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.
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...
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.
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.
The system is built on everything growning.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
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.
If you look at the link I previously posted, the under $10k a year group have the highest birthrate. So it can be done.
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.
Then instead of having kids people will work on saving money for the old age.
...
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.
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.
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.