…children were social security. Just recently the mother of a friend who is gainfully employed in the Philippines , was a former undersecretary of natural resources who owns a condo and an expensive car lamented that her son had no children. “Who will take care of you in your old age?” she asked. Children were security.

With the advent of the welfare state or its equivalence in pensions, a lot of the incentive to have children went away…

yes, and people make the mistake of thinking money is a thing. Especially a thing they can save up and spend in the future. But it’s not a thing, it’s a measurment. You can’t really save dollars any more than you can save inches or degrees Celsius. All you really have is some claim on future goods and services, but the money doesn’t automatically cause those goods and services to exist.

An 80 year old with a leaky roof needs a 25 year old to go up there and fix it. Doesn’t matter how much money they saved up, if they didn’t have kids, they didn’t help to supply the thing most needed – 25 year old grandsons. Maybe they can trade some horded dollars for the temporary attention of someone else’s grandson, but that roofer is going to be able to charge hefty rates because he’s a scarce commodity.

So, yet another way in which prosperity messed us up. We had lots of goods and services to measure with our dollars, and confused the dollars with the goods and services we were measuring. Lost sight of how those goods and services came to be in the first place. It’s like the old joke about the city kid who thinks the answer to “where does corn come from?” is “the Supermarket.” Where does future prosperity come from? It doesn’t come from 401k accounts. It sure doesn’t come from Social Security, or from a pension plan administered by the Fraternal Brotherhood of Picket Sign Wavers. It comes from productive grandkids working at productive jobs.