[anonporridge]

Yep. This is the problem I've been zeroing in on as well.

Socialized retirement destroys most of the incentive to sacrifice your youth to grow and raise new people. Why sacrifice your youth and money being a parent when you can leech off the labor of other people's kids in retirement?

I think we'll need to eventually experiment with things that try to give some disproportionate benefit to people who have kids. e.g. everyone gets some minimal socialized retirement and healthcare, but your benefits increase above that baseline in proportion to how many children you raised. Maybe your benefits increase at 3+ kids and decrease with 0-1 kids.

[lazide]

In theory those benefits are already there in the form of social (and potentially economic) support from the kids.

The challenge comes if the kids hate you and refuse to acknowledge you - something which has been being encouraged more and more by western society, BTW.

Historically, people would secretly understand (yeah, they are an abusive alcoholic!) but call you a bad kid and tell you to suck it up and deal with it. Since otherwise they’d have to deal with it. Going no contact is increasingly normalized.

Probably why many societies, especially conservative ones, lean so heavily on filial piety type concepts and frown on people cutting off their parents. especially when those parents are a burden or huge pain in the ass to those around them. Like Chinese mother-in-laws.

I can’t imagine that proposal going over well with the LGBTQ contingent either - which near as I can tell gets a lot of the angst from conservatives precisely because they’re ’having fun’ by opting out of the system and doing what they want instead of ‘comply or die’ like the rest.