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Why not just offer affirmative action to married couples with children?
Want a promotion in your white collar job? Have a husband/wife and have children!
Want your kids to get into a good university? Have more children!
This would efficiently target the most valuable, productive, ambitious people too, rather than the welfare class who don't really want to go to university, don't have anywhere near the necessary marks and aren't in line for promotion anyway.
The whole criticism of affirmative action is that it promotes non-meritocratic people. I don't really want my surgeon being selected for having four kids any more than I want her being selected for being a neurodivergent woman, or something. And if we started offering affirmative action for people who have kids, I don't know how it would stop otherwise-low-performing people from having kids to game the system. It probably would boost TFR but I don't think it would efficiently target the most productive or ambitious people any more than current AA policies do.
Well in the fantasy world where this policy is implemented, I'd block low-performers from taking advantage of it. Right now the affirmative action system doles out money and jobs to people of the right (wrong) race, I'm conceptualizing a system where it doles out money and jobs to married couples who meet certain baseline standards - their children aren't menaces, they work in more skill-intensive occupations, good character...
There's always going to be gaming of all government systems and there'd be gaming of this too but the system would be designed with perverse incentives in mind, not as a political patronage system.
If we just meritocracy-max then we're back to IQ-shredding, there needs to be a balance.
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Only targets a small slice of the population, so unlikely to generate results worth the amount of aggro it will pull, which is what I was aiming for with my proposals. That's why I tried to make them as broad as possible while minimizing inflammation as much as possible while retaining effectiveness.
That's why I didn't recommend outright banning no fault divorce; that's a coup-complete solution.
You do want to slash pensions though. I also want to slash pensions, I think it's a good idea. But it's incredibly toxic, since you'd also need to disenfranchise the olds. They will always vote for loot now and consequences later. While we're disenfranchising, may as well keep going and remake the entire political system...
None of our political solutions are at all likely to happen without a major transformation of the system, something comparable to a coup. So I also agree on the importance of a technological fix.
The fact that the pension is sitting in the bank account of someone other than the recipient is just a paperwork issue. It should be treated the same as if it was sitting in the bank account of the recipient. Taking it is equivalent to taxing the old on savings. You may wish to tax the old on savings anyway, but admit that that's what you're doing.
Except they aren't savings. It's not like the money they contributed was put into a fund somewhere to accrue interest and now they are getting it back. Their money was spent to pay out pensions to the old before, and their current pensions are being paid by current contributions from the young, with no relationship between how much they contributed and how much they get paid back out (pensions pay out much more than was ever paid into them and were only ever possible because of an exponentially increasing population of young people to fund them; when fertility collapsed, the pensions became unsustainable).
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No, that's not how it works at all.
A state pension means that the government is taking from taxpayers and paying the old.
Pensions are provided because the old don't have savings (or because they don't have 'enough' savings, after they've fiddled the figures to ensure they don't).
I have no problem with people saving their own money, my issue is with the government subsidizing the lifestyle of the old at the expense of the young. Welfare /= savings.
A "pension" in the US is deferred compensation, generally the term implies a defined benefits plan. Once you've been employed for the requisite period, the employer (whether public or private) is obliged to make the payments when you get old. At a cash accounting level this is the same as taking from the taxpayers and paying the old, but it's a matter of paying a debt owed, not a subsidy.
This is complicated by the way some of the public pensions were attained -- union delivers votes to politicians in exchange for pension benefits -- which taints the process, but barring things like that, a pension is an obligation owed the former employee.
In most other Anglophone countries what the US calls "social security" is called a "pension".
Good definitional clarification, I understand where Jiro was coming from now, not being American myself.
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