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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7805 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Mostly dumb.

  1. The US needs to spend less money, not more, given the deficit. If this is offset by cuts to Boomer entitlements like Social Security or Medicare, then that would be another story, but we all know that's not going to happen. The median voter wants to bankrupt the US while blaming their outgroup "it was always the other guys who were spending recklessly, my side was just spending in retaliation!"
  2. Baby bonuses barely move the needle in terms of fertility, e.g. Hungary has shoveled crazy amounts of cash into stuff like this and still has fairly dismal results. That's because the decision to have children is almost never about money. There are some at the margins where affordability genuinely is the deciding factor, but they're slim margins. Having kids mostly comes down to 1) are cultural gender dynamics conducive to people coupling up, and 2) is there enough social prestige and status in having kids to offset the burden that kids bring? Read this for more info.
  3. Flat payments like this, if they have any effect are usually dysgenic.
  4. Why payments for stay at home moms instead of simple baby bonuses? Having a parent take care of the childwork for the first few years is genuinely labor intensive, but after that kids mostly take care of themselves apart from occasional doctor's appointments and helicopter parent stuff. Society likes to lionize parents that stay home for some reason, but once the kid is no longer a toddler the parent will spend their time either doing helicopter parent stuff or using their "stay at home mom" status as an excuse to bum around watching Netflix, neither of which should be incentivized by the government.

Baby bonuses barely move the needle in terms of fertility, e.g. Hungary has shoveled crazy amounts of cash into stuff like this and still has fairly dismal results. That's because the decision to have children is almost never about money. There are some at the margins where affordability genuinely is the deciding factor, but they're slim margins. Having kids mostly comes down to 1) are cultural gender dynamics conducive to people coupling up, and 2) is there enough social prestige and status in having kids to offset the burden that kids bring? Read this for more info.

I recently came upon this study looking at the effect of access to housing on fertility in Brazil. It uses a Brazilian housing-finance system where people contribute regularly to a common pool and access to housing credit is partly determined by lottery. This gave the researchers a way of comparing people who received access to housing earlier with otherwise similar people who did not.

The effects seem particularly large for younger people: among those aged 20–25, receiving housing increased the probability of having a child by around 32% and the number of children by around 33% relative to the comparison group. Which suggests that housing and credit constraints could have a fairly large effect on fertility, especially when they delay access to housing during the ages when people are most likely to start families.

Child credits, on the other hand, mostly support people once they are already in a position to have children, rather than helping create the conditions that make having children possible. Which of course this study isn't either, since it's essentially randomly picking winners in a zero-sum housing system.

Maybe this study isn't very representative, I don't know, but this sort of thing seems to be rarely tried or studied. Efforts are mostly targeted at people who already have children, and with first births now happening relatively late, that leaves us subsidizing a cohort with a fairly limited remaining fertility window.

Late birth cohort may have a small fertility window, but their voting window is probably just starting to ramp up.

The problem with housing benefits for the young is that it's part of the old "subsidize demand, restrict supply" schtick that populists love but which keeps failing over and over and over. If you subsidize demand, most of that subsidy just flows to incumbent landowners. If you actually want to help young people in that regard, you could do some federally-enforced YIMBY stuff, but there's just no appetite for that. In Trump's affordability push he explicitly said that he wouldn't try to lower people's property values, and MAGA's reaction was basically "this is fine".

Also, in Brazil housing affordability might be a real limiter, but in America most young people who want to get their own place can at least rent their own apartment. It's expensive as hell, but America is wealthy enough to mostly face-tank that.

Hell, trailers are still affordable, and it’s better than 95% of the planet. They’re just stigmatized. America making housing affordable wont solve the status competition thats thé real economic block for childbearing, because that’s fundamentally impossible.

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