I watched the movie Children of Men on Scandinavian Netflix and it was really good. The general theme of the movie is that unexplained infertility causes the collapse of civilization and only Great Britain has managed to maintain a government and not fall into anarchy, thus causing illegal immigrants to try to sneak in there (In the real world, I think it would be the other way around). I know people always say, “Well, children are the future!” but this movie really hammered that fact home. If you have kids or have a friend who does, you’re somewhat invested in the future. If no one has kids, humanity has no future. What’s the sense in saving for a rainy day if there’s not going to be anyone down the line to inherit?
Nowadays Americans don’t save much. We save more than we did in 2006, when we had a negative savings rate, but we still aren’t saving a lot. Meanwhile, birth rates around the world have plummeted to barely or just below replacement levels and experts have predicted a large population crunch. The US always brags that we won’t have that problem because we can replenish our labor force with immigrants. Not so easy if there aren’t people immigrating. People are having fewer kids. Part of this is a consumption choice: children are a consumer good. We can have kids, or we can have an Ipad. After struggling to get Beta to put her diaper on before bed, my husband commented that he can definitely understand why people are choosing to consume Ipads instead of kids because kids are a pain in the ass. You don’t have to potty train your Ipad. It doesn’t wake you up in the middle of the night or throw fits at the mall.
But at the same, mankind as a whole has decided to invest less in the future and more in today. We’re not saving the money we’re not spending on our kids on the kids we’re not having, we’re consuming it on alternate products. Has the investment value of kids gone down? What is the actual investment worth of a child versus a stock or real estate? How would you even measure such a thing.
But the movie did leave a lasting impression that the inability to have kids definitely results in everyone’s time preference becoming a lot higher.
German, Finnish and Chickens 