Everybody needs orthodonture! That includes adults, children, and your pets if Congresscritters are persuaded (bribed) to compassionately extend health insurance safety nets. Juvenile dental caries coincidentally disappeared as tap water supplies across America were doped with 1-3 parts-per-million fluoride. (Cavities lustily returned from drinking unfluoridated bottled water.)
Adult root caries yielded to fluoridated toothpastes, mouthwashes, and flossing. Gum disease is on the run (use Colgate non-whitening toothpaste instead of Crest). DDSs can scarcely extend investment portfolios with sealing, whitening, bonding, cleaning; and servicing adolescent mouths rotted by Ritalin and Adderall (side effect, and a splendid dental anticipation). The sporadic root canal job is heaven's gift. Is the American Dental Association a huge if covert supporter of junior ice hockey?
Kids with caring (paranoid middle class) parents have braces, sophisticated (insecure) adults have braces. America will never be heir to Big Book of British Smiles horrors! An avalanche of extracted healthy bicuspids and wisdom teeth gorge landfills as medical waste. Recycle them as cufflinks or carve them into brooches. Teeth are a great Satan. Their growth traps patterns of isotopic anomalies tracing nuclear powerplant effluent. Government hates retained evidence.
What is orthodonture? Push come to shove, it is rearranging teeth to fit their jaws and themselves fit together. Bone is amenable to pressure erosion (via osteoclasts) and regrowth (via osteoblasts). Winding a rubber band about two divergent front teeth will bring them into registration nice as you please, with patience. More likely the tensioned rubber will slide up the teeth into the periosteum and proceed to ablate tissue down to the root tips, severing the teeth - so sorry - hence braces.
Orthodonture begins by extracting four healthy bicuspids and cutting out four unhatched wisdom teeth, endowing proximate reimbursement and impressing upon parents the value their money is acquiring. Doc then affixes brackets, strings wires, and torques the braces until tears pour down the patient's face. "See you next week. Wear your ugly retainer." The result can be a white picket fence flossable with pipe cleaners, or it might be a beautiful perfect smile in a face deformed flat as an infantryman's feet. Look at your chums' engineered smiles. Were areas south of their noses smashed planar by 2x4s? Perhaps.
Modern jaws are often nowhere near large enough to accommodate all 32 supplied teeth, nor should they be. Deciduous teeth kept a baby going until its face grew to full size, to be followed by permanent teeth. By late teens or early twenties molars were worn and rotted away, making room for wisdom teeth. By your 30s your kids were self-sufficient, your gums were empty, and you died. Evolution has no ambitions for those too old to reproduce.
My mother at 75 had naught but gums remaining, courtesy of New York City dentistry and water naturally free of fluoride. My mother-in-law died at 87 and still retained *all* of her teeth, having benefited from doctors spawned by the University of Southern California School of Dentistry. When brute force will not provide sufficient cashflow to skim against the usual IRS demands, the last resort versus death is expertise (at least for the boys. Pretty girls exhibit neoteny - juvenile attributes - which includes weak chins and flat mouths with full lips).
What would rational orthodonture entail? Leave the bicuspids, maybe lose the first molars. Encourage the jaw to grow rather than atrophy, which allows the wisdom teeth to achieve full size and fit naturally. Minimally reconstruct the bite to fit the teeth but acquiesce to a residual convex face. People would again look like people. Kids might be in braces for as little as six months after a year or so of modest jaw reshaping. It would be pecuniary dental disaster.
Nobody wears metal braces anymore. Tiny sintered white sapphire brackets are almost invisible against teeth when glued on. Thin nitinol (nickel-titanium) shape-memory alloy wires complete the assembly. The high tech route is almost invisible and costs like sin, which is fair. If you are a dentist it is fantastic! That said brackets' glue does not know when to quit is trouble. They are typically chipped off the surface of the tooth with a mallet and chisel, residue being polished of with a diamond grindstone. Sometimes the tooth goes with the bracket, the remaining stub being given a root canal and capped. Look up "iatrogenic" and "nosocomial." There will be consumer resistance against gluing $10,000 into a mouth then chipping it out a half-year later. Let the kid get some wear out of his braces. Besides, his face is not flat yet.