As pension funds - run for the incontinent by the incompetent - find themselves in terminal decline, pre-pensioners are apt to wonder how they will be supported in their golden years. We can't all be like Gordon 'Greedy' Brown whose pension fund currently stands at around £1.9m (1), worth about £120000 ($250000) a year at today's rates.
When The Impressionist started gainful employment more than a few years ago, a kindly gentleman from the administrative department took him aside and quietly reminded him that, even though it didn't seem like it at the time, putting a bit aside each week for a pension was prudent and I'd be grateful some day. Sadly, it still isn't clear that this was good advice, as pension pots seem to fall very quickly when the stock market is bearish but rise very slowly when it's bullish. Economists call this sort of thing
hysteresis; you and I call it a
rip-off.
Nowadays, the species
kindly administrator is extinct and it's quite difficult to get good advice on what to do with any tiny excess of income over expenditure. Most people seem to ignore the question altogether and spend money they don't have on stuff they don't need.
So welcome back the Unlimited Resource Foundation (URF), a group dedicated to the principle that the Earth's resources are limitless and that all we need to do is breed more humans to earn the wealth to keep us in the lifestyle which we think we deserve. The idea is that your own (and everyone else's) children will keep you in your old age when your pension fund dries up, which is to say has been used to feed the fund manager's floozie's fashion fetish.
Wait a minute! Haven't I heard this somewhere before? The Victorians thought along similar lines - the result was a 50 percent death rate for the children of farmers, labourers, artisans and others like them (2).
The problem for the URF is that we are already pushing the limits of the Earth's resources. The Victorians thought their offspring would dig them out of poverty, almost literally. In fact, advances in industrial and medical technologies liberated us from destitution but replaced the labour driven economy with the energy-driven economy that we're all familiar with. It has been our wasteful use of energy that has led to our current woes.
The very last thing that the we need now is more mouths to feed, more people to transport inefficiently, more CO2 emissions. We can breed our way only into swift oblivion.
But will I have enough for booze, ciggies, foreign holidays, drugs, ...?
Of course.
References
(1)
'Greedy's' Pension Pot
(2)
Mitchell, Sally. Victorian Britain Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing, 1988.