For people my age, full social security benefits are not available until age 67. The de facto retirement age in the U.S. is 67 now.

“In the US (which is certainly not an example of good policy), the retirement age for baby boomers was raised in the mid 1980s when none of them cared a bit about retirement, and were not looking. Now people are surprised that it is not 65 when they get there.”

Source: Ageing planet: the new demographic timebomb | Population | The Guardian

As a youngster, I mowed the lawn of a guy who was 100 years old. He was one of the oldest living recipients of Social Security, having retired just after the law was passed in 1935. I am not kidding. He paid almost nothing into Social Security but went on to collect over 35 years of benefits!

The problem is that the fertility rate has fallen well below 2.1 in most countries – this means our population is no longer steady state but will eventually decline. That may be a good thing but it also causes many challenges as the average age of the population rises, with fewer young people to support those who are elderly (as say, health care or construction workers to fix stuff). Further, our economic systems have long relied on an always increasing population to create economic growth. (I’ve proposed that WEF’s proposed “rental society” might be an alternative solution that generates on going revenue without necessarily producing more things.)

The Guardian propaganda rag, of course, favors a socialist solution to the fewer young people problem though their idea is already known to not work – they propose more childcare benefit programs.

“We do know that if you want to raise the fertility rate from say 1.3 up to 1.8 [children per woman], which is the difference between, say, Greece and Scandinavian countries, if you provide good-quality childcare, women will take that leap and have that second or third child,” Harper said.

Except that at 1.8, we are still shrinking. In fact, the Scandinavian utopias have had generous childcare benefit programs for years – and it’s made no difference. All the countries that have tried this have had no success in changing the fertility rate over time.

The bigger issue, as Peter Zeihan pointed out, is that in agricultural settings, having more kids produces free labor. In an urban environment, having more kids means far more expenses for housing, health care, food, clothing and much more. “Free childcare” doesn’t solve those problems.

It is good that The Guardian propaganda rag notices the population demographic issue and the future global population decline. Of course, as Paul Ehrlich worshippers, they end it with their usual doom and gloom “in a world facing climate catastrophe and worrying fall in biodiversity” – The Guardian remains stuck on stupid.

(Reminder – The Guardian invented the term “climatecrisis”- it’s now a single compound word – you can’t say climate without adding “crisis”- they evangelized climatecrisis to be adopted by media propagandists globally. The words “climate crisis” had never appeared in IPCC documents when The Guardian made it up.)

Coldstreams