This is definitely the most original total fertilty rate piece I have read recently. It does a great job of explaining why the obvious answers are bad.
I have one question that I always come back to. Where are the men? Fertility really does require considering both men and women and the messy interactions that go into family decision making. Sure, in the end only women give birth and men aren't strictly necessary beyond a brief appearance at the start of the process. And maybe investing in women as mothers therefore matters more on some margins than investing in men as fathers. Is that true for current margins? There is still a fair bit of both economic and cultural investment in motherhood and close to zero for fatherhood.
Anecdotally, the non-religious families I know with 3-4 kids seem to differ mainly in having super-involved fathers.
I think it's the first take on fertility that, despite being far from perfection (seriously, what about the men? if men want to have more children, they can do greater part of the work it require. the division of the childcare work is not set in stone - and actually changed a lot the last decades. and it make the risk more equal, if fathers have more skin in the game), didn't leave me with the feeling that the author just want punish women, and search not for the best solution, but for the best Fabricated Option that let them push all the cost on women.
Thank you :) I am glad to hear that, as I also feel like most pro-fertility pieces are basically just saying "why can't you just shut up and have more babies?". If we're going to solve this problem we need to meet women where they are at, not yell at them for not going where "we" think they should go.
> Still, we can’t exactly do anything about these causes.
Disagree, and there are two counterexamples of this. First, there was the famous study where they tried to discourage teen pregnancies by telling high school students about what's involved in taking care of babies. Second, we have Israel, where even "secular" Israelis have TFR > 2.1. Neither of these is as expensive as various economic proposals.
Now, one might say that we have no way of replicating such approaches at scale in America. But I disagree with that as well. This can be done in a revenue neutral way, without becoming a theocracy. All it would take is to calculate high school teacher pensions as "baseline * (2*quantile(adjusted gross income of their graduates)) * ((1/2.1) * (TFR of their graduates))". How would teachers respond to such an incentive? First, they would start teaching students about parenting in ways that concretizes it. Second, they would teach students to be proud of our past and optimistic and determined about our future.
So fixing the cultural problem is very feasible from a technical point of view. Of course, it hasn't been tried, but neither have economic incentives of the scale that would actually make a dent. Is it feasible from a political point of view? I'm not sure, but it's not less politically feasible than an economic policy that's targeted at "women in their late twenties, probably mostly white and asian, who work in tech as product managers".
Now, if I'm being honest with myself, I'd say that my proposal and your proposal have exactly zero probability of ever becoming policy. This brings me to my second proposal, which is to found the cult that you want to see in the world. I don't think we should assume a "religious world" necessarily involves "sliding back". The reason is that I don't think "secular" Israelis are irreligious, if one properly understands what religion is. As Max Nordau said in his speech at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898, "Everything that is alive in Judaism, everything that is a Jewish ideal, that embodies dignity and the desire for development, is Zionist." There is an enormous religious difference between "secular" Israelis (who are reproducing themselves) and "secular" Diaspora Jews (who are not).
The problem is that most secular Westerners and secular Easterners are not only secular (unbound to any magical or theistic belief system), but irreligious (unbound to any story which they are a part of and want to continue). To quote Stanley Hauerwas, "We live at a time when we believe we should have no story, except the story we chose when we had no story. We call this freedom." Fixing this cultural narrative at a societal level is a regime-complete problem, but it is substantially more addressable at a smaller level.
People act like you can separate cultural things like religion or ideology or whatever from the tradeoff structures the do or don't underwrite. I presume people stopped having kids because the tradeoffs changed and any ideologies or religion/irreligion is just cope rather than causation. I am astonished the degree to which trad cons mirror the left in their love of social constructionism and "false consciousness" explanations for human behavior where people are naive and dumb to their own self interest and easily fall for cultural brainwashing. I presume when people used to do something and they stop doing it later, that there has been a change to the tradeoff structure. I don't think people are particularly susceptible to being brainwashed to disregard their self interest - whether it be women brainwashed by the patriarchy or women brainwashed by post-modernist or hippies with bad values.
I’m totally with you on “just pay people to be parents.” Like hundreds of thousands of dollars a kid.
But I’m not really on board with “subsidized childcare”. Price childcare at market rates and let people decide if that’s how they want to spend their child tax credit money. Different people will have different solutions.
Subsidized child care has a bad track record of increasing fertility. Most people have multiple kids because they want to spend time with them, not stick them in a facility and go to work all day. They want to be parents, so just pay them to be parents. You can make it scale with income by being a tax break, hubby keeps more of his paycheck because wifey is taking care of the kids.
Let’s face it, it’s never going to be economical for women to work at non-elite jobs if they have multiple children. That’s fine. We do not in fact need more product managers, the economy will hum along just fine, maybe they can go back to work when the children are older or do part time or whatever. Give people money and market prices and let them figure it out.
We already have one big piece of subsidized childcare, k-12 education. It costs 25k/kid/year in NYC. Parents don’t seem to feel they are getting their monies worth.
Some of the other ideas are just bad. This live in foreigner that gets the green card, whose watching her kids? Oh the school system and Medicaid? Whose taxes are paying for that? Instead of some backdoor subsidized childcare through immigration just pay parents directely. They can decide if hiring a live in nanny (at a wage rate that doesn’t require state subsidy) is the best way to spend their money.
This is definitely the most original total fertilty rate piece I have read recently. It does a great job of explaining why the obvious answers are bad.
I have one question that I always come back to. Where are the men? Fertility really does require considering both men and women and the messy interactions that go into family decision making. Sure, in the end only women give birth and men aren't strictly necessary beyond a brief appearance at the start of the process. And maybe investing in women as mothers therefore matters more on some margins than investing in men as fathers. Is that true for current margins? There is still a fair bit of both economic and cultural investment in motherhood and close to zero for fatherhood.
Anecdotally, the non-religious families I know with 3-4 kids seem to differ mainly in having super-involved fathers.
I think it's the first take on fertility that, despite being far from perfection (seriously, what about the men? if men want to have more children, they can do greater part of the work it require. the division of the childcare work is not set in stone - and actually changed a lot the last decades. and it make the risk more equal, if fathers have more skin in the game), didn't leave me with the feeling that the author just want punish women, and search not for the best solution, but for the best Fabricated Option that let them push all the cost on women.
(childless woman here)
Thank you :) I am glad to hear that, as I also feel like most pro-fertility pieces are basically just saying "why can't you just shut up and have more babies?". If we're going to solve this problem we need to meet women where they are at, not yell at them for not going where "we" think they should go.
> Still, we can’t exactly do anything about these causes.
Disagree, and there are two counterexamples of this. First, there was the famous study where they tried to discourage teen pregnancies by telling high school students about what's involved in taking care of babies. Second, we have Israel, where even "secular" Israelis have TFR > 2.1. Neither of these is as expensive as various economic proposals.
Now, one might say that we have no way of replicating such approaches at scale in America. But I disagree with that as well. This can be done in a revenue neutral way, without becoming a theocracy. All it would take is to calculate high school teacher pensions as "baseline * (2*quantile(adjusted gross income of their graduates)) * ((1/2.1) * (TFR of their graduates))". How would teachers respond to such an incentive? First, they would start teaching students about parenting in ways that concretizes it. Second, they would teach students to be proud of our past and optimistic and determined about our future.
So fixing the cultural problem is very feasible from a technical point of view. Of course, it hasn't been tried, but neither have economic incentives of the scale that would actually make a dent. Is it feasible from a political point of view? I'm not sure, but it's not less politically feasible than an economic policy that's targeted at "women in their late twenties, probably mostly white and asian, who work in tech as product managers".
Now, if I'm being honest with myself, I'd say that my proposal and your proposal have exactly zero probability of ever becoming policy. This brings me to my second proposal, which is to found the cult that you want to see in the world. I don't think we should assume a "religious world" necessarily involves "sliding back". The reason is that I don't think "secular" Israelis are irreligious, if one properly understands what religion is. As Max Nordau said in his speech at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898, "Everything that is alive in Judaism, everything that is a Jewish ideal, that embodies dignity and the desire for development, is Zionist." There is an enormous religious difference between "secular" Israelis (who are reproducing themselves) and "secular" Diaspora Jews (who are not).
The problem is that most secular Westerners and secular Easterners are not only secular (unbound to any magical or theistic belief system), but irreligious (unbound to any story which they are a part of and want to continue). To quote Stanley Hauerwas, "We live at a time when we believe we should have no story, except the story we chose when we had no story. We call this freedom." Fixing this cultural narrative at a societal level is a regime-complete problem, but it is substantially more addressable at a smaller level.
People act like you can separate cultural things like religion or ideology or whatever from the tradeoff structures the do or don't underwrite. I presume people stopped having kids because the tradeoffs changed and any ideologies or religion/irreligion is just cope rather than causation. I am astonished the degree to which trad cons mirror the left in their love of social constructionism and "false consciousness" explanations for human behavior where people are naive and dumb to their own self interest and easily fall for cultural brainwashing. I presume when people used to do something and they stop doing it later, that there has been a change to the tradeoff structure. I don't think people are particularly susceptible to being brainwashed to disregard their self interest - whether it be women brainwashed by the patriarchy or women brainwashed by post-modernist or hippies with bad values.
I’m totally with you on “just pay people to be parents.” Like hundreds of thousands of dollars a kid.
But I’m not really on board with “subsidized childcare”. Price childcare at market rates and let people decide if that’s how they want to spend their child tax credit money. Different people will have different solutions.
Subsidized child care has a bad track record of increasing fertility. Most people have multiple kids because they want to spend time with them, not stick them in a facility and go to work all day. They want to be parents, so just pay them to be parents. You can make it scale with income by being a tax break, hubby keeps more of his paycheck because wifey is taking care of the kids.
Let’s face it, it’s never going to be economical for women to work at non-elite jobs if they have multiple children. That’s fine. We do not in fact need more product managers, the economy will hum along just fine, maybe they can go back to work when the children are older or do part time or whatever. Give people money and market prices and let them figure it out.
We already have one big piece of subsidized childcare, k-12 education. It costs 25k/kid/year in NYC. Parents don’t seem to feel they are getting their monies worth.
Some of the other ideas are just bad. This live in foreigner that gets the green card, whose watching her kids? Oh the school system and Medicaid? Whose taxes are paying for that? Instead of some backdoor subsidized childcare through immigration just pay parents directely. They can decide if hiring a live in nanny (at a wage rate that doesn’t require state subsidy) is the best way to spend their money.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA