{"id":76,"date":"2002-12-04T03:42:00","date_gmt":"2002-12-04T08:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=76"},"modified":"2002-12-04T03:42:00","modified_gmt":"2002-12-04T08:42:00","slug":"social-security-and-the-demography-bomb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=76","title":{"rendered":"Social Security and the Demography Bomb"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A friend of mine, Russ Cage aka Engineer-Poet, comments on my essay<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?m=200212#18\">Demographics<br \/>\nand the Dustbin of History<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nPeople used to have children to take care of them in their old age.<br \/>\nSocial Security took care of this by socializing the benefits, but all<br \/>\nof the costs still fell to individuals; worse, taking time out of the<br \/>\nworkforce to raise kids reduces your Social Security benefits.<br \/>\nRational actors will stop having kids to have a good retirement.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>He&#8217;s right, and this applies to <em>all<\/em> public pension schemes.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s a very simple, very powerful mechanism.  When you subsidize old<br \/>\nage, you depress birthrates.  The more you subsidize old age, the more<br \/>\nyou depress birthrates.  Eventually&#8230;crash!<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not just Euro-socialism that&#8217;s going to get trashed by<br \/>\ndemographics, it&#8217;s the U.S&#8217;s own welfare state.  It might take longer<br \/>\nhere because our population is still rising, but it will happen.<\/p>\n<p>Now that the effects of income transfer on demography are no longer<br \/>\nmasked by the Long Boom, this is going to become one of the principal<br \/>\nconstraints on public policy.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=85477017\">Blogspot comments<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A friend of mine, Russ Cage aka Engineer-Poet, comments on my essay Demographics and the Dustbin of History: People used to have children to take care of them in their old age. Social Security took care of this by socializing the benefits, but all of the costs still fell to individuals; worse, taking time out&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=76\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Social Security and the Demography Bomb<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}