They see their 90 neighbours holding out their hands expecting to be looked after, those who, during their youth, were richer, had more free time, and more individualistic political views. And they start to wonder: why should my children have to bear this incredible burden?
As a relatively old person and a relative anti-natalist, I say they shouldn’t. It’s not their doing.
Unfortunately I can’t offer them a good alternative. Even if they don’t support all those old people, they’re still burdened by a world full of those people’s misery.
I have to own all that. What you are saying is important. A fair amount of it is already baked in. Denying it would be delusion.
Yet if I don’t want the young to break themselves trying to feed the old, I also don’t want anybody obliged to be breeding stock for somebody else’s Grand Plan. Slavery is slavery, however either of those might be dressed up as “duty”. And “voluntary” can be a dangerously elastic word.
All this is, in small part, the doing of people who set up public pension plans that promised an endless future payment stream, relying on the assumption that there’d always be new members. That’s an insolvent system that can never be wound up: a Ponzi scheme. But no matter how much money some pension system had put aside, there’d only be so many people to actually do the work. Money can only move real wealth around, not magic it into being. At best money can lubricate economic realignments, let productive systems get set up… but it can’t do that if you’re forced to spend it all on consumption. Prices just go up.
… but another reason I dislike natalism is that it’s another Ponzi “solution”. If your system can’t handle population contraction, or at least stability, then your physical arrangemenent can’t be “wound up”. Growth just sets up a bigger failure when you hit some real, physical limit. [1]
Such limits really do exist, and we don’t actually know where they are. In fact, we don’t even know if we’ve already passed them. We may not be sustainable right now. The climate’s looking pretty rickety, and it’s not the only thing, and nobody really knows the end state. Even after they pass tipping points, things that big take a long time to hit their new equilibria. Decades, and not just one or two decades. People who say tech or lifestyle changes will fix any of that, or just brush it off to assume that any new equilibrium will be tolerable, seem to be relatively long on talk and relatively short on substance. It might be a more realistic assumption that a major transition would at least fix your demographic imbalance by killing all the old people… but the way would happen would be… unpleasant. And not completely restricted to the old.
Anyway, my hope, if not my faith, is in the robots. And maybe anti-aging. Seriously, the whole demographic thing, and, if we’re incredibly lucky, maybe even much of the environmental thing, may be moot in 20 years.
If nothing else, paperclips don’t have a lot of needs and don’t care much about the climate.
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Not that anybody seems to know how to get stability or sustainability either.
A car horn is an emergency device, and a tricky one to use properly. It’s not something you should be using unless there’s a genuine safety issue. The horn basically tries to blow up the situation in the hope that the pieces will settle into a better configuration than what you have. It can easily startle somebody into doing the opposite of the right thing, or failing to recover from something they otherwise would have recovered from.
The only message a horn can send is “pay attention”. It can’t say to what, and in any situation where it’s actually likely to get used, there are probably going to be a lot of candidates. Not only that, but it draws instinctive attention to itself, and thus away from the real issue. You don’t keep honking, or even start honking, at somebody whose trunk is open. They’ll never figure it out.
It’s also annoying and disturbing to everybody around. Everywhere in a big city is dense enough that you’re going to disturb a lot of people if you get on that horn. Your having to wait at a light isn’t a sufficient excuse for that.
Blowing through red lights, or driving the wrong way on ramps, or the like, are, of course, serious safety issues worthy of being honked at, and the sort of thing where you have some chance the target will get the right message. However, the right answer for somebody who finds themselves creating such serious issues three times in a one hour trip is to get off the road and miss the birthday party. Then you actually learn what you’re doing before you get yourself into that kind of situation again.
Driving up an exit ramp should cause a total freakout in every fiber of your being, no matter how flustered you are. If it doesn’t, you’re not adequately trained and shouldn’t be there. Neither should a person who chooses to drive while flustered to the point of losing their skills. Arguably neither should a person who routinely loses track of when it’s their turn to go at a light.