A large concern regarding the demographic change of Germany is the decreasing working population. The consequence is, that as a larger proportion of the population is within pension or in other form needs social security to survive the working population will have to work more and pay higher contributions in order to support the previous generations. An extreme but simple example: 2 family with each just one child. The two children become a family of their own and have to take care of 4 elderly. Classical sandwich generation, if they end up having kids as well.
In a democracy this is amplified, because the elderly vote for parties that raise pensions. The old eat the young and the young can't do anything about it. Peaceful protests will not change the course, when you are democratically a minority.
Recently I have been wondering why now fewer couples decide to have children and what implications it has on their life. After some research I found that the reason was simply the loss of lifestyle options. While the Grman government pays a significant part of the cost of having children (Kindergeld), the opportunity cost, the time required to spend raising the kids and the additional financial burden is quite significant. For many this will not lead to poverty, but you still have to sacrifice flexbility, time and purchasing power.
Given that childless people have significant financial advantages, yet receive largely the same or even higher pensions than parents, this led to the question:
Are childless people freeriders?
Turns out I am not the only one asking this question and an economist named Hans-Werner Sinn has even written an article about it. After reposting the article on reddit it quickly became apparent that this deeply offends people.
The thing is pension is an insurance against childlessness. Yet nowadays people take advantage of this insurance as a lifestyle choice. While the first post I made was quite provocative and generalized a bit too much, most of criticism seemed like denial. People didn't want to believe that they are actually free riding. So much so that most didn't even bother reading the article before protesting.
So I took a closer look at the criticism and made another post on medium where I dive into the different arguments in detail. The reponse on reddit has been just as horrendous as the first. I think the natalism community has more childfree propagandists in there than the name of the community suggests.
A good question among the critiques was: Why am I a freerider if I pay pension? Don't I pay pension to get pension myself? It is true, that ones own pension increases based on how much one paid into it during their lifetime. However turns out that the pension was actually paid only for the previous generation ("Umlageverfahren"). The simple reality is, that if noone has children, then noone will have pension, because there is noone there to provide the services one needs to survive. The money would essentially be useless. Also called the island paradox.
The work to raise children is pushed to parents, yet the burden to provide the work for those that decide to stay childless is put on the children of those parents. In a sense it is the attitude 'let the others make children and let their children pay my pension'.
This is not just a personal choice either. By demanding pension and voting for pension raises these people effectively make the life of others harder. This is no longer personal.
People try to convince others or themselves why it is better not to have any children. What I find infuriating is how they in the process they frame parents as the free riders or egoistical. It's just pure egoism under a facade of being less resource heavy.
Posts from the natalism
community on Reddit