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So, motteizeans, thought experiment- you’ve been hired by the government of a country you’ve conveniently never noticed before, let’s call it genericland. Genericland has a problem- they have an economy dependent on high tech manufactured exports using highly skilled labor that can’t be imported, it has to be homegrown, and has had a TFR of 1.5 for long enough that the government is seriously worried about a labor crunch taking them from an upper to a middle income economy in 20 years or so. They’ve hired you to raise the birthrate enough to save the economy in the long run, and are willing to spend .5% of GDP to get it to 1.8 or 1% to get it to 2.1. You don’t have reserve currency status, but genericland has excellent credit ratings. The government is dominated by long-running consensus politics and will stick with your recommendations long term. They aren’t concerned with feminism, but are dependent on remaining in American good graces and are well aware that they cannot get away with saudi-level black sheep behavior. The population is homogenous and speaks a language not spoken elsewhere, but 90% are fluent in English. Family norms are perhaps slightly more conservative than PMC American ones, but not by a wide margin. And, of course, because the government wants future factory workers, it’s strongly preferred if the fertility increase doesn’t come from genericland’s underclass and doesn’t care how it affects the elites, it needs to target the working to middle classes.
What do you do?
For myself, all women with white collar jobs get two year’s entitlement to WFH after every childbirth in addition to parental leave, in which they can’t be required in the office more often than 1x week. Renters who get married have access to a government loan to buy the apartment or house they rent, and the government issues loans to couples having a 3rd child to help buy a bigger home. At a fifth child these loans are forgiven and payments pause for three years after a fourth. The ministry of culture is directed to work with generican-language pop culture producers to promote pro-family memes, female pop stars are paid to give interviews and sing about how much they love being a mom. High schools now require ‘family formation’ classes to graduate in which teens assist existing families with childcare(particularly for girls this is strongly associated with wanting kids) and learn social skills for forming relationships, along with some basic home ec. New fathers get an automatic 5% raise regardless of employer. Female civil servants have the option to go part time if raising a child, and genericland’s many factories are enrolled in a subsidy program that pays them to allow female workers with a child under ten to work part time.
so Japan. I recall someone here raised this hypothetical four-six or so months ago. There were no answers/solutions within the framework of liberal democracy. The problem is people are motivated by relative social status. Govt. incentives will never be good enough. Aid is good for raising the bottom, but dos not help the top 10 percent who want to join the ranks of the top 1 percent. The issue is is not scarcity of money but scarcity of status. forcing people to do things crosses into the line of authoritarianism.
Exactly. People today are unimaginably wealthy compared to 150 years ago, yet the fertility rate in the United States has fallen from 4.5 to under 1.8 today. (The true decline is even worse because generations have lengthened as well).
Efforts to provide financial stimulus for parenthood won't move the needle much because money has never been the issue. To really change things, you'd have to take extreme measures, like outright banning non-parents from desirable cities.
The cost of having kids has gone up even faster than wealth has. Kids used to be an economic net positive after a certain age, now they're net negative at least until they leave home. Having kids used to make your life better in non-economic ways (even excluding sentiment) after a certain age; now they're a burden until they leave home.
The issue with this I think is that they don't have to be. Many of the costs of children provide no net benefit to anyone in the long run and you can simply not pay them. Maybe people don't know this? Perhaps simply a nationwide education program about it would suffice.
Could you be more specific? What large costs are common people making that doesn't actually help their kids or the parents dealing with kids?
Effectively all of them. Getting kids into expensive private schools? Twin studies have demonstrated them to be pointless. They end up exactly as successful and happy by the age of 35 regardless. This is also true of special early education, fancy extracurriculars, cool vacations, neat gadgets, a nice first car etc. This is all generally verifiable from twin studies. Nature wins, nurture... sort of helps, at least as far as "don't lock your kids in a basement and starve them."
As someone who personally grew up for extended periods of time without running water or electricity it was just sort of fine. Didn't really have a massive impact on my life, got me outside more, spent some more time with friends, etc. Occasionally annoying but like: you wash your hands in a bucket instead of the sink, you haul drinking water from the well (exercise), and you don't brain-drain in front of a screen. Frankly seems pleasant compared to how my college roommates lived.
You want to have your kids do better than you? Marry up, don't starve them, provide a very basic level of opportunity, and you're good to go. The sad reality of parenthood is there's very little you can do. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. It's been known for a long, long time.
That basically leaves as expenses: diapers, food, gas for driving them to school, clothes. That's practically covered by tax benefits alone. Medical expenses are a legitimate concern, but they can be dealt with (or just ignored, if you're lower class and have already acquired a mortgage!) If the wife's career is an issue, I can't really speak to that. That's just never been an issue in any of the relationships I've known as all the women happily jumped on being a stay-at-home-mom when it was an option (as my own girlfriend wants to, and is ready to drop her career plans at a moments notice,) so I've no experience with it.
I'm phone-posting, but for sources I'd look into 'Selfish Reasons' For Parents To Enjoy Having Kids by Brian Caplan, which is very good, and just general twin studies. SSC has some good old posts about it as well I believe if you dig.
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