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Notes -
Maybe this is morally sound, but it has an obvious drawback.
The expected monetary value of an additional vote is very, very low. This is not going to meaningfully incentivize more children. It will have a much stronger effect on the political landscape, concentrating power in…Utah. Well. Aside from the Mormons, the largest households go to California, Texas, Alaska and Hawaii. No prizes for guessing which of those have the most families in total.
It is possible that a country with “the best” policies actually incentivizes having children. I am skeptical that those policies are going to be implemented by this method of skewing the votes. ~40% of American households already have a child. I’m sure it’s much higher in suburbs with good schools and high property taxes.
Even ignoring everything below the poverty line—your average parents are not actually incentivized to make the system work for everyone! They are best off when they get their kids a comparative advantage, then pull up the ladder. This is visible in good school districts, in the college admissions treadmill, in tax exemptions and NIMBYism. Voting with your feet is always going to be more effective than voting with your, uh, vote.
Oh the additional value of a single vote is effectively zero I agree. The point is not that the additional half vote incentives children. The point is that giving votes to parents makes them a stronger voting block, thus making politicians pander to their needs more than they do at the moment and society slowly changes to one that is better for children/worse for those without children than it is at the moment, and that is what incentivises more children.
I gathered that.
Why do you think the bloc of poorest, least educated citizens will enact such policies? Rather than ones that, say, redistribute to them once and then pull up the ladder.
It's not the poorest who'll propose and enact these policies, but rather politicians. Making politicians pander more to parents than they currently do is probably a good thing. Now they could decide to pander to the poorest as a proxy for getting the extra votes parents are given, but why do that when you can be more effective and directly pander to the parents instead?
Think of the children sucks super hard already. Even as a parent I can say definitively that most of us are tunnel-visioned dum dums once kids are involved.
Because the culture war around children is already there. Busing low SES kids into rich neighborhood to fuck up their education (and then painting opposition as racist) is already a well-established tactic. Statistically it seems clear there's a lot of garbage parents out there, and I don't identify as a political bloc with them. They consume a vast amount of resources compared to me and I haven't seen any benefit from it.
(by the way, love the concept and the rise it gets out of people)
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This policy shouldn't have too much of an effect of political power between states, because elections are not decided by pure popular votes, but are either individual to a state, or are decided by the electoral college, and minors are already counted for allocation of representatives, I believe. It would have much more of an effect on electoral results within any given state.
Fair point. I have a suspicion that it will amplify the advantage of urban centers, but it’s possible that loses out to cost of living. Statista seemed to think Hispanic population was a big driver. I don’t know how that squares with the non-Southwestern states that ranked pretty high, like New Jersey.
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