This is my day to be flabbergasted.

Repeat after me, children: "Correlation does not imply causation."

And never send your children to a college that is stupid enough to broadcast the fact that their faculty doesn't understand that very basic truth.

A Reformed Social Security Can Help Families and Economic Growth

Release date: Thursday, March 10, 2005
Contact: John Della Contrada, [email protected]
Phone: 716-645-5000 ext 1409
Fax: 716-645-3765

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Policymakers and citizens pondering the merits of Social Security reform should consider new evidence showing that "social security" adversely affects decisions to marry and have children.

A new University at Buffalo study, examining the experience of 57 countries over a 32-year period, concludes that in the U.S. and other countries where social security is instituted as a defined-benefits, pay-as-you-go system, marriage and fertility rates fell sharply over time -- partly as a result of social security itself.

Those declines were not found in countries utilizing government-managed personal savings accounts or privatized pension funds as a basis of their social security system.

The study, led by renowned economist Isaac Ehrlich, chair of the UB Department of Economics, also supports previous research showing that pay-as-you-go social security has contributed to a slowdown in the rates of savings and economic growth.

"Current Social Security systems in the U.S. and elsewhere have some unintended consequences, which include disincentives to form families and have children," explains Ehrlich, who also is Melvin H. Baker Professor of American Enterprise in UB School of Management.