' destroys the development of the child and improperly robs the parent of the ability to focus on other tasks, further yet destroying the will of the parent to make the mistake of raising another child. Note: there are some caveats to this: obviously the childless pay higher taxes and also K-12 is partially publicly funded, but these only damper the effects.

usrn 5y ago

Yup. I've said in other places that people who can have kids but don't probably shouldn't get social security.

anamax 5y ago
> Yup. I've said in other places that people who can have kids but don't probably shouldn't get social security. And you also said that such people shouldn't pay social security either, right? Moreover, they get a refund (with interest) for past payments when the determination is made.
- usrn 5y ago
  No. By not having kids you save a lot of time and money that should have gone into the future. That's your refund.
  - anamax 5y ago
    So, you want me to pay for my own retirement AND subsidize yours? And before you say "but you'll be relying on my kids", I'll be PAYING for my retirement. Just like you. The difference is that you think that you're entitled to my money to do so.
    - usrn 5y ago
      Yeah that's part of living in civilization. If you don't like it you can go live in Somalia. An alternative would be to just get rid of social security but that seems pretty unpopular. If you're going to have socialism you have to think through the issues like this.
      - anamax 5y ago
        Paying for you is part of civilization? Why isn't paying for ME part of civilization? Do you really want to claim that this is socialism?