Social Security & the Free Rider Problem
26th February 2025
There is a slowly unfolding global catastrophe being driven by two factors:
Public pensions
Birth controlThe second provides unfettered access to one of our core pleasures without all the pesky little side effects (or at least the ones that crawl and ask for your car keys). The second ensures that other peoples’ pesky little side effects — which are quite expensive and time-consuming, by the way — will pay for your old age.
The result?
A massive free rider problem — the largest in human history. Humanity is about to get a lot older, and as we’ve removed the need to rely on our own offspring, there suddenly aren’t enough offspring. This has an impact not only on public pensions but on private savings as well. If there aren’t enough producers, then you will see (and are seeing) long-term inflation as labor becomes more and more expensive and rare.