I’ve read a lot recently on a neighboring blog and its comments (at least I feel like the blog is in my neighborhood, even if the author lives in Colorado and I live in Missouri), about how we might really be in the middle of a worldwide population collapse instead of an overpopulation trend.
I’ve also read some articles about news articles on people choosing not to have children, and other people commenting and discussing whether they are being selfish that way or not.
And I’ve also been reading a lot of articles about planning for retirement.
By now you are wondering how I am planning to tie all these together into one coherent blog. And how crass I can be to have my headline equate children with money.
Well, let me tell you how I start bringing this all together mentally.
It started with a book about the next 80 or 150 years, that I picked up in the library months ago, by a well-respected political analyst (I cannot remember the name either of author or book). But he said something about my retirement prospects that stuck with me.
It talked about the current retirement projections being based upon historical growth of the stock market and housing prices. And that the growth of those was based upon increased demand due to population growth, but that the future trend in the US is not population growth, but population decrease, It made the connection between population decrease and the decrease in my retirement portfolio prospects.
That started me thinking about several things.
Historically, in the agrarian society, people had a lot of children for a couple of reasons: 1) many of them would not live to adulthood, and 2) those children would be the prop of their old age.
If you didn’t have children, you needed to have money for your old age, or some other relative who felt obligation or compassion to take care of you.
If the option was money, what did that money represent? It represented your labor saved up from the past in exchange for other people’s labor in the future.
And where would that future labor come from? Other people’s children. If you had children you didn’t need to have money, because you already had the labor.
As we got out of the agrarian society, the lines got more and more blurred. People’s children didn’t support them directly via labor, but generated money into the general labor pool that could be earned and saved and spent for one’s support. The distance has gotten so far that people have mostly lost the connection of money to labor. The connection of children to future labor, and thus children to money, has gotten completely lost.
The advance of technology has further blurred the issue, by creating many types of multipliers for labor, We see the machines and forget the labor behind it, because there is so little obvious human labor connected to much of it. But we haven’t yet created any self-perpetuating machines (and I am not sure that we will like it if we do — something for science fiction to discuss before the reality occurs). When the labor disappears, so, eventually, does the technology.
We can ride some of it out for a few more years, even a couple of decades, by increasing the multipliers to the labor. Maybe even enough to soften the descent somewhat. What we cannot do is change the underlying dynamic.
The technological society stresses the expenses of raising children for the individual. What it doesn’t stress is the corporate benefit of those children for the future, for all.
At The Rainbow 