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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32831 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Low TFR is the new hot topic.

It's been a topic forever. i think the problem is sorta overblown. You sometimes see stats like "A minimum 2.1 TFR is needed to sustain the population, thus it's crisis is if it's below it." But the math of population growth is much more nuanced. Yes, a TFR of 0 is certain extinction within 2 generations, but even as little as a TFR of 1.0-1.5 can sustain a population for a looooong time with slow decline. Sometimes it's so slow that the population can keep rising after fertility peaks. It's fascinating how the math works out this way. Japan has been at sub 2 TFR for over 50 years yet its population has only fallen a bit, and this is with very heavily restricted immigration.

As I understand this issue and reading between the lines, the real concern is that with an inverse population pyramid the SS scam comes tumbling down, not so much that they become extinct.

How much of that is the very idea of traditional retirement being kind of absurd in the modern era?

Retiring at 65 when there was a reasonable expectation of death by early-mid 70s after a life of actual hard labor and there wasn't obscene amounts of money poured into extending out the last 2-3 years of life was sustainable. The modern conception of retiring from a laptop or deskwork at 65 to just kind of aimlessly dodder around for 20-30 years has upset the whole system.

yeah, you are right in that aspect. But from the beginning it functions more like a pyramid scheme than anything else.

SS scam

This is silly, there will need to be some (moderate) increase in payroll taxes or means testing or (moderate) decrease in payments in the next decade or two to keep SS solvent in the long term, but it's nowhere near a 'scam'. Who is it scamming, it's working precisely as intended?

it's working precisely as intended?

like a pyramid scheme.

How so?

for the system not to come tumbling down they need more people to be coming into it. If for some reason there is a deficit of people in the bottom of the pyramid compared to the top the system crashes.

the scam is that it's considerably worse than a normal investment account.

So? It's not supposed to be. Whatever people say, it's more of a benefit than a public retirement account. After all, it's current revenues that pay for current expenditure.

When it's one of the biggest line items on a tax bill it kind of bears scrutiny. It's a 12.4% income tax that you see literally no benefit for until your sixties. This is a tremendous amount of money and I'm almost certainly going to see much less of it in my lifetime than I put in. It's the old taking from the youth. How people can defend it while shooting down UBI is beyond me.

It's the old taking from the youth.

Sort of, but everyone who lives to an old age benefits; you might well pay more in than you get out, but it exists as a safety net for everyone, so even if you find yourself impoverished at 65 you still have that security.

Not to mention certain groups get a much higher payoff than others, depending entirely on lifespan. Statistically a black man paying into social security will only collect for a few years before death, while Asian and Jewish women will get a return many times greater by living to their late 80s.

Small differences in life expectancy turn out to be huge in terms of "years lived after age 65", and the inevitable raising of SS collection age will only make that worse.

If anything, one would think the scam would be the confusing nature of sending some money every paycheck into the program, being required to have sent some amount over some number of years before being able to qualify for it but that the program is not and has never been anything like a personal account.

The scam is that after all of the smoke and mirrors you just described the money you can expect to be entitled to compares unfavorably to spending it on treasury bonds. It's billed as paying for your retirement but it's very much a wealth transfer.

I think it's a little broader than that, in that it's not just social security. Younger people work more, are more economically productive, and so on. Older people are more likely to be retired and consumers. The net result is a society in some amount of decline. But I agree that that wouldn't necessarily be any disastrous thing to worry about, there is no chance of extinction or something due to this.

It may also reverse itself to some extent, since now that birth control exists, wanting kids plays a much bigger role than it used to, rather than wanting sex, and so there should be an increase over time in people who want kids, if that's at all genetic. (Or if not, I would think that the effect of generations being disproportionately raised by people who value children would itself have some amount of effect. Religiosity could also matter, since more religious families tend to have more children.) Since the loss of children in large part from people delaying and not wanting children, that would provide a check on that.

I'm curious as to what this will do for future generations politically and religiously. I think in general, the right in the US is more pronatalist than the left, which could shift what demographics look like a generation from now back rightward, unless the zeitgeist proves a large enough influence (which, given what Gen Z looks like politically, is very plausible).

Edit: This is all assuming that the way society works stays relatively similar to now, which, given the recent AI progress, could plausibly not be the case.

Religiosity is also hereditary, so I'd expect selection for religiosity to be a major factor. It's probably worth checking to see if elementary school teachers, scoutmasters, and the like have more kids, or are related to people with more kids on average, although I have no idea how you'd go about doing that.

I do think rural areas of France are probably a thing to watch, because their fertility transition happened long enough ago that it could feasibly have some mild selection effects by now and I think that small towns haven't been replaced by Arabs yet. Again, not sure how to check- try to correlate desired fertility with TFR in 1840?

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