Increased use of contraception (or some other way of having less children) would help with SO many things other than pensions (which it wouldn’t help with):
- Global warming – less cars, less consumers, less people needing housing.
- Starvation – if a species have more than 2 children surviving to sexual maturity per couple for a sustained period then eventually it will lead to a catastrophe. It’s basic maths. So as well as giving people food in countries where people are starving and also having 6 children if they can, we should try to change this.
- Other resources – less competition for resources generally.
- Pollution
- Quality of life – less people in the rat-race, more open spaces, less noise…
- Species loss
- Deforestation
So we might have a bit of a pension gap for a few years, but personally I think it would be worth it. Population growth, like economic growth is just not continuously sustainable.
I love the bit in the Al Gore movie (an inconvenient truth) where he mocks the marketing image of a pair of scales – the earth on one side and gold on the other. As though you could have gold without the earth. I think the same thing applies to the simplistic way of thinking about population growth in relation to economics.