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I've previously posted on the Motte about the Swedish state-funded Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility and suggest solutions to the problem. We've already reached the fifth report in the series, this time analyzing how fiscal policy and social welfare affects childrearing, and what reforms have potential to raise the birth rate. As before, here's a link in case you know Swedish or want to use an AI to give you the uptake. https://framtidmedbarn.se/rapport/nr-5-ekonomisk-politik-och-fodelsetal-en-analys-av-effekter-och-evidens/
This is a significantly stronger and more refreshing report than the last two. It gets deeper into the nitty-gritty of the research in this field, while also being less hand-wringingly faux-neutral. One of the key take-aways is that the problem isn't merely one of spending more resources: Finland and Sweden both spend about equal amounts of government dough on child-friendly policies, yet Finland's birth rate is far worse than Sweden’s. The report instead suggests it's a matter of how you spend the money rather than how much money you spend.
In an especially striking and interesting part of the report, it actually hints at some relatively fresh and semi-radical new solutions. Becoming a parent, muses the report, is most difficult for younger people around 25-35 who are less securely established both in career and life-situation, but who have the highest fertility and the best chance of a good outcome if they do have a child. Yet current policy sprinkles benefits over time rather than concentrating it in the hands of the young who need it most: so concentrate the benefits! Give new young parents a bigger concentrated dose of total spending instead of spreading them out over time. The logic’s pretty good! When the kid turns 14, the parents are likely to be in their 40's, well-established and hardly hurting for money — quite different from the situation when the child was a newborn! Nothing is certain, but the report produces some tentative evidence that it might be possible to slightly raise birth rates by ensuring such economic support to younger new parents.
There's actually a natural experiment supporting the theory that large endowments to young people can raise birth rates — namely, longevity! It wasn't long ago that people mostly kicked the bucket when they were 60-70 years old, thus naturally boosting the economy of their offspring who were likely to be 25-35. With the average life span in Sweden now well above 80, fewer young people today can count on that sort of windfall during their child-rearing years. It might be an idea to try and restore that natural transfer from the older improductive generation to the fertile younger one. The children, after all, are the future, and if there’s anything in the world worth preserving they’re the ones who are going to have to do it.
In passing, I have lately become more and more skeptical towards the term longevity itself. We indeed live longer, but we haven’t so much prolonged our lives as we have diluted them. What is life, and what is death? A long-sickly 95-year old woman whose country and family are straining and sundering keeping her and many like her alive through exorbitantly expensive care – does she live? And conversely, someone who died when he was 75 but lived honourably and left behind an untarnished memory and a future full of promise for his nation and family – is he dead?
Dilution of the lifespan in fact seems to be the secret culprit behind a lot of factors in the fertility-decline – older people living in large houses 20 years longer, the wealth transfer to the new generation being significantly delayed, et cetera – and it seems to me that the solution often involves counteracting these negative effects in various ways. Something worth pondering, to be sure.
Benefits are opaque. How much does the colleague with four kids get with tax credits or child benefits for this and that program? No idea. Instead reverse the positions: tax and penalize having few children. Print on the tax return every year the extra malus one has to pay into social security. Make childless people fill out annoying and complicated forms to get a small tax return (while people with +3 children are getting them by default), instead of making families fill out forms to get benefits.
Also do DEI/affirmative action for people with children. The state should hire/promote for public servant positions the person with more children (would be counter to meritocratic idea, but the state is not trying to be efficient anyway). Let the intelligentsia compete for prestigious leadership positions/sinecures by having the bigger family first and education inflation second.
As I said last time this idea came up. Punishing people for not having children is a bad idea. If you are single woman, a harsh tax + good benefits is going to result in you having children out of wedlock. Which is dysgenic for society anyway. If you are a single man, you are just fucked. There is nothing you can do to have children on your own, and if you can't get a partner by normal means, you'd have to commit horrendous crimes to do so. The vast majority of people are not Chad + Stacy, sucking and fucking around and never settling down. Punitively targeting everyone as if they are is just revenge porn dressed up as a policy.
There is no material difference, single people will be always punished. It does not matter if you let's say have $10k and give tax credit $5k to family with children or if you have tax $5 and gather extra $5k tax from childless family.
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"Punishing" for the purposes of tax policy is always a bit vague: are EV and solar credits "punishing" dinosaur car owners? Kinda, but the distinction seems a bit unclear. It's not an uncommon structure in tax code, either.
Tweaking some combination of the child tax credit, tax rates, and the standard deduction could feasibly
punishraise taxes on households with less than two children.Not endorsing, just observing how it could be implemented.
I think about it as rewarding for taking an action vs imposing a penalty for not. There's a third axis for how easy/capacity to take that action is. I think its probably more permissible to impose penalties for taking an action if it requires a conscious single decision to take that action, for example littering. Or if the action you want people to take is very easy to do. The ACA "tax" is somewhere there, though it was mildly contentious. EV and solar credits are rewarding a particular behavior. The problem stems from imposing a penalty for not taking an affirmative action, made worse by that affirmative action being downstream of other affirmative actions that additionally require another party to also take those same actions. Since person A can't control what person B is doing and requires person B to also do it so that person A can, punishing person A for not doing it is fairly tyrannical.
I'd say something like raising the overall tax rate and then giving a cut is not really a punishment. We understand the side eye thats really happening but theoretically its just raising the tax rate to pay for the deficit, and then lowering for people that are making "future taxpayers" as a reward for the socially approved behavior. But you'd have to do a blanket increase, doing targeted increases is just punishment. Last time this came up there were even more draconian punishments for the childless.
Tax credit for having kids or tax penalty for not having kids are functionally identical policies economically
One just makes people mad and one doesn't
If they are the same then it should be easy for people to stop suggesting the penalty. For some reason they can't, suggesting there is an emotive component that they prefer to punish people they disagree with, rather than benefit people they agree with.
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Since DEI/Affirmative Action is most impactful and least harmful at earlier opportunity stages rather than at executive stages, I would say the correct aim should be to do Affirmative Action for kids with siblings. If you make having more siblings a major plus for getting into Harvard, and having enough siblings a near-guarantee of significant college scholarships, you get two birds stoned at once. Rather than the optimal meta being to focus parental investment on one kid to get them into Harvard, the optimal strategy becomes having a bunch of kids to boost all their odds. It subsidizes one of the major cost concerns for having middle-class kids, education. It taps into existing status hierarchies rather than trying to create new ones from whole cloth.
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