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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.
My personal guess is that social status is a far larger driver of fertility than economics. Problem is government is a terrible tool to try to selectively raise social status. In the past, religions were free to keep birthrates high, but since the left ended the separation of church and state by making the state their church, it turns out their religion is anti-natalist.
We do not need more governmental action to increase birthrates. All we need is the government to stop funding anti-natalist propaganda, respect the boundaries of state and church. In terms of actual governmental policy, just having a strong economy for young workers is probably the biggest thing. The government is never going to hit on the perfect amount of money to make women want kids when their whole friend group will think they're weird if they get married before 30.
You're right, but to quote demographer Lyman Stone, the solution to a problem doesn't need to reverse the cause of the problem to be effective.
Poor eyesight is caused by genetics, but we don't treat it with genetic engineering. We treat it with glasses, contacts or laser eye surgery.
Similarly, if modern status hierarchies are suppressing fertility, that doesn't mean we can't fix it with money. If every newborn came with a $1 million cheque, you'd bet the US birth rate would skyrocket. Suddenly all the people who were ambivalent about having kids would become enthusiastic parents.
It's a toy example, but it demonstrates the obvious fact that there is an amount of money that will work. There's even a calculator online to see how much, and what kind of fertility policy it would take to get birthrates up, with all the data based on studies of real policies.
And of course, if taxpayer money does succeed in increasing birth rates, that also strengthens the norm of having more kids, which builds on itself.
No, that's not fixing the problem. In the discussion about aborting Down's Syndrome children, one of the responses I got about having kids was that it was much more expensive today because it had to be. You had to pour all these resources into your one, absolute max two, child in order to get them on the ladder. You had to have the house in a good school district and the separate bedrooms and right schools and right extracurriculars and all the expensive, time-consuming, helicopter parenting because my god, the horror of having a child who wasn't upper middle class!
You hand out a $1 million cheque with every newborn, and that money will go to the one, absolute max two, kids that have to have all the resources poured into them because now the Red Queen's race got even hotter with all the money that can be poured into the meat grinder.
The solution to having kids is easy enough, poor(er) people have kids without the resource sinks. But I don't want my genetically maximised, embryonically selected, implanted into a surrogate via IVF child to be one of the - ugh! - lower middle or middle middle class! Little Valerius must be PMC and higher, one of the high value human capital economically productive post-AI winners! And if I don't sink the guts of $500,000 into having him, then the entire project will be a failure!
Have kids. Have your kids share a bedroom in your modest house. Get them into a decent school, I agree about that, but they don't need 'summer camp at NASA enrichment extracurriculars Mom and Dad are writing your Ivy League application essay when you're six' raising. Have more kids and hang the expense. Somehow they, and you, will muddle through. AI may put us all out of a job by the time they're college aged so we'll all live on abundance UBI (or we'll all be soylent green), so don't think too far ahead.
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.
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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