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Do we? My not-particularly-well-researched impression is that the cost of having and successfully raising children is growing faster than any subsidies provided for doing so.
ChatGPTs ideas were to increase the subsidies; that's what won't work. You can't outrace the costs because the subsidies are driving the costs. Subsidizing daycare, for instance, makes daycare more expensive.
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Isn't that expected? Same thing happens when you subsidize education, healthcare, etc.
And if the costs are the reason fir thr liw borth rates, why is it the poorest who keep having most children?
It may be expected, but that's unrelated to the question whether the observations actually give us any signal about whether sufficient levels of subsidies would work.
I assume the subsidies you get do not scale with your own wealth all that much, and raising a poor child is (definitionally) cheaper than raising a middle-class child. Subsidies may be sufficient for the former but not the latter: if the subsidies let a person living in a moldy apartment, bagging groceries at a convenience store in a gang-riddled neighbourhood for a living and eating rice and beans every day raise a child also living in the moldy apartment, eating rice and beans every day and going to the public school those gangs recruit from, all this says is that they would also let a middle-class person raise a child in a moldy apartment, eating rice and beans and going to a gang-riddled public school. Having children with a significantly lower standard of living than yourself may be supported in the ethical frameworks of medieval noblemen and warlords, but I don't see it being something inhabitants of our culture could be persuaded of easily.
That would only be the case during their childhood, you don't actually need to spend a lot of money for them to have a decent career. Maybe not being able to guarantee trips to Disneyland, or that everyone has their own bedroom (you're being a bit of a drama queen with eating rice and living in moldy apartments), is what keeps people from having kids, I can even get into that headspace, but ultimately I think it's precisely backwards. Let the little bastards experience some scarcity, so they don't get spoiled.
I don’t know how it is elsewhere but the American poor do often live in barely habitable apartments and eat terrible diets(although usually not literally rice and beans).
He's saying it's ok for them, because they're so poor the subsidies will be enough to make a difference, but that a childless middle-class couple would be propelled into similar squalor if they have a kid. That's what I'm skeptical of.
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