Which flies in the face of population growth and is also sociologically injust in the long term since it's rich people who are trending towards having more children (and also the privileged in more subtle ways:
The source in that article doesn't show a complete reversal of the old trend yet but bear in mind that I think the level of privilege of parents compared to non-parents will be systematically underestimated because we're looking at income (which will both be reduced by having children, and I'm guessing being income-oriented correlates negatively with /wanting/ children so they've probably converted their privilege into other forms). They will also on average have all the forms of privilege which makes you an attractive partner with the time to have kids: looks, background of wealth, easy job.
I think we should very clearly distinguish things that benefit primarily children=everyone, and parents=the privileged.
For example, education directly benefits children and society but time off and tax breaks for parents is more of a benefit to them, the already privileged.
Someone will probably post a reply that we "need" children for pensions but that's kind of a misconception. You can run a pension system where each generation puts money into a pot and gets it back later, the truth is just that we've chosen not to. Basically if there's ever a pot of money government will find a way to spend it, so now we have this weird system where instead of each generation's pensions being self-contained they're offset by one generation. It's a political problem and bad choices rather than some rule of nature.
I think the problem with the pension system you propose is that money is not actually real.
The money will have to be exchanged for goods (which usually don't store that long, so need to be produced fresh) and services (which don't store at all). If each generation wants to stop working the next generation needs to produces these things.
I don't think that's true, it's true that "money is not real", and will need to be exchanged for services.
But a lot of the expenses each generation has are for example housing, food, cars. So sure, that method doesn't hedge against the price of services or fluctuations in whatever you invest the money in, but neither does the current system. Current system is exposed to inflation, FX etc too. It does at least hedge against [working vs retirement age] population which is one which definitely varies. Basically the current system is going to screw my generation (in the UK) because we're paying off our parent's triple-locked gold-plated pensions, which we are definitely not going to receive. So we'll be the one that pays for ending the offset.
https://medium.com/makingofamillionaire/rich-families-are-ha...
The source in that article doesn't show a complete reversal of the old trend yet but bear in mind that I think the level of privilege of parents compared to non-parents will be systematically underestimated because we're looking at income (which will both be reduced by having children, and I'm guessing being income-oriented correlates negatively with /wanting/ children so they've probably converted their privilege into other forms). They will also on average have all the forms of privilege which makes you an attractive partner with the time to have kids: looks, background of wealth, easy job.
I think we should very clearly distinguish things that benefit primarily children=everyone, and parents=the privileged.
For example, education directly benefits children and society but time off and tax breaks for parents is more of a benefit to them, the already privileged.
Someone will probably post a reply that we "need" children for pensions but that's kind of a misconception. You can run a pension system where each generation puts money into a pot and gets it back later, the truth is just that we've chosen not to. Basically if there's ever a pot of money government will find a way to spend it, so now we have this weird system where instead of each generation's pensions being self-contained they're offset by one generation. It's a political problem and bad choices rather than some rule of nature.