World population implosion?

Public Interest, Fall, 1997 by Nicholas Eberstadt

As an abstract conjecture, it is possible that societies under such circumstances could keep their pre-existing Social Security systems intact - if they were willing to foreswear publicly financing practically anything else and to sacrifice a good measure of future economic growth as well. But free electorates today would never opt willingly for such a choice, and it seems highly unlikely that they would do so tomorrow. Under the demographic constraints envisioned in the UN's "low variant" projections, the mounting pressures would likely generate political momentum for a transition to an actuarially viable pension system.

One aspect of such a restructuring would likely be later general retirement ages, as populations made greater productive use of their extended active life spans. No less significant, such a restructuring would almost necessarily presuppose a change from pay-as-you-go financing to self-financing of retirement benefits by individuals over the course of their own lives. Though such a change could involve a full privatization of social insurance, it is also possible to imagine the reformed pension systems operating under the aegis of government. Even under government supervision, however, it is hard to see how self-financed pensions (which explicitly acknowledge the beneficiary's creation of his or her retirement account) could lend themselves as readily to redistributive or other non-market objectives as pay-as-you-go arrangements have done. Declining population growth thus might not suppress the appetite of the state, but it might weil check the voting public's willingness to feed it.

From blood ties to elective affinities?

Nearly 40 years ago, Jean Fourastie, the French sociologist, wrote a vivid and penetrating essay on how family and social life changes under the influence of the modern decline in mortality. The revolution in survival chances, he asserted, had transformed marriage from a binding but temporary contract to a much lengthier, and possibly more tenuous, commitment; it had reduced old age from an almost mystical status to a common and often pitiable physical condition; and it had all but banished the procession of death and suffering that had previously conditioned all family life. Fourastie also noted that the modern revolution in mortality schedules had totally altered the ordinary person's chances of participating in "intellectual life" (which he took to begin at age 12) and "independent life" (which commenced, in his view, around age 20). The scope for "creative intellectual life," he observed, had been hugely expanded by improvements in survival chances: By his calculations, modern man could expect to experience between three and six times as many years of life in his forties and fifties (which Fourastie designated the peak period of creativity) as the "traditional man" of the seventeenth century. (This vast extension of "creative intellectual life," I would add, may have contributed to modern economic growth, which has been so strongly driven by applied advances in knowledge.)