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This is one of those things that sounds great when you say it but in practice requires some extremely unpleasant political compromises. Are you going to...
The only thing that could possibly raise birth-rates non-coercively is for society to stop forcefully redistributing the labor of working age adults to unrelated elders. Removing social security and medicare would give people a much stronger incentive to either invest productively during their working years or have children to support them in their old age. There would still be a need for welfare, but it could be distributed as a UBI: flat cash payments to every citizen.
I mean, to some extent, all 4 of 1-4 are already happening:
Most countries have at least some form of policy that incentivizes being coupled off with children; Canada, at least, directly pays parents via the Canada Child Benefit. I'm fairly confident that the US has options to file jointly or single for couples, enabling them to minimize the amount they owe in taxes. This means that people who are single are either paying more than their fair share, or couples are paying less than their fair share (depending on your viewpoint).
In an "almost certainly not what you meant" sort of way, parents (as in, working parents) are forced to spend their income on programs that are intended for the welfare of the elderly, or to support single mothers; most of these elderly have had children, so the labor of working parents is subsidizing the lifestyle of parents who are not working.
And it is currently illegal in Canada to discriminate against a pregnant woman; I ran into this as a kid when my teacher left for maternity leave, they hired a pregnant substitute, who also left for maternity leave.
I don't really have any point to this "well, acktually"-ing, just thought it was kind of funny.
To the extend that child tax credits directly help parents, they're unfair... But I'm not heartless enough to deny support to the blameless children. On net I think we'd have a lot less need for them if we removed elder-support programs and therefore let working parents keep more money in their pockets.
The american tax code is designed to help families in a "working parent/homemaker" situation but ironically punishes cases where you have two high-earning adults. I've got some DINK friends who had to pay more taxes after getting married. TBH, I also think that's unfair. They shouldn't get elder assistance in their old age, but also they should be able to save and invest more of their taxes now so that they don't need it. Basically, our society can let people decide of their own volition whether investing in children or career advancent is their best retirement bet. Anyone who chooses to be both unproductive and childless can suffer the consequences and resign themselves to either poverty or becoming such a pillar of their community even unrelated adults are willing to help thm.
That's kind of exactly what I meant, actually. By removing the need to pay for unrelated elders, adults can focus on supporting their own parents. Reciprocally, that also increases the incentive for elders to help their adult children with childcare. My grandmother helped my mom with me while my mom was doing her PHD; in return, my mom has helped her quite a bit through the years with remittances. That all winds up with a greater incentive for adults to have children, and in particular to raise them well so that the children will be happy to take care of them.
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This seems like an unnecessarily fatalist take on an already very solved problem. We already have working structures to encourage people to enter the military while ensuring that their time in service won't work against their employment prospects when they return. Vets are also people who have not necessarily been gaining experience that's 100% relevant to the civilian workplace experience during their time away, but who have been building job-adjacent skills and demonstrating conscientiousness while away, as well as sacrificing pleasure to serve the greater good. I haven't noticed that mild preferential hiring standards for vets have caused every business to collapse, and employers aren't forced to give vets credit for more experience than they possess, just forced not to use their work gap to freeze them out versus other similarly-experienced candidates. It seems to me that most mid-20s professional women leaving the workplace to raise young children would be happy simply to reenter at the same step on the ladder, the way veterans get to; what I've seen in practice is that employers just arbitrarily won't even consider them, so they have a terrible time reentering at all.
If preferential hiring for returning moms seems like an unthinkable drain on productivity while you don't feel the same way for returning vets (notwithstanding high rates of PTSD, etc., etc. that make vets at least as empirically risky to hire), then I think that intuition merits some extra scrutiny. Is it possible that we don't really believe increasing the TFR is actually a contribution to the public good, the way bombing villages in Afghanistan was? In which case, it's a fair question why that same TFR would then require public investment in robot wombs.
Or is it possible that we don't actually believe that raising small children is a respect-worthy task for a talented person to spend time on, the sort of thing that should look good on a resume the way military service does? In which case, wouldn't the feminists be correct that people pushing momhood are mostly doing it as a way to demean women?
Not all work experience is universally applicable in every other domain. Experience in the military is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to carry out orders while working as a team under time pressure-- a.k.a, most well-paying jobs. Experience as a mother is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to determine your own schedule and manage small children. That admittedly does prove useful in stuff like hr/people manager/project management roles. (Basically all the managers I've ever had have been parents, and I think that makes perfect sense.) But the supply for those roles is much greater than the demand, so rationally self-interested companies filter for accumulated domain knowledge, which disadvantages mothers. Meanwhile the most numerically common jobs that benefit from experience as a mother are childcare and teaching related, but those jobs have a whole ton of structural problems that prevent them from accurately renumerating employees based on the quality of their work. The incentives of school district administrators are poorly aligned at best with actually maximizing learning, and any attempt to assess teacher skill and renumerate appropriately will piss off so many entrenched groups.
There are a few fields-- like nursing, for example-- that avoids the problems I've mentioned... but if you just compare the number of veterans versus the number of order-following jobs, and the number of mothers versus the number of caretaking jobs, and you see why things get to be the way they are.
Really? Slavishly following orders and following repetitive protocols under conditions of extreme physical stress sounds more like McDonalds jobs to me. And one could argue that running a household with small children is far better preparation for C-suite roles that require big-picture strategy, critical thinking about efficient use of limited resources, thoughtful design of people-friendly processes and institutional structures, etc. But both sides are just special pleading, because of course there are many military tasks and many mom tasks that will cross-apply to any given job, and many others that won't. The point of preferential hiring is not that the person is inherently more qualified for every position; it's that their resume gap was undertaken in order to render something of value to the public, so they shouldn't be disadvantaged for it versus a similarly-qualified person who didn't serve.
But I'm getting from your comment that you pretty much agree that mothers should be disadvantaged in hiring? The claim about how women with children should be unhireable lest they eventually bear more children makes no sense unless you're rationalizing a general sense of "moms, eeeeeeew": men could similarly acquire health problems or decide to become stay-at-home dads at any time, and statistically a childless man is far likelier than a female hire to eventually create expensive workplace issues through drug and alcohol problems, running-off-with-a-floozy problems, white-collar or violent-crime problems. But better to hire Schroedinger's embezzling coke addict than... a lady who's at some point changed a diaper, I guess. On account of the mom ick.
So yeah, this is kind of an illustration of the problem: if raising children well is not respectable professional labor, just base "caretaking," and if moreover being a mom at any point condemns you to be fit for nothing but caretaking scutwork jobs ever after, regardless of your pre-childbearing education and professional skills, then it's no wonder young women get nervous about the tradeoffs involved. Seems like a little open-mindness would fix the whole thing, but I guess there must be a lot of people who don't respect their moms.
#1
I don't think mothers should be disadvantaged-- I think people who are relatively less capable, experienced, knowledgeable, etcetera in a job area should be disadvantaged. And unfortunately, raising children makes it harder to become those things. I don't like that, but it is an unfortunate fact. Forcing companies to preferentially hire mothers is just going to lead to economic inefficiency and poverty. Yes, there are some specific roles where motherhood is actually good training. To the degree that those roles are prevented from hiring on merit, those roles should be reformed. But if you genuinely think mother are better for already-meritocratic roles like C-suite roles, then no actual intervention needs to happen. Companies will be darwinistically selected until they have the appropriate amount of mothers and everything in perfect.
Similarly, while I can tell that your whole veteran argument is non-salient, can you not see how it's proving my point? Yes, being a veteran makes you better at mcdonalds. Also, it makes you better at a whole lot of other places. Therefore those places preferentially hire vets, so that demand outstrips supply and military vets end up paying well. And judging by how well vet-owned companies seem to do, it looks like those place are actually making reasonable decisions. So why aren't I hearing about any companies that preferentially hire companies making it onto the fortune 500? If it was legitimately a good strategy, it would just be money on the floor. But it isn't, so it's not.
#2
All that being said... I completely sympathize with
I definitely don't blame young women for not wanting children. You seem to be coming at this from a perspective where you think I both expect women to have more children and yet have zero interest in giving the woman what they want. That's not my perspective. I understand that the tradeoff is skewed against women, and that not having children is simply the rational option for many of them. But you seem to have this weird belief that motherhood is intrinsically skewed, and that therefore we need special government to make it not suck, but that's the opposite of reality. Motherhood isn't a profession, but it is an investment-- and one that has historically paid off very well. People have given up part of their entertainment and leisure potential to raise kids since the dawn of time because they reasonably and rationally expected that their kids would contribute to their well-being in turn.
From that framing, it's obvious that we don't need to specifically promote motherhood, we just need to stop hindering it. We need to let parents internalize the full value of their children by ending government-mandated transfers of labor to freeriders by ending medicare and social security. I know that might be difficult to process emotionally because there's this idea that those programs are "helping grandma," but if it weren't for the money they lost to taxes, grandma's descendants could help her themselves.
Look, just imagine if women gave birth to massive piles of money, or robot servants that did their chores and took care of their needs. If that were the case, they would obviously be happy to accept less professional advancement in order to give birth more often. Conversely, if the government started taking 90% of their robots and their piles of money, women would stop giving birth in favor of looking for professional advancement. That's the situation we're in: everything about our society is geared around socializing the benefits of motherhood while privatizing the costs. All we need to do to get above replacement fertility is to just stop doing that.
So you'd be cool with your mom taking a cut of your paycheck? Interesting plan. Unfortunately, I'm not sure who would be the constituency, given that professedly people want above-replacement fertility because of the need to prop up Social Security and Medicare.** What would be the point of draconian policy if the community weren't planning to socialize the benefits?
**Although the back-to-the-kitchen arm of the discourse never seems to consider that you start by deliberately deactivating a large chunk of your current taxpaying workers, in exchange for a nebulous promise of additional workers two decades down the road. Unless the stay-at-home mom happens to have daughters, in which case her sacrifice is in vain for forty years until one of them pumps out a son.
I would be much happier if the money I paid into social security/medicare just went directly to my parents instead, yes. And even without the coercion of the state, it's not like children sending money to their parents is anything new. My mom has sent remittances to her mother in brazil for decades. That's effectively the same thing. If she hadn't been unfairly taxed to pay for feckless american non-parents she could have sent even more money back, and had more money to save for herself.
So you admit that taxing the youth to pay for medicare and SS are draconian, and yet you think somehow socializing the benefits makes them any better?
Remove the taxes. Remove the social programs. If parents are good parents, their children will be happy to help them. If parents are bad parents, then they deserve what they'll get. If non-parents don't plan for the future, they don't deserve society's help. If non-parents try and invest responsibly for the future, they shouldn't be stymied by the fact that they have to also pay for the upkeep of bad parents and lazy non-parents.
What's "nebulous" is Medicare and Medicaid. Thanks to the demographic crisis, I have zero expectation of getting any substantial old-age benefits. So why should I have to pay for the lazy old people that hollowed out the base of the demographic pyramid in the first place?
And since I'm getting this vibe that you're blue-tribe, and suspect you're just not interested in arguments about personal responsibility, let me try also appealing to a value I suspect we share:
The fact that dumb old people don't need to keep younger generations happy to receive benefits is why we have trump, climate change, and the housing crisis. Gerontocracy thrives off the back of old-age welfare.
I don't at all mind arguments about virtue, but I don't see how virtue pertains here. We don't pay old people entitlements because it's moral or just; I gather we paid them originally to ensure continued consumption and get them out of the labor market, and now we probably also pay them so the bureaucratic class can skim their cut off the top. Why should you have to pay? Because you live in a big society, and state capacity costs money.
Your argument doesn't follow from your premise. Yes, I agree that we should pay the taxes required to mantain state capacity. Cutting old-age security from the budget, and reducing taxes proportionately, wouldn't affect that. "You need to pay taxes because we need roads" is a good argument. But adding, "So then you can't complain about giving money to a vampiric class of elders," is just building a bailey around your motte.
At this point you're just arguing against yourself. If there's no morality or justice in paying old people, why in the world would I want more of my consumption re-allocated toward old people? Why would I want services to become more expensive because there's fewer workers? You might be able to convince me that it would be worth getting everyone else to pay for old people specifically in my industry to retire, but why would I care if I get a promotion and a raise if the extra money was just going to go to old people anyway? I'd prefer to keep working at my current responsibilities and pay. I don't think I even need to address the "skim off the top" bit.
You would legitimately have a better argument if you appealed directly to my morality. I'm taking a bit of a hardline stance, but I could imagine wanting to maintain some level of old-age security out of pure altruism. It wouldn't be structured the way it is now, and it would definitely be less generous than social security + medicare, but I'd support a unified program designed to supply enough food, water, housing, and dollars-per-QALY efficient medical interventions to keep the elderly, destitute, and disabled alive. Such a program would, by design, offer very few luxuries-- but I would also allow local communities and charity groups to supplement those luxuries, and also create a simplified program to enable whatever marginal employment the participants are capable of performing to afford small luxuries. Babysitting children, cooking meals, performing chores, etcetera-- untaxed, and with maximally flexible hours. Basically, those "preschool + retirement home" setups should be the model.
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Fertile society and public-welfare-society are incompatible paths of societal development. I don't know about the other fertility-yes and public-welfare-no people, but as far as I'm concerned it's a question of switching tracks entirely rather than to make minimal adjustments in order to prop up existing institutions. Of course it won't happen - modernity is married to the self-destructive path. But half-measures and knob-fiddling won't cut it. Attempting to raise fertility to prop up public welfare is like trying to throw wood into a burning building because the old beams have already been consumed.
But as much as I detest public welfare, it's not the sole source of this evil. Modernity isn't sick in only one way. Low fertility is also due to urbanization, atomization, and yes, of course, emancipation and the prevalent girlboss et al. narratives. Our resident women and emancipation advocates may disagree, and I understand that this isn't a bullet that can be bitten with any semblance of social grace, but ultimately women must breed. Easy to say for a man, I know. But them's the breaks. Outsourcing fertility to the third world is a retarded idea born from the utterly idealistic view that we can just convert arbitrary types and numbers of immigrants into natives with minimal friction - which isn't working as is. If you want first-world societies to persist as such, you either need first-world women to give birth to and raise their own children, or you need a radically new kind of society that can take in any kind of human capital and convert it into whatever is required without the currently observable failure modes. Which doesn't exist so far, and the fewered imaginings of current-day utopian progressives
And so we come to what seems like an even more ridiculous bullet to bite. Parents should own their children. Sounds atrocious to most people nowadays, and is certainly not without its many pitfalls, but I see no way around it. That's how it was in most premodern societies, and for good reason. It's practical. It's prosocial. The incentives align. It's philosophically consistent, not that anyone cares. The kids age out of it sooner or later, and I'm sure there are many ways for laws and regulations that can screw up the relationships between elderly parents and their adult children, but giving parents all the responsibility and none of the authority (to exaggerate somewhat) has always been a non-starter. Mandatory public schooling, ubiquitous public welfare, and the complete legal independence of children from their parents, what do you even need parents for? Wiping asses? More pressingly, what do you need children for? To punish yourself with little brats who get raised by others and can disregard you at will? Parental love is the only motivator left, and that's in pretty bad shape in a society that lives on synthetic superstimuli and instant gratification. Certainly there are high-functioning parents who raise their children right, have strong bonds with them and are even supported by them in their old age. But there are increasingly more who check out, do the bare minimum, park the kids in front of a screen and call it a day because why bother the little wireheads will never appreciate them anyways.
I wanted to write more, but I need to go.
We're past the society where parents owning their children translated to direct economic benefits, though, such as help on the farm or apprenticing in your profession. How exactly do you propose the parents should extract the value from their children? Lifelong alimony?
The easiest way to extract value from your children is to raise them in such a way that they'll want to help support you later in life. For example, spending time with them when they're young, helping them out both financially and socially when they're starting out on their own, and in general treating them well means that they'll be more willing to support you when you need it. If they don't want to support their children? Well, that's fine, but then they should be forced to plan for their own retirement instead of taking it from those they couldn't convince to help them.
I know of people who love and care for their parents - having their mother live with them and help take care of their children would not be a burden for those people.
I'll bite the bullet and say that if people (like my parents) do not produce kids who can/want to support them, and don't plan for their own future, then they should suffer for it; if I stop working I'll be homeless within a year, they can deal with the same.
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Getting to decide when and who they marry, for one, in order to steer them towards the formation of productive and prosocial families that remain within reach and can thus support each other and the parents, rather than to have them move off each to a different end of the world never to be heard from again.
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Exactly how does that reasoning not apply to veterans too?
It does apply to veterans. Re-read what I wrote, I never said it didn't. But veterans compensate for being relatively less capable, experienced, knowledgeable, etcetera in a job area by having their service be a hard-to-fake signal of a wide variety of positive qualities, plus training analogous to what they'd find in a lot of high-paying jobs.
For the record, I agree that motherhood is also a hard-to-fake signal of a wide variety of positive qualities, but the training it provides and the qualities it is a positive signal for just have greater overall supply relative to demand and therefore less total market value.
Just look at South Korea if you doubt my words. In a society where every man is conscripted, there's less of a relative advantage to being a veteran and young men face delayed achievement and worse outcomes compared to young women. If we massively increased the supply of veterans in the united states the same thing would happen. It's not systematic oppression, it's just the free market rationally allocating resources.
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Then maybe college should be intended for mothers who are already more or less done with the 'housewife' job?
That's how the Boomers did it, and that actually worked out pretty well for them.
I'm sympathetic to an argument that posits that there should be an effort to get men established quickly so they have credentials or financial backing to offer women (one always benefits from some seed money to court bigger investors), then try to matchmake them with an appropriately-younger cohort fresh out of high school. Then, in 10-15 years, they can join the educated/workforce as desired (perhaps subsidized if you had at least 2 kids).
Seems like something that would solve the issues in Korea, at least, so you don't have women complaining about men taking spots at workplaces ahead of them their experience/education suggests they deserve instead (ignoring the fact that men are unable to gain that experience due to the mandatory military service, and that is part of the compensation package).
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I thought usually vets are people who've served in the military and then moved on to civilian life, and, as civilians, they get casual nepotism from fellow vets and non-vets who have high regard for military service, but otherwise are hired based on their merits. Akin to, say, a company that's run by a mother or a non-mother who has high regards for mothers who might give casual nepotism towards a mother in terms of hiring, but otherwise judges potential employees on their merits.
But where I'm not sure how the comparison works is where vets generally aren't expected to take time off to go back to their military service, possibly multiple times and unexpectedly (well, with around 9 months of lead time, anyway). I think that, once they return to civilian life, vets are generally expected to keep working like a regular civilian. This can't be said for any given woman in a certain age range with respect to motherhood. A vet's ability to perform the job can be assessed before hiring and then, if they get hired, the employer can generally rely on them to behave like any other employee; in the case of potential mothers, that's not the case. Mothers who have aged out of birthing more children and have already spent their time raising them before they apply to the job, perhaps, is a better analogue. But those aren't the mothers that are under discussion.
There's also the issue that, as best as I can tell, there's very little empirical reason to believe that extra maternity leave would have any meaningfully positive impact on fertility. It certainly could, and we could try it out, but if the predictable happens and it has no positive impact, then it becomes an arbitrary handout that's basically impossible to revert, leading to high costs for no gain. Of course, there's the gain of mothers having more time with their babies as they grow up, which is a positive in its own right, but it's also a different issue than fertility and one that needs to be argued on its own merits separately.
Reservists have to leave their jobs to fight
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