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Notes -
The article seems to think that Greene is asking for the government to interfere by subsidizing families more. However, I have not seen anything of the sort in his articles or his X timeline. Instead, I suspect he's going to recommend building more homes and daycares to lower costs, based on how Part II ended. "We are a nation of builders." (bolded in the original.)
Boehm also says that Greene refuses to acknowledge tradeoffs, but Boehm hasn't provided the numbers for what tradeoffs exist for a couple in their 20s who are hoping to have replacement-rate level children by the time they're 40. Boehm seems to think that children are optional luxuries, ("First, all choices come with tradeoffs, and having kids is no exception.") On the individual level this may be true, but on the societal level this is not true.
Saying "you only need to pay the outrageous cost of childcare for the first 5-10 years of parenthood and then the cost becomes smaller" doesn't lower the barrier to entry at all.
In Part II, Greene added up the percentages of jobs that could support children in Lynchburg, VA, and it came up to 63.6%. This complements perfectly the 36% of people who responded to a Pew Research poll indicating they could not afford kids. This stood out to me as something significant but no one on either side of the debate has commented on it yet. (Edit, this is a mistake on my part, it's 36% of people who don't have kids already who said the reason was they could not afford them, not 36% of the total population of people age 25-45.)
Complaints about the articles I am sympathetic towards:
Greene completely messed up his calculation on Part I by picking the numbers in a county in NJ, instead of actual National Averages. In Part II, his correction to $100,000 seems more accurate.
Greene is really trying to calculate the "Middle Class" line and distinguishing it from the "Working Poor" line. He conflates "Working Poor" with "Impoverished."
The articles being flawed doesn't detract from them being viral and noteworthy. They struck a cord with people.
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