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Russ Roberts talks about how inserting money into things can change the culture around said thing. The example he often goes to is that of day care centers. Some day care centers had a problem with parents picking up their children late (i.e., they were supposed to be all picked up by 6pm or whatever so that the center could close at that time). In order to try to fix the problem, they implemented a late pickup fee. People follow incentives and will then do a better job of picking up their children, right? Whelp, the result was that the number of late pickups went up.
Prior to the fee, parents had a cultural incentive to try to pick up their kids on time. 'I would feel bad if I was late and the workers at the center had to stay later than planned.' After the fee, a person could reasonably believe, 'Well, they set the fee at a rate that appropriately compensates them for the trouble, so as long as it's worth it to me to pay the fee, everyone wins.' And so the culture around how people viewed their choices changed; parents apparently valued not being rude (in the prior regime) more than paying the fee (in the current regime) more than picking up their kids on time... and so late pickups went up.
There have been a lot of discussions lately about financial incentives to have kids. I'd like to finally share an experience I had recently with my wife. We were on a trip in the southern US, and we happened to be out at a restaurant for breakfast on a Sunday morning. The place was pretty busy, and there were a lot of families there with little children. These kids were pretty much all quite well-behaved, and the families seemed pretty happy.
...the sight of this was apparently a crying experience for my wife. Parents actually like their kids?! They're all able to enjoy a nice breakfast out and have just an all-around pleasant morning?! What even is this world?!
You see, my wife immigrated from Canada, where they pretty straightforwardly pay people for having children. The payments are relatively substantial. Her sister is a prime example. Sister doesn't work; sister's husband works a pretty low-paying entry-level job, without a whole lot of hope in sight for significant advances anytime soon; sister and her husband already have two children, will probably be having more. Wife basically thinks that sister is just an example of a phenomenon that she thinks is common in her home country - people basically treating their kids as sources of income.
When I told wife about Hungary's schemes that have been talked about here, she immediately started thinking about how people would game it, how they'd make choices to just barely satisfy the governmental requirements, and how it would change the culture around how people view these choices. She also has gobs of experience with how employees game out the parental leave time and unemployment and so on, so she knows the way these games will be played (she's already confident that many people make choices of how to space out their kids based on how much leave you get, then how many hours you need to work again before you become eligible for another huge chunk of parental leave; you can string along several years of barely working at all if you do it right). "So, around 28-29, every woman will be figuring out when the best time is to hit up a sperm bank, given their job situation and ensuring a high probability of it working prior to 30."
I'm not going to confidently predict that there is going to be some particular unintended consequence (e.g., maybe people who might have otherwise had more than one kid just have their "gov't mandated, sperm bank one", they hate the thing, and overall fertility declines). But hot damn am I sure that there will be some unintended consequences to the culture around having kids if people go to some of the extremes of the financial incentives talked about here. Like, yes, injecting money will produce incentives that will change behavior. Will the resulting behavior be something that we like? Ohhhhh boy. We're in for a wild ride. Mostly, I'm sort of just amazed that this group generally leans right and would be incredibly quick to point out the possibility of unintended consequences for vast social engineering schemes proposed by the left, but is relatively uncritical about possible unintended consequences for vast social engineering schemes proposed to increase fertility.
I'm not a fan of large social engineering projects, and wasn't one of the people advocating for fertility stuff.
The problem will eventually work itself out. The higher fertility places and cultures will become more dominant. It will just happen on timelines that are too long for people to care about. Probably at least two or three generations 40-60 years.
The scenario you bring up reminded me of something ... people like to start by fixing problems at a societal level. They want the federal government to just step in and wave a magic wand to fix things. But if you are forced to actually solve a problem, this is a backwards way of thinking about things. Instead of thinking at the national level, people should be thinking at the personal and local level. "What would make me have more kids?" and then "What would make my close family and neighbors have more kids?"
Me and my wife have good jobs so I don't really find myself money constrained when thinking about having more kids. We are actively trying to have more kids right now. (which will be number three, but earlier in my life I thought about having four kids, and now I don't think I can do it). I feel kid constrained because of time, stress, and space constraints. The two kids I do have I feel like they require a ton of effort, it feels impossible to just get everything done that needs to get done. The time spent hanging out with my kids is often one of the best times to get a bunch of important tasks done.
I tend to feel more stressed, because there is a local expectation of closely watching your kid. There is a playground right behind my house. I'd be able to see my kids from my house if they went to this playground. I think my parents might have just let me wander off and go play at the playground when I was my kids age, but I feel like if I did that for my kids it would be frowned upon.
Our house is a decent size, but we'd like to expand it if we were having more kids. We can't expand it due to regulatory constraints. We might be able to get around these regulatory constraints, but it will take time and stress (areas where I already feel resource constrained).
When I look around at my family and neighbors, the main additional constraint is medical (some of them have trouble having kids).
Its not that money isn't a true constraint for anyone, its just kinda lower on the list. And maybe if we had enough money some of the other constraints could be handled. I've considered hiring a personal assistant to deal with more of my life problems, but my wife hates that idea.
For me, and maybe some of my family and neighbors, we would be having more kids if the following things happened:
Reduced local regulatory constraints on housing expansion.
More communal child care opportunities. (things like birthday parties are great, my kids can get in some social time, and so can I). Its a pain for someone to host these, but everyone else usually enjoys coming along.
More relaxed social attitudes, aka allow free range kids.
Less bullshit bureaucratic things I have to deal with. Car stuff, taxes, and recently the city changed all our street addresses (cuz the old ones were racist or something). Those are annoyances that I wouldn't choose to deal with. But there are also things I choose to deal with that feel like they are made more difficult because of regulatory crap. I am trying to become a wedding officiant for my sister's wedding, trying to get banquet license for a recreational event, trying to setup doctors appointments for myself, trying to apply to some private schools for my daughters, etc. This is just the current stuff that is on my mind, but it feels like I've had a list of things just as long for the last few years even though I keep knocking things off the list every month.
The last one is the real kicker for me. Each one thing is usually no big deal on its own, but there are these constant bureaucratic bullshit things added on top of them that make each item take longer. And the kind of impulse people have that says "the federal government should do a thing to solve some societal issue" is exactly why I think that list of bureaucratic bullshit keeps growing. Everyone always thinks their one issue is so important, and they always think that any minor costs imposed by imposing their top down solution are very minimal. But the shit adds up. I can only imagine the nightmare that a national kids registry might choose to impose. How long before they start tying your kid benefits to other crap they care about. Oh, you can't get your child tax credit unless they have x doctor visits a year, because we need to actually make sure your kid is being taken care of. Submit the reports made by your daycare, or the child visitation officer who comes to inspect your home.
If there is one big societal problem that I want the federal government to fix then it is this one: people having the desire to fix big societal problems all at once via the federal government. I want a federal agency that makes it their goal to determine how much time the average American spends on bureaucracy, and when that number gets too high they have the power to go around axing bureaucratic requirements at other agencies. You think your issue is so important? Too bad, we are gutting your "save everyone at once at the federal level" program that requires hours of every American's time.
That is my little pipe dream. Just writing this should have been a stress reliever. But I feel more stressed now, I could have spent these moments of coffee fueled productivity to slog through another government form. And now I am one day closer to multiple deadlines hanging over my head.
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