I wish I had a solution. As an educated woman, why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career? Most research indicates that child support programs tend to just support people that already planned to have children. As someone about to be a first time parent, I would love more support in the US. But it’s hard to imagine a world where you take on a lifelong responsibility for, say, an extra $2k (or even $20k) being handed to you by the government.
This contains the answer: we aren’t paying enough.
Kids used to confer private, excludable benefit through their labour. Without child labour, their economic value is no longer exclusive to their parents. This transforms children, economically, from a private good to a common resource. Our low birth rates are a tragedy of a commons. A known problem with a known solution.
If we want a higher birth rate, we should have a massive child tax credit. One that can rival the rising cost and opportunity cost of childrearing.
At some point, would-be parents at the margin decide they don't need a job to attain economic security.
This is basically a way of doing price discovery on the "market rate" of parenthood. Currently we're under-paying and getting the predictable outcome, and we're all out of ideas.
(In fact, I think this should basically be the solution to all labor shortages, of which parenting is just one example. The wage should increase until the market rate is found, even if that wage is much higher than people say it "should be").
I was reflecting, since becoming a parent, that there are basically two lenses with which to view the economics of parenting. You can children in terms of their cost and benefits in monetary terms, where money is the end and children are the means to that. Or you can view money as the means to support and provide for children, with raising them as the ultimate end goal. And people with the former worldview will most likely never have children, and if they do probably will not make good parents. Parenting is a 24/7 commitment for at least 18 years. It fundamentally changes the course of your life. And children also need to believe that they are the most important thing in their parents' lives, which is hard to do, by definition, when the most important thing is money.
I sit here trying to get some rest after having 5 days of rotating sick kids. When the baby was sick, he would wake up literally every hour; last night was the first in 5 days where I had any sleep stretch longer than an hour. (This also pales in comparison with the newborn phase, which is like this but lasts for about 4 months.) How much would you have to get paid to go without sleep for months on end? I was at a party a few months ago where someone asked "How many of you have caught vomit in your hands?" Every single parent raised their hand while every single non-parent looked on disgusted. How much would you have to get paid to catch vomit? I've been reliably sick about twice a week every winter for the last 7 years. How much would you pay to let a little germ-factory infect you all the time? (When governments have done medical experiments on this basis, it's been called abusive.)
When you have a realistic picture of what parenting actually entails, it starts to look a lot more like the economics of pricelessness [1]. There is usually no price at which people will be willing to compromise everything you give up by being a parent (usually things like liberty, experiences, security, peace) for parenthood if you don't want it. And conversely, there is usually no price at which people will give up the experience of parenthood for more money, if that's what they really want.
[1] https://ribbonfarm.com/2014/08/12/the-economics-of-priceless...
But since you mention the Nordic countries, it's worth driving home just how high the amounts are:
In Norway it's 100% of pay for up to 49 weeks or 61 weeks at 80% of pay, capped at ~$111k (based on a your salary, capped to "6G" - 6x the national insurance base rate)[1].
So not even up to $111k is enough to convince enough women to have more children to maintain replacement rates (and I don't blame them).
And this is in addition to e.g. legally mandated right to full-time nursery places with the fee cap dropped to a maximum of ~$130/month as of last year.
When people think money will be enough, they need to realise just how much money some countries have tried throwing at parents without getting back above replacement...
[1] in Norwegian: https://www.nav.no/foreldrepenger
When you add those who don't want kids or can't have them for other reasons - not straight, asexual, emotional trauma, physically unable, others - getting to parity is even harder.
It's not stress. For a lot of history life was far more challenging, uncertain, and dangerous than life today.
Humans kept reproducing, aggressively enough to compensate for infant mortality, wars, and pandemics.
The big change is that the primary role of women doesn't have to be motherhood, where for most of recent-ish history it was.
I'm not saying a return to that is desirable. But I am pointing out that the causes of low birth rates aren't mysterious.
Women who do choose motherhood are more likely to have kids younger.
But if given a choice, a significant proportion of women will either not choose motherhood at all, or will delay it significantly, which lowers fertility and raises infant mortality.
It doesn't need to be a majority of women. A fairly small percentage is enough to shift the numbers.
Those people often don't even consider the time cost either. Which makes sense, if reason A is sufficient to say 'no' then why continue dwelling on other reasons? But even if there was more money and they were willing to not spend it on themselves, they now need to accept giving up roughly 90% of their non sleep/work time to someone else as well. That's not giving away something new you didn't have, that's giving up something you've been using and are accustomed to having.
What is the lifetime private cost of raising a child in Norway? The $111k sounds like it's just offsetting the opportunity cost of birth, not the opportunity cost nor direct costs of raising a kid.
In my (much poorer than Norway) country we have that, and also women can't be fired for that duration and I think two years more and employer can't refuse then remote work if it's technically possible and parents get some money directly (~around 1/10 of average monthly salary per month is automatic, but also there are other programs for example for women who decide to return to work). And, as a young parent, this is still nowhere near the cost of takes to actually raise a child.
On the other hand, all those programs are still not enough to raise number of children significantly, so your main point stands.
I say crank up the numbers then. Give them a bigger tax credit too. Hold it long enough for societal expectations to slowly adjust.
In order to pay for pensions, the government borrows money from young, working adults. This is effectively what happens in pay-as-you-go public pension systems (which is most of them, to my knowledge, apart from the US, I'm not 100% sure how pensions work in the US). The money you put in actually goes to pay for another person, with the government guaranteeing that they will do the same for you.
If the percentage of retired people increases, the percentage of working adults naturally decreases. Eventually, you'll hit a turning point where the government can no longer borrow from working adults. The government is now in a debt crisis and has to loan money from banks or foreign investors at a significantly higher interest rate, which becomes even more unsustainable if the percentage of retired people increases even more.
This is what is happening in e.g. South Korea and Japan. There are too many old people, and too few working adults. This is caused ny low birth rates over a long period of time.
When you have a working age child in Germany the child's pension payments are added to a common pool that anyone, including the childless can draw from. You might argue that people have contributed their own payments to their pension, but this only works if most people have children of their own. The way the pension system is set up rewards free riders and discourages parental investment from both father and mother including step parents. One of the biggest reasons there is a single mother epidemic is that there is only a biological incentive to reproduce and no economic incentive to raise children. This means as a man you are better off sowing your oats since that maximizes the biological incentives and minimizes economic costs. Due to the defective pension system there is a strong incentive to avoid child support payments since they do not contribute to the pension of the father even though this should be a logical consequence. Hence you see extreme cases e.g. fathers prefer go to prison to avoid paying rather than work and have everything taken.
Women have to abandon their careers to take care of children which represent a pure economic loss to them, especiallyin the form of power pension contributios, when in reality the future pension contributions of their childre. are what makes their pension possible in the first place. The pension system considers their essential reproductive labor to be worthless despite it being an existential concern for the functioning of the pension system. No wonder you have women complain about gender pay gaps and the double burden of work and child care and female pensioners living in poverty.
Then there is the whole step fathers thing. Being a step father sucks, but men have a choice here, so they obviously decide to avoid single mothers in face of the irrationality of the pension system. If step fathers could gain a higher pension for raising step sons and step daughters, then the economic incentives would reduce single parenthood through more step fathers or through more parental involvement of the biological father who will obviously lose out on his pension due to absenteeism.
The ideal pension system allows parents to receive a portion of their children's pension contributions as their own contribution. This means there has to be a free for all pool and a parents only pool. If you are childless you will get a pension, albeit a lower one. If you have many children, your pension will be higher if they are economically successful.
Ultimate purpose of any biological entity is to survive and reproduce. I don't see the logic in exempting humans from this reality. People with these luxury beliefs will get culled by nature in couple generations anyway, so at least nature will sort this out over time. People who prioritize continuity will inherit the future.
You as a man will only live for ~70 years(~75 if you are a woman) no matter how you eager for continuity.
It is by no means an issue just in the West.
You're right the situation is different with respect to Nigeria, but the birth rates are also falling in all of the remaining countries. Nigeria's is still high but also falling.
I mean that's the point. We don't want people who have no interest in being parents to become parents for a paycheck. What we want is for people to have the financial freedom to live as they wish to live. In the US 46% of parents of young children report they have fewer children than they'd like due to financial constraints, and 23% of gen-Z report financial concerns as a primary motivator for not having kids. We don't need to go from 0 to 2.3, we need to go from 1.6 to 2.1. That extra half child is gonna come from tipping the scale for someone who is already on the fence, not paying people to be incubators.
Most people don’t see a problem with not reproducing because 1. “It’s not their responsibility to save society” and 2. The effects on the pension system are long-term. It’s like eating burgers and smoking every day, you don’t see the fatality of your decision right away.
Up until very recently, and especially in Africa, huge amounts of effort went into reducing birth rate to avoid locally-Malthusian situations with high child death rates and occasional famines.
Governments around the world would benefit their society by investing in family planning, family support (esp. child care) to enable parents to work and provide for their family.
An educated and healthy populace (from infant to old age) benefits everyone.
The more educated/developed a nation, the lesser their birth rate is going to be.
I understand the "shoulds" but that's not what the data suggests.
In essence, we can't have the pie and at the same time eat it.
The most useful thing education does for children is reduce child-mortality rate.[1]
Sources: https://raphael-godefroy.github.io/pdfs/mali_final.pdf
How are you defining "improve"? Is it "increase" or "decrease"?
I feel that informing males beforehand about the responsibilities of fatherhood would decrease the birth rate. Maybe you consider that an improvement? Many people in this thread consider increasing the birth rate an improvement.
This will only reduce birth rates. I have two kids and it's hard. I would still have them if I knew just how hard it would be (especially during winter, when everyone is sick).
There are also many men that just don't care if they have a child, what it does to a woman's body. This won't change with more education.
If it reduces birth rates, that's not due to education alone. That's due to a lack of investment by governments to support those families.
You should know this with two kids. Any help is better than no help. Women want to work. Women want to go to school. That's what this topic is about.
I thought they were built for that. For tens of thousands of years women had on average 7 children or more, it looks like the process is very reliable. These days birth-giving mortality is very close to zero, also post-birth care is quite good, so we are in a better place than ever and still concerned?
https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/1t6akt4/id...
Just because women used to birth 7 kids with high morbidity and mortality rates does not mean they wanted to.
Mortality aside, pregnancy is incredibly hard on the human body. Demineralized bones, anemia, vaginal scarring and fistulas, etc etc. Whole lot of stuff can wreck your body without killing you.
Also reliable and affordable DNA testing makes much easier collecting pensions from fathers that before would just vanish, or outright deny paternity. An underrated breakthrough in women and children rights enforcement.
Societally, almost everyone would argue we shouldn't encourage women to have kids that young.
Women get poorer in divorce. They report higher hapiness after divorce and tend to stay single longer. And also, women file for divorce more often.
>I think a stable fertility rate AND educated girls are simultaneously possible all around the world
i.e countries with a very high education attainment rate or high ranking in the human development index coupled with a high fertility rate? There was HackerNews discussion a while back that alluded to the fact the more developed a country becomes the lower the fertility rate.
Because its suggested that solutions like affordable housing, more free time, child care may help in a few situations but largely don't bump the fertility rates.
Developed countries are currently getting by on their immigration rates but as the rest of the world becomes more developed this isn't a lasting solution.
Because humans are so numerous even if we hit 1.0 rates (ie population halves each generation) we've got a long time before that's a pressing issue.
If someone things the population on the planet is too big, then plan for a reduction that is manageable and change the pay-as-you-go pension system that exists in most of the world, that is based on working age people paying the pension for retirees. Even at replacement rate the pension systems will collapse, they were built in a time when the average number of children per woman was around 7 and the age of retirement was higher than average life expectation.
No, the children are fine in this scenario, there are even proportionally fewer than now and so there are any number of available carers.
The elderly are screwed. But, that seems OK?
> If someone things the population on the planet is too big,
This isn't a centrally planned thing, it's just an exaggeration of the observable reality. On the whole humans who could carry a baby to term but understand exactly what's involved are not keen and if they're willing to do it once or twice draw the line there. The assumption that we're just not compensating them financially enough to reproduce more is let's say, not well supported by available evidence.
I think we should choose to be entirely OK with that until there's risk of a real population bottleneck, e.g. 1000x fewer people -- in the expectation that conditions change and it might sort itself out without action.
Everyday we prove it slightly more. To exhaust the nutrients in all the mud in the world would take a lot more farming, but we thought that ip4 addresses would never run out either, so maybe it will happen.
This isn't a given. This is due to the continuous growth cycle without effort made towards long term stability. A pyramid scheme will fall apart if they can no longer scam new members to join.
A system where you need to increase those at the bottom for the top to succeed is a pyramid scheme.
Invest now in elderly care training. Reallocate resources from wasteful corn subsidies into healthcare, edible crops, and renewable energy. This will soften the blow from the inverted pyramid and society will be able to work through it over a period of 20 years.
Or, continue investing in war, divest from education, ensure wealth trickles up, and cry about the problem we all caused. It's not the woman's duty to keep this meat grinder going.
Multiple problems with this:
- converting farms from one type of crop to another is often enough outright impossible (because climate and/or soil conditions don't allow other crops), very expensive (e.g. need to replace specialized machinery and buildings) or takes decades (if you shift to anything based on bushes and trees, that shit needs time to grow)
- rebalancing agricultural subsidies is a very, very fine line to walk. as a country, you want overproduction of at least core crops, even if it means excess going to biofuel, and you want to isolate farmers from wild speculation swings on global markets so that they don't call it quits and you suddenly end up with (far) less than you actually need. famines haven't been an issue for the Western world precisely of the artificial oversupply situation for many, many decades.
- healthcare doesn't need more budget. The US, Germany and many other Western healthcare systems have more than enough money - their issue is waste, corruption and perverse incentives.
- corn subsidies aren't automatically wasteful. the corn is needed to provide bio-ethanol as a synthetic fuel, and there are more than enough usecases that foreseeably cannot be converted to electric.
- letting farms just die out or go fallow and no one take over is also bad, especially in areas where soil erosion is already an issue. Once soil dries out and there is no plant material to tie it together, it either can get blown away by the wind or in the worst case it can compress all the way down to the nearest layer of bedrock, making it all but impossible to restore.
