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In complete seriousness, I don’t think you understand the visceral worries that parents have of whether their children will do well.
Your economic analysis of what would happen to the money is correct but I know enough parents to know many are genuinely trying to do their best for their children rather than living out some pompous caricature of the PMC, and are desperately afraid their children will fall into an unhappy state.
You may think those fears are misguided but parental worry is something that it’s hard to reason away.
Counter-anecdote: My wife and I live on a single salary and our 4 children sleep in the same room together. We are a respectable middle class family. We are surrounded by a mix of the people @HereAndGone2 describes: 1-2 child striver families as well as 2-3 child "laid back" families. The striver mindset is a choice, and AFAICT it is indeed rooted in parental ego. Plenty of loving parents raise their kids without the anxiety of helicopter or tiger parenting.
Personally, I have decided to opt out of the striver rat race as I think it is spiritually and mentally destructive, and I'm also not sure what sort of white collar work or which credentials will matter in 20 years anyway. I would rather my kid be a well adjusted mechanic or UPS driver who relates to people and culture normally instead of a status- and achievement obsessed quasi-human with an Ivy league diploma. I do have visceral worries about my children's wellbeing, but they're more about whether they're developing a healthy conscience and positive personality traits like conscientiousness.
In a first-world country, even one with a housing shortage like the UK, 4 children sharing a bedroom is not compatible with the normie version of middle class respectability. In the UK, anything more than 2 same-sex children sharing would attract the attention of curtain-twitchers and social workers.
That said, I agree with your underlying argument.
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What's the conflict here? IME the PMC caricature is basically on the money. It probably doesn't even go far enough. People out there literally believe that it's abusive to have kids share a bedroom, and this has nothing to do with ensuring that your kids escape the permanent underclass. It's just pure competition.
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Sure, but being so scared you don't have kids because woah, the pressure, the responsibility? Handing out cash inducements or penalising the childless will not overcome that. If we want more babies, we need to relax the pressure. So what if Junior does not in fact become that software engineer? So long as he's healthy and happy and has some kind of job, even if it's a stupid dumb job, then that's okay.
I have two work colleagues whose adult (20s) kids died. One in a car accident coming home from a work shift in the early morning, one who died of sudden cardiac death. All the worries about the right university and the right career and the rest of it are meaningless against that, because we can't see the future and we can't control it. Have babies. Love them. Don't try to foresee thirty years ahead.
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