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Comment by spywaregorilla | Hacker News Reader

That's just because people died young. The mode (most common) age of death was over 75 in France for men in 1930. I'm not sure how WWII factors into that. It's now about 82, eyeballing it (yes, still higher).

https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPU_1204_0683--the-mos...

People were not "old" and dying at appreciably higher rates given they reached age 60 back then. The general premise that there's a lot of rich old people now is true. But the factors that have raised life expectancy are probably working against this trend, and to minor effect, as they primarily raise the current number of kids.

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My understanding was that almost all countries with advanced economies are experiencing negative growth in producing children. So even if you are right about the nuance in age, go look at Japan. Their population is shrinking.

Purely economically, only a total moron would have a child. Child labor has been outlawed and society says the (grown) child is their cash cow not yours, so the retirement from taxing the kid is spread across everyone else. Meanwhile you're asked to pay the lions share of the investment for everybody else to cash out on. So the name of the game is to let everybody else have the kids and free-ride the fuck out of that by paying some token contribution like the property tax for their grade school or whatever and then taking advantage of their tax dollars when you get older.

This is a huge departure from almost all of human history except the last 100 years in the developed world, where the family formerly was the safety net so these kind of investments and arrangements stayed in the family leaving a much stronger economic incentive for children.

As a parent, you are 100% correct. I love my kids and I’m saving like mad for them, but the future is, frankly, bleak for young people.

There's also the aspect that old people will feel bothered by your kids and complain if they have to endure hearing happy kids after 6PM. Even though they were the ones who bought the house next to the playground...

>This is a huge departure from almost all of human history except the last 100 years in the developed world, where the family formerly was the safety net so these kind of investments and arrangements stayed in the family leaving a much stronger economic incentive for children.

except the evidence seems to point towards kids being a net drain, even in preindustrial societies.

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/10/was_having_kids.htm...

When options are thin, hope commands a premium. See: lottery tickets.

Would you give up planning for retirement just because all of the options were unreliable? I wouldn't, I'd pick the least bad and try anyway.

I think it is at least worth considering that there may have been reasons other than economic reasoning that people chose to have children.

And apparently that results in people having 1.8 children instead of 5.6.

I’m not sure what you’re saying. There are other factors that have changed between now and then, such as the general acceptability of being unmarried, family planning tools, reduced religiosity, and woolier stuff like people’s idea of what a good life is.

Except the linked article argues that in hunter gatherer societies, kids were a net drain even when their parents were approaching retirement, and in agricultural societies there were "retirement" options in the form of land ownership and financial instruments.

Some of the calculations they made were utterly bizarre. Like assuming the child wasn't paying anything forward until "retirement" of the parent. All adults being net positive is not the same as the elders not benefitting from in-kin capture of investments in a scheme that almost resembles taxation moving benefit upwards in in-kin seniority.

So if you were living in an agricultural society, you would trust their financial instruments and institutions governing land ownership more than you would trust your own family? Really?

Feels a bit like saying the compressor is a net drain on a jet engine. Sure, if you disconnected the compressor while running, the engine would make a lot of power for a very brief moment. But the compressor is needed to keep the engine running.

> Purely economically, only a total moron would have a child.

OK but nobody is making that decision "purely economically." Returning to a world of filial piety laws and no real social safety net sounds nightmarish.

Thankfully, people do things (especially having children) for reasons other than financial.

Mostly true, yes. But pension deficiencies are not generally because people are living a whole lot longer after retiring.

If the system is expecting population to grow infinitely and holding everyone to hostage for it then the system needs to change.

Be careful what you wish for. Societal change comes with disorder.

So does infinite population growth.

Doesn't seem like stasis is possible so the question is more what change we want to see given our current constraints.

I don't think wishing or not will stop whatever is coming.

China learned about the perils of a child policy the hard way.

> If the system is expecting population to grow infinitely

The system is built on everything growning.

ergo the "limits to growth" :)

I think the population distribution by age band in the different eras would illustrate why there was enough money then and insufficient money now.

The premise wasn’t that you the worker would pay your own retirement but that you would pay for the current crop of retirees and then when you retire the younger age bands would be paying for your retirement.

If the worker would be funding their own retirements then they have to pay in a whole lot more.

"If the worker would be funding their own retirements then they have to pay in a whole lot more."

What? That doesn't make any sense. If my social security contributions went into a bank account that was invested, I'd be way ahead of what social security will pay me.

I think you're making a big leap to saying that economics are the reason people aren't having kids. Many people who are financially well off don't want kids either. I haven't looked for good numbers, but it seems the poorest members of society have the most kids, while the richest have the least (could be some issue with lack of controls here).

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

"Able to have kids" isn't the only economic factor. "Incentivized to have kids" is another.

Kids used to be cheap labor plus a retirement package. Now they are an expensive hobby. With privatized costs and socialized benefits (or, if you prefer, benefits that get sucked to the top of the social pyramid), kid production stopped making sense for kid producers and we are seeing a supply shortfall. If we fix the incentives we can fix the supply shortfall. Even a partial fix is probably sufficient -- people enjoy having kids, they just need the personal economic consequences to be less of a flaming trainwreck.

I can't even pay for my own food now, let alone for kids.

The social safety net will cover that. SNAP, WIC, CHIP, Medicaid, school, are all covered. All you need is subsidized housing and to know where the different charities are that have free food and clothing.

If you look at the link I previously posted, the under $10k a year group have the highest birthrate. So it can be done.

Hmm, sounds like forbidding pensions would fix that (make older people rely on their kids).

Cheap labor is no more, especially in the age of highly specialized jobs requiring education (manual labor is greatly automated now, especially in agriculture, compared to 100 years ago).

How else would we incentivise it? Money payouts on birth don't work -- only poor people would make good use of it, middle class would see the payouts too small for them anyway.

Depends on the payout. I’m decidedly middle class, as are practically all my friends, my large family would probably qualify as „rich“, but I and everyone I know are still weary of the financial burden of having kids. Although my personal theory is that it is not so much the cost, but the lost income potential and career opportunities for women that keeps people from having (more) kids.

> Hmm, sounds like forbidding pensions would fix that (make older people rely on their kids).

Then instead of having kids people will work on saving money for the old age.

Again speaking for the devil, historically it was solved by inability to reliably save money.

'"Able to have kids" isn't the only economic factor. "Incentivized to have kids" is another.

...

people enjoy having kids, they just need the personal economic consequences to be less of a flaming trainwreck.'

You start out saying one thing and end up saying something different.

The point is, even when people have the money, they don't want kids, or at least not very many. If people truly want kids, then they are already incentivized and just need to be able to.

Parents already get tax breaks for kids. Primary and secondary education costs are mostly covered via taxes, whether one has kids or not. So there are already economic incentives, they just aren't a net benefit to the parents. I don't believe making them a net benefit is the right course of action since that has potential problems as well.

I think they're still relevant but in a different way. Upper-class parents have higher expectations for the amount of extracurricular education and activities their children are going to do and it's infeasible for them to do that with many.

If you are employed in manual labor then I'm not sure how working into your mid-70s is supposed to work. It seems like it's just saying that people should go off and die.

Sure, but is shrinkage really a problem, given that automation is about to eliminate a bunch of professions?

Did that article you link say anything about the ratio of those that reached 60 or not? In a pay as you go system what matters is the ratio of retired to working and in a system that is actuarialy sound and actually saving then the percentage that pays in and does not collect by dying before retirement matters a lot. The most common age you die given you make it to 60 is pretty irrelevant in both situations other than it indirectly partially relates to the load of old people you have to contend with in the system, which is what actually matters in both situations.

75 was the most common age to die for French males from that time across the board. Not conditioned on making it to 60.

The "life expectancy" of someone given they made it to 60 was similarly high. Highlighted only to dispel people's imaginations that people used to be "old" when they reached their society's average life expectancy. They don't look physically old. Nor are they even outliers. 1930s French society would have had lots of people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s,

> The mode (most common) age of death was over 75 in France for men in 1930.

The most common age of death in France, for both men and women, in 1930 was 0.

Unless the words “men” and “women” imply adulthood, as they do in ordinary conversation.

Pretty much all life expectancy statistics are based on people who are successfully born.

Indeed.

An integer age of "0" at death means they died after birth but before age "1".

Why does the mode matter? We are discussing cost, which is related to the the number of retirees. The average lifespan tells you how many people you can expect to be retired at a given moment, the mode tells you... what exactly?

No it doesn't.

If you have 100 people of which 50 died below age 10 and the 50 that survived lived to 75 that's a lot of retirees.

If all 100 survive past age 10 but 90 of them die before age 65 you have not a lot of retirees.

The exact numbers can work out to the same "life expectancy" with wildly different results for retirement planning. And also in genealogy the high infant mortality rate makes for small average life expectancies and you might be surprised how old most people that survived to adulthood actually got.

The mode is far more useful here because it gets rid of the war outliers.

Consider the following:

1. A high infant mortality rate brings average lifespan down.

2. Infants don't contribute to the economy nor to public pension funds.

A country might have low life expectancy, but a relatively close number of workers and retirees, as life expectances can be (even more so in developing countries) multimodal.

When someone says the life expectancy used to be lower and we now have a lot of people who are old are not working would lead you to believe that there were not a lot of old people not working in the past. That would be wrong. The plurality of people were dying at 75 as I said.

The average lifespan is very insufficient to tell you how many people you can expect to be retired at a given moment.

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