Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

If You Don’t Have Kids, Should You Get Social Security?

The realities of future population collapse

In case you haven’t heard, Japan is in a bit of a pickle. In 2022, they were estimated to have had as few as 800,000 births. Now, my math is a bit shaky, but going by my numbers, their death rate significantly exceeded that, being around the 1.4 million mark.

That’s a population deficit of 600,000 in a year.

Now, with all the talk about humanity’s footprint and climate change, you might be thinking this is fantastic. How could Japan’s — and indeed the world’s, population decreasing be anything but a good thing? Well, the PM of Japan has stated it rather bluntly:

Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.

Japan is an example to all developed countries on the dangers of an ageing population with plummeting birth rates. Roughly speaking, as people become elderly and can’t work anymore, they become more dependent on the state for healthcare, medication, social security, and other items that the state is expected to provide.

All of those cost money, and unless they’ve invested for retirement, that money comes from young taxpayers.

And if those taxpayers dwindle, then there are only two solutions: you either provide less help to the older generation, or you tax the younger generations more. The latter isn’t really an option, because most countries can’t tax their citizens too much more without causing severe social unrest and anger.

Option 1 is likely to cause a similar level of anger, but basic economic realities have to win out.

What if there was a third option though? What if social security were to be restricted to those who produced the next generation that would actually be paying for it?

The chickens of our selfishness will come home to roost…

I’ve seen a few takes here and elsewhere on social media of people proclaiming they’re not having kids. The tone, more often than not, isn’t so much “this was a really hard decision and we hope it was the right one” so much as smug and…