Not only pensions. Individuals cannot save any kind of money for retirement on their own if there will be no one to give to in exchange for services after retirement.
We cannot save without children, and the only answer is more automation, or just tough it out until the hump is past and we can have a more stable population. Toughing it out is not easy: young people put off having children or avoid it altogether if they feel they can't afford it. Of course, young people today don't have to deal with the privations of yesteryear -- they have no idea, but no matter, they won't have children if it feels too difficult.
> young people put off having children or avoid it altogether if they feel they can't afford it.
Well, people describe their behavior that way, and it may be true to an extent over very short timescales (like a short recession), but economic development empirically leads to decreased population growth overall; people don't have more kids because they are prosperous and less because they are not, but the reverse.
That's the general arc, yes, but I think for Europe the specific effect lately has been the opposite. Perhaps it's part of the same effect, just a generalization.
Economic growth ->
longer life expectancy / lower child mortality ->
population boom ->
people figure this out ->
baby bust ->
??? ->
stable population.
We're in the ??? part, and we may overshoot both sides of equilibrium for a long time for all I know. My sense is very much that fertility rates below replacement rate is due to young people feeling incapable of affording child rearing.
I'm curious if any modeling has been done around 1 vs. 2 working-parent households in developed countries, in relation to population growth. Would we really be having a problem with "natives" not having kids if a single parent could work full time for a (very) comfortable lifestyle as it was just 40 years ago?
It seems to me there is at least a correlation around the time a 2 parent household more or less became a requirement for the middle class to simply survive and when it became such a burden to raise a child. Since everyone is now more or less competing with 2x dollars for the same amount of fixed cost "stuff" (housing, education, healthcare, etc.) prices for those things rose substantially faster than inflation.
Then you add in the second or third highest cost a dual-income family has (child care) that didn't really exist 40 years ago.... It seems at least obvious on it's face that this was going to happen. We removed any and all slack from our family lives, and wonder why we can't seem to get ahead when we have multiple decades of income hyper-planned in advance.
I also think car culture and suburbification of many western countries also heavily contributed - at the same time we were forcing parents to both work outside the home, we also decided it wasn't cool to live near extended family or within a close-knit multi-generational community. Thus making the need for child care even more acute.
I'm not entirely sure the point I'm making really - just that it seems so obvious. This outcome was practically written in stone on the policies (fiscal, social, and energy) western governments put in place since WWII.
We cannot save without children, and the only answer is more automation, or just tough it out until the hump is past and we can have a more stable population. Toughing it out is not easy: young people put off having children or avoid it altogether if they feel they can't afford it. Of course, young people today don't have to deal with the privations of yesteryear -- they have no idea, but no matter, they won't have children if it feels too difficult.