alt Hacker News> maybe you don't give a crap if today's teenagers will inhabit a horrific world with twice as many old people as society can afford to support
I wouldn't say that a lower population needs to result in a horrific world.
I assume standards of living would change. What other choice is there, given the change in the ratio of workers to retirees? Not everyone could afford a big house of their own, a car, and tech toys and other possessions, but we are productive enough as a society to feed, cloth and shelter everyone, including a bunch of retired people. We could still afford the really important benifits of modernity. And we keep getting more productive, finding easier ways to do more, so who knows?
The Ahmish wouldn't describe a simplier way of life as as horrific. Nor people born a hundred years ago. Nor people living like that in many countries today. Change society like that and, who knows, young people might be more open to having kids again.
Why do you think things would end up being horrific?
The Amish have tons of kids and are one of the fastest growing groups you could think of. It's because of this high birth rate that they're easily able to care for their elders, even though they are IIRC legally allowed to opt out of Social Security.
Having a very inverted population pyramid, where the old vastly outnumber the working age, and the working age outnumber the children, isn't something that would be a minor inconvenience. Our economic system will collapse because it takes a lot of people creating value to pay for the needs of the elderly (remember, there isn't some big trust fund set aside for them -- it's only through the wages of the currently-working that we can pay the benefits for them, and if I'm not mistaken, public pensions in other Western countries are exactly the same in that way). And setting aside the money abstraction, which is just how we organize things, the elderly need a lot of medical care and they consume food, water, need housing to live in, and they can't contribute much to the work of making those things. So they need there to be enough younger, working people that there's a big surplus of stuff not needed to keep the young fed, clothed, and housed, and a surplus of young people to work to take care of them.
I'm not one who insists on some unsustainable growth or even any growth at all. A 0 growth rate would be fine. But the nihilism in the West (coupled with too many economic incentives to not have kids) that has killed off our birthrate is going to make the decline in living standards that's been seen between the boomers and our generation (you know, all those think pieces about the "Death of the American Dream") look like a joke. And economic collapse doesn't mean we just shift to living like the Amish. It looks more like Haiti.