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Comment by nyokodo | Hacker News Reader

> Every single pension system has the working population pay for the retirees.

Which is just a socialized form of the previous social security system which had children or grandchildren look after their parents. Of course, the glaring difference is that social security schemes have motivated many millions, who otherwise might have, to not have children at all or an inadequate number and so contribute very little to nothing towards the future maintenance of the system while still cashing the checks once they retire. Of course this system does help the minority who can't have children for whatever reason but it does look like we've swapped looking after that cohort for a few decades for effectively no social security system for anyone once this ponzi scheme collapses.

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>Of course, the glaring difference is that social security schemes have motivated many millions, who otherwise might have, to not have children at all or an inadequate number

This implied link between public pensions and demographic collapse paints a picture that social security was destined to fail because people wouldn't have children for the purpose of taking care of them in old age. The millennial generation, the largest American generational cohort, were born almost 50 years after the founding of social security. How does it make sense that public pensions motivated millennials to not have children, but not their parents?

Across all developed countries where you have demographic collapse you have societies where it becomes more and more expensive to raise children. The public pension system requires that the economy grows year after year and that becomes hard when your population shrinks. As to why the population is shrinking you have to look at why people aren't having children. And when you ask that question you get way more "I can't even afford to buy a house" and not "the government is going to take care of me when I'm old".

To prepare for retirement, you have two options:

1. Have children and treat them well. 2. Save and invest, so capital is available for the few children of the next generation to work with.

As long as millennials are doing option 2. there isn't a problem. If they rely on the pension system, then that would be a problem.

That’s a pretty crazy position. In the US, there’s lots of material out there on the conditions that led to the creation of Social Security and subsequent legislation like Medicare and Medicaid. Hopefully you are simply ignorant of that history and not demonstrating a blase tolerance of human suffering.

These systems are very sustainable, and the solution to the funding issues would be best served by indexing the cutoff for contributions to inflation.

As to birth rates, how do you expect people earning less than their parents to absorb the exponentially higher costs? My son was born over a decade ago. Thanks to a moderate, common complication, his birth cost $85k. His childcare at age 3 cost as much as our mortgage.

I think the parent comment is being overly reductive for rhetorical effect, but not necessarily wrong. At the end of the day, social security programs are an abstraction across the demographics of working people vs non-working people. And you only get more working people by giving birth to them.

All the retirement savings won't make a difference if there is no one to spend them on. If the population is expected to decline, then you better hope your retirement investments are going into technology that can yield sufficient future productivity gains.

It's apparent if you just think about the farm labor required to produce food, which can't be stored as easily and long term as money. (On that note, maybe the best retirement strategy is a whole bunch of kerosene and shelf stable foods...)

Edit: As said elsewhere in the thread, I fully agree that the problem is due to children being too expensive, not that people just expect the government to take care of them.

> the solution to the funding issues would be best served by indexing the cutoff for contributions to inflation.

Social Security caps are indexed to inflation (they went up 9% from 2022 to 2023): https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/retirement/planner/maxtax.html

I assume you're a software developer in the US. Doesn't your awesome insurance mean that you are out of pocket just a few thousand dollars?

Even if so, that money was paid by the premiums of all the other people in the plan. The point is that having children is simply too expensive, partly due to cost disease in healthcare.

Your insurance most certainly didn't pay out 85K. They have negotiated lower rates which are not transparent to us. Source - my own kids deliveries were billed 40-50K. We paid at most a few hundred.

I'm not sure where this thought comes from - on our explanation of benefits there's always a line item for how much they negotiated down and it usually never amounts to much.

Insurance profit margins are pretty tiny. We (or our employers) pay a ton for insurance because healthcare costs are beyond ridiculous in our country.

Are you trying to say US healthcare isn't expensive? What is the financial risk of having a child who needs insulin?

> Are you trying to say US healthcare isn't expensive?

I am only arguing with "The point is that having children is simply too expensive, partly due to cost disease in healthcare." Typically, the main cost of having children involves preschool childcare and good colleges.

> What is the financial risk of having a child who needs insulin?

How many children need insulin? Again, I only contend with the broad generalization that having children is expensive due to healthcare costs.

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