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Notes -
I think that's true in the short term, but children are also, as much as I dislike the phrase, "an investment in the future": if we decide to stop having kids (experiment ongoing in South Korea, among others), we can save so much money in childhood education and improve industrial output. Surely this won't have any consequences on a longer time horizon. /s
I'm not sure how I'd recommend aligning the incentives more broadly, though.
I suspect if we stopped spending money on education entirely we'd increase TFR. This would obviously have some bad consequences but in South Korea at least it might be net positive in the medium term.
But I would suggest that most government spending on education is a very poor investment. You can divide special education up (which I believe is half the spending) roughly into two groups -- strivers abusing the system to get a leg up in college admissions for their own kids, and attempts at educating the ineducable. The first could be zeroed out with no loss whatsoever, and the second could be reduced considerably -- if a kid simply isn't going to ever become a functioning adult, there's no point in spending enormous amounts of money in trying to educate him.
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