;D - "real Catholicism has never been tried", I guess. Malta had no divorce laws till 2011. Abortion mostly not ok in Ireland till 2018. - none doing much to keep the birth rate over 2.0 - The folks you know seem to be very special. Maybe it is not their church. Btw: "Mass every week" does not qualify as "orthodox Catholic". lol . Mum goes several times a week. Grandma prayed each time the bells rang. As the Irish did.
Politics are a lagging indicator to culture. I can't find any data over time in the five minutes I am willing to spend searching, but the vast majority of Europe is just not very religious.
Catholics who attend mass are about a third more fertile than the average American, according to this; mass attendance is directly correlated with more children, but not as strongly as I thought:
But does one want people with such warped incentives to take over simply because one couldn't figure out incentives for others to procreate (assuming getting more people on the planet is a good thing anyway, which we were ushered to (pretend to)* accept)?
As regards Amish and similar groups, I would personally argue for deconversion, for destroying their religions (like any other religion, especially any Abrahamic one), except that would, of course, be problematic in terms of getting more people on Earth.
As regards the last part: I mean the disclaimer at the top of Zvi's original post that states he won't get into arguments about it but emphatically states the position of "more people is good". My concern is people, existing and new, living lives not worth living in their own opinion, as well as Earth being way _over_ its long-term (i.e. not relying on frankly very finite amounts of oil, gas, and coal) capabilities of population support - this is not really about climate, although it may be an amplifier, this is about energy per person needed for establishing a not-totally-miserable standard of life - with no reasonable plans of living on other planets on the horizon.
On the contrary, deconversion was and is very successful. A century ago, most of non-Muslim Russia was Orthodox (or Jewish, but let's not touch that part, we know what happened there). Currently, despite all attempts by the government to reinstill Orthodoxy, Russia is _very_ comparatively secular. Same with Nordic countries and Lutheran Protestantism. Religions are beatable, they have been beaten before, and there are good rationality reasons to destroy them. As for "more passionate" - wombs of Amish women, to put it plainly, have finite capacity that they already mostly use, they just won't be able to reproduce twice as hard after you deconvert the other half.
Maximum energy from solar and similar sources was calculated to stably support at middle-class-level consumption something… less than current population (2 billion, from what I can quickly find now?). While I agree that catastrophes you mention are more of a concern, I really don't see a point in literally pumping more people on this planet.
In a country with the political stability of Hungary (annual inflation rate this January: 25.7 %) it is quite possible that the next government, or even the same government, will later reverse course and cancel the tax break.
"It is simply that no one has done anything remotely like the reverse of the one child policy in China, or Iran’s widespread push to discourage births."
I think Ceaușescu's Romania was something like this.
The direct consequence of the decree was a huge baby boom. Between 1966 and 1967 the number of births almost doubled, and the estimated total fertility rate increased from 1.9 to 3.7. Thousands of nursery schools were built. As the children got older, their needs were not properly met. There were cases where lectures were shortened to enable three school shifts."
Just because it needs to be said, and definitely not an argument against trying at all: selection effects are a thing.
For example flat payments have a higher effect for below average earners. This may mean younger people (which can be good, bad or neutral, depending on your goals), due to bad luck (compensating for which is definitely good), and also genetics. I think it's acceptable to say out loud that we don't want to do a whole lot of actual selection for negative traits.
Both genetics and inherited family culture(value of hard work, delayed rewards, etc.) - but conceptually the same; traits that are inherited within families.
Dependency ratios explain everything- that is the cudgel, unintentional most of the time, that governments used to drive down fertility rates. Young people don't just support the children they have- they have been increasingly supporting retirees who are complete strangers, government workers, and welfare beneficiaries of all types.
Intellectual Turing Test. It's a stronger version of steelman - can you create an argument for the other side that would pass as written by someone who actually believed in that position?
"Requiring a college degree to provide child care is one of those places I fail the ITT."
Children are important and precious. They deserve the highest-quality care. College-educated people are higher-quality. They will know more of The Science about childcare and therefore make better decisions, meaning your children are less likely to DIE or be TRAUMATIZED. Isn't it worth paying a little more for that?
Not endorsed, just trying to imagine the thinking behind this insane rule.
This is right. Also, tragic and horrible things sometimes happen to children, because we live in an imperfect world. After a tragedy, WE MUST DO SOMETHING, so there's a lot of temporary support to implementing new insane rules.
>Not endorsed, just trying to imagine the thinking behind this insane rule.
I don't know if you said "college-educated people are higher-quality" mockingly (as if this is a bad argument), but it's very obviously true.
College admission and graduation acts as a substantial (though declining) filter. To get into and pass college, on average you're going to be above the general population in intelligence and conscientiousness, for one thing, and you're going to be less likely to commit crime or anti-social behavior (which may be relevant in and of themselves but can also be used as a proxy for being more or less of a good/bad person generally).
All that's really up for debate is whether or not the reduction in supply (and associated higher costs/scarcity) the college degree requirement has is worth the (potential for, in the absence of actual empirical studies on childcare quality) better carers.
If anyone actually does claim that colelge educated people are good because they know about childcare, then this is a dumb argument.
Here's the rule in full: "Under the new rules, directors of child care centers will need a bachelor's degree in early education, teachers will need an associate's degree in early education, and assistant teachers and caregivers in home-based daycares will need a Child Development Associate's credential." The latter credential will be required for even a domestic childcare worker starting in 2023 - 120 hours of coursework.
I do think certified in-home daycares already require minimal coursework and a ton of other hoops to jump through (I myself briefly considered this, but my house would require massive renovations to make it possible in my state.) But it seems that this law will require a mom who wants to watch kids in her house for money, in addition to all the official certification hoops, to ALSO get a full bachelor's degree.
This, and also it should be noted that a degree with a specific major is required... the steelman for "college-educated people are higher quality" only works if you allow any major from a four-year university... there's nothing about a childcare studies major that signals more general competence than one in computer science or English.
Does the college degree in general make someone more caring and empathetic, or knowledgeable about the practicalities of children? Will they be kind to your child, love your child? Will they care and be responsible? Does a degree in Early Childhood Education, specifically, confer these magical qualities?
Of course, the care-giving field and profession is somewhat self-selecting, but not perfectly.
I know you're being sarcastic, but yeah the law is horrible.
It makes something already scarce scarcer and more expensive (like other untimely regulatory hoops - e.g. extra occupational licensing requirements for trade workers or truck drivers). Read the parenting boards about how hard it is to find childcare, and what the pay expectations are these days.
Daycare work is hard work, can be thankless. If you can make comparable money doing e.g. DoorDash or working at Target, why would you do the daycare work? But if you're running the daycare, you have certain overhead costs (e.g. rent, insurance) and there's only so much you can charge your families.... or they'll just opt for a nanny. So there's a limit to how much you can pay staff, and still make a living, while also conforming to maximum kid to teacher ratios.
Increase the hoops for a SAHM to provide care, for someone looking for part-time work to take daycare hours... and those people go underground or they just choose different work that is less hassle and perhaps more money. Or the SAHM has to enter the workforce to make money, further increasing childcare demand.
Now, the BACHELORS college requirement is only for daycare DIRECTORS. Teachers have to get an associates, which is a lower barrier to entry, but still: 1 to 2 years. A college student in, say, nursing or teaching, looking to make money and possibly get exposure to children, who might have taken a daycare job, will not be able to now.
I suspect a UBI would be a good plan for increasing children. It's Universal, meaning no age requirements. A flat rate per person payment. So if a single unemployed woman has a baby, their UBI payment instantly doubles.
Government subsidizing children could have rather concerning effects tho. It further reduces incentives for people to pair up. I mean, just look at these articles:
> TBF **if women have enough power to not need a male provider they may decide to do without**. It might be the real reason conservatives are making sure there is no universal childcare and good maternity leave and so on, it results in too much independence.
> Iceland has shown that a good support system for women leads them to not marry men nor wait for a marriage to have children of their own. In 2017, over 2/3s of babies were born to mothers who were not married.
> It seems if you give women the social support they need to have families, they will just have them without waiting for someone to put a ring on it. Some women have children from multiple fathers. And we see none of the hand-wringing we hear about someone getting pregnant and the father is crap and what to do. Icelandic women just have the children they want when they want them. I am sure it is easy to sign men up for that when there is little to no requirement to personally support these children. **Men could become drones in this scenario.**
"Skirbekk argues, in part, that it’s because of a lack of “‘suitable’ men, as women have become increasingly selective.”
"That men are increasingly living lives in which they feel they are unable to fully flourish, causing women to not want to have children with them, is a problem(...)"
Any policy which makes having children without a partner more financially viable will just make things worse, ultimately. Sure, you can boost fertility rate—but also, such society won't be stable. As I responded to that Reddit comment:
> If you structure things that way, there's absolutely no reason to not reproduce with the most attractive willing man availalble. Since a single man could (& would, if it doesn't cost him anything personally) impregnate a large amount of women, vast majority (90%?) of men won't. Yet they would, for some reason, be expected to provide for all of this.
This is a problem, and I would go so far as to say a tragedy, but probably not as much of a problem as chronic demographic decline.
And I personally believe that"fixing" the issue with increase immigration would have an even worse cultural impact, so it becomes a matter of picking the least terrible alternative.
You make a good point and I'm not debating it. Just a small nitpick:
> Iceland has shown that a good support system for women leads them to not marry men nor wait for a marriage to have children of their own. In 2017, over 2/3s of babies were born to mothers who were not married.
It could be that couples just chose not to go through with the actual marriage, but still live and raise children together. Given that Iceland is probably as non-religious as they come, it's a thing that should be checked - depending on what the reality is it may suggest different ways of handling the situation.
And you consider lifting requirement for pairing up to have children to be bad beca-a-ause? "But that policy is making single men indirectly pay for child support - while also pumping up amount of single men" sounds, economically, like a dream come true if you want more money given to parents.
According to a friend who lives in Hungary, there's been a large exodus of highly educated women (and men) due to dislike of Orbán's policies and this is a large confounding factor in any attempts to look at the changes in fertility rate (as obviously the fertility rate is going to increase if you change the population's composition like that, educated people largely have less children) - did you have a chance to research the intricacies involved here?
Subsidizing fertility treatments seems like low-hanging fruit to increase reproduction by people who want to have children but are limited by a combination of biology and wealth. I have many friends who would like to have children or more children, but who can't afford to do so because of the costs of fertility treatments/surrogacy/adoption. While subsidies for fertility treatments, surrogacy, etc. would partially go to people who would have chosen to spend the money anyway, it would pretty clearly move the needle at the margin, and for people who very much want to have children (or more children).
Business Insider just misunderstood one of their sources, if you click on their linked source, there is an ambiguous sentence about mother under 30 and mothers with 4 children, which the journalist apparently misunderstood.
This makes this policy much less of a big deal than the post suggests, changing many of the conclusions.
On the other hand, the preferential mortgages are under-emphasized in the post, anecdotally this seems to be maybe the biggest deal for people, and the mechanism is pretty interesting.
Married couples can apply for $30,000 mortgage, which they don't have to repay at all if they have 3 children in the next 10 years. If they have 1 or 2 children, they get favorable interest rates, but if they don't have any children, they have to repay it in full with worse than the market interest rates on loans. Couples who already have 3 children they are currently raising can also apply and just get the $30,000 for buying a new home. The bad part is that this mortgage can only be used for newly-built apartments (with 3 children, you can also get a $7,000 subsidy for buying any apartment, but that's much less money). This is partially probably because of the lobbying of the construction industry, and partially for excluding poor people (a subsidy that can be interpreted as subsidizing the Roma to reproduce would be unpopular), as a newly-built apartment is expensive, so a poor couple can't buy one even with the subsidy. Unfortunately, newly-built apartments are often really expensive, so this implementation of the mortgage often exclude middle-class people too and creates various perverse incentives, also driving up apartment-prices (I can't assess how bad Hungary is in NIMBYism, but it's not particularly good).
I also want to make a general Gell-Mann amnesia note: understanding the policies of foreign-language countries is hard, both for journalists and bloggers working from second or third-hand sources. Even if a newspaper doesn't make such a serious mistake as Business Insider, it's hard to catch the (very significant!) small print about newly-built apartments in a foreign language law. So I wouldn't trust the analysis of other country's policies in this post very much either. (Although the broad conclusion that country's spend less on this than reasonable, probably stands.)
Is China doing more than is generally being reported?
If not, it seems strange how subdued the CPC's response to this is. They'll go to the ends of the earth to increase GDP growth, even if this is done in a largely unproductive way (e.g. malinvestment in worthless infrastructure/housing), but this huge, ticking time bomb that will unravel so many of their long-term ambitions apaprently isn't enough of a kick in the ass to even scrap restrictions of the number of children people can have (the limit was increased but there is still a limit), let alone going all out and fixing it in a characteristically CPC brute force way.
I mean, every government is like this. There are low hanging fruits, like government-funded dating apps, which wouldn't have a problem of misaligned incentives. Invest into creating third places (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place) appealing to young people. Don't discourage use of drugs lowering inhibitions.
Invest into making young people more appealing to each other. It's absurd that we have GLP-1 analogues, which solve obesity - we had them for years, at this point (Ozempic was approved in late 2017) - and they are still not deployed at scale.
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimagrumab | "to treat pathological muscle loss and weakness". The thing is, it works whether you have "pathological muscle loss" or not. But of course we will restrict it like this.
Boost testosterone levels in men; at least don't restrict access to steroids. Height surgery is a thing. Make it affordable. I'm pretty sure it would not cost a lot, at scale. Most of the cost is apparently hardware, and I don't believe it costs that much to manufacture. Subsidize plastic surgery.
Stop doing braindead things like restricting housing supply. Bully corporations to drop the attempts to reverse shift to remote work. Legislate away bullshit jobs, drop workhours by half. Productivity would probably increase that way, if anything. Having more time makes the prospect of raising a child less onerous. Possibly modify social contract a little, by taxing kids 10% of their income (lifetime), directly transferred to parents. It would incentivize having kids.
You might get me to support payments for having kids, but I see this going over like a lead balloon with my right leaning friends. They already complain about 'welfare mothers', taking their tax money. As a way to incentivize two parent families, you could pay a little for the parent staying home with the kids and give 'nice' tax breaks to the parent who is working.
Don't leave out orthodox Catholics and Ultra Orthodox Jews!
Catholic here. My parents had the record among the orthodox with just 4 kids. Spot the traditional Catholic countries here https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/4187653/11571499/Fertility_rate_values_map_2019-01.jpg/3982d64d-6542-5f1f-5d91-4d31278e40c8?t=1616426590837
Noe of the traditional catholic countries are really catholic.
It is a small sample size, but the folks I know that attend mass every week have a minimum of four kids.
;D - "real Catholicism has never been tried", I guess. Malta had no divorce laws till 2011. Abortion mostly not ok in Ireland till 2018. - none doing much to keep the birth rate over 2.0 - The folks you know seem to be very special. Maybe it is not their church. Btw: "Mass every week" does not qualify as "orthodox Catholic". lol . Mum goes several times a week. Grandma prayed each time the bells rang. As the Irish did.
Politics are a lagging indicator to culture. I can't find any data over time in the five minutes I am willing to spend searching, but the vast majority of Europe is just not very religious.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/06/13/how-religious-commitment-varies-by-country-among-people-of-all-ages/
Catholics who attend mass are about a third more fertile than the average American, according to this; mass attendance is directly correlated with more children, but not as strongly as I thought:
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/38446/empty-cradle-empty-pews-what-the-low-birth-rate-means-for-catholics
But does one want people with such warped incentives to take over simply because one couldn't figure out incentives for others to procreate (assuming getting more people on the planet is a good thing anyway, which we were ushered to (pretend to)* accept)?
As regards Amish and similar groups, I would personally argue for deconversion, for destroying their religions (like any other religion, especially any Abrahamic one), except that would, of course, be problematic in terms of getting more people on Earth.
As regards the last part: I mean the disclaimer at the top of Zvi's original post that states he won't get into arguments about it but emphatically states the position of "more people is good". My concern is people, existing and new, living lives not worth living in their own opinion, as well as Earth being way _over_ its long-term (i.e. not relying on frankly very finite amounts of oil, gas, and coal) capabilities of population support - this is not really about climate, although it may be an amplifier, this is about energy per person needed for establishing a not-totally-miserable standard of life - with no reasonable plans of living on other planets on the horizon.
On the contrary, deconversion was and is very successful. A century ago, most of non-Muslim Russia was Orthodox (or Jewish, but let's not touch that part, we know what happened there). Currently, despite all attempts by the government to reinstill Orthodoxy, Russia is _very_ comparatively secular. Same with Nordic countries and Lutheran Protestantism. Religions are beatable, they have been beaten before, and there are good rationality reasons to destroy them. As for "more passionate" - wombs of Amish women, to put it plainly, have finite capacity that they already mostly use, they just won't be able to reproduce twice as hard after you deconvert the other half.
Maximum energy from solar and similar sources was calculated to stably support at middle-class-level consumption something… less than current population (2 billion, from what I can quickly find now?). While I agree that catastrophes you mention are more of a concern, I really don't see a point in literally pumping more people on this planet.
Hosting a surrogacy increases the population, correct? It does create an opportunity for arbitrage, though.
Wouldn't necessarily increase the *Hungarian* population.
Hah, this is a very good point.
In a country with the political stability of Hungary (annual inflation rate this January: 25.7 %) it is quite possible that the next government, or even the same government, will later reverse course and cancel the tax break.
"It is simply that no one has done anything remotely like the reverse of the one child policy in China, or Iran’s widespread push to discourage births."
I think Ceaușescu's Romania was something like this.
Yep. I was more or less that generation, and we were doing 3 shifts at school for a few years.
Oh, decree 770. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770#Origin_of_the_decree "Contraceptives were removed from sale and all women were required to be monitored monthly by a gynecologist. Any detected pregnancies were followed until birth.
The direct consequence of the decree was a huge baby boom. Between 1966 and 1967 the number of births almost doubled, and the estimated total fertility rate increased from 1.9 to 3.7. Thousands of nursery schools were built. As the children got older, their needs were not properly met. There were cases where lectures were shortened to enable three school shifts."
Just because it needs to be said, and definitely not an argument against trying at all: selection effects are a thing.
For example flat payments have a higher effect for below average earners. This may mean younger people (which can be good, bad or neutral, depending on your goals), due to bad luck (compensating for which is definitely good), and also genetics. I think it's acceptable to say out loud that we don't want to do a whole lot of actual selection for negative traits.
Both genetics and inherited family culture(value of hard work, delayed rewards, etc.) - but conceptually the same; traits that are inherited within families.
Dependency ratios explain everything- that is the cudgel, unintentional most of the time, that governments used to drive down fertility rates. Young people don't just support the children they have- they have been increasingly supporting retirees who are complete strangers, government workers, and welfare beneficiaries of all types.
What is “ITT” in this context?
Intellectual Turing Test. It's a stronger version of steelman - can you create an argument for the other side that would pass as written by someone who actually believed in that position?
Oh durr. Should have thought of that, but immediately went to stranger non sensical acronyms. That and late night ITT Tech commercials.
Thanks.
"Requiring a college degree to provide child care is one of those places I fail the ITT."
Children are important and precious. They deserve the highest-quality care. College-educated people are higher-quality. They will know more of The Science about childcare and therefore make better decisions, meaning your children are less likely to DIE or be TRAUMATIZED. Isn't it worth paying a little more for that?
Not endorsed, just trying to imagine the thinking behind this insane rule.
It's about "children are sacred" plus refusal to recognize that tradeoffs are necessary. Or the delusion that all good things go together.
This is right. Also, tragic and horrible things sometimes happen to children, because we live in an imperfect world. After a tragedy, WE MUST DO SOMETHING, so there's a lot of temporary support to implementing new insane rules.
>Not endorsed, just trying to imagine the thinking behind this insane rule.
I don't know if you said "college-educated people are higher-quality" mockingly (as if this is a bad argument), but it's very obviously true.
College admission and graduation acts as a substantial (though declining) filter. To get into and pass college, on average you're going to be above the general population in intelligence and conscientiousness, for one thing, and you're going to be less likely to commit crime or anti-social behavior (which may be relevant in and of themselves but can also be used as a proxy for being more or less of a good/bad person generally).
All that's really up for debate is whether or not the reduction in supply (and associated higher costs/scarcity) the college degree requirement has is worth the (potential for, in the absence of actual empirical studies on childcare quality) better carers.
If anyone actually does claim that colelge educated people are good because they know about childcare, then this is a dumb argument.
Here's the rule in full: "Under the new rules, directors of child care centers will need a bachelor's degree in early education, teachers will need an associate's degree in early education, and assistant teachers and caregivers in home-based daycares will need a Child Development Associate's credential." The latter credential will be required for even a domestic childcare worker starting in 2023 - 120 hours of coursework.
I do think certified in-home daycares already require minimal coursework and a ton of other hoops to jump through (I myself briefly considered this, but my house would require massive renovations to make it possible in my state.) But it seems that this law will require a mom who wants to watch kids in her house for money, in addition to all the official certification hoops, to ALSO get a full bachelor's degree.
This, and also it should be noted that a degree with a specific major is required... the steelman for "college-educated people are higher quality" only works if you allow any major from a four-year university... there's nothing about a childcare studies major that signals more general competence than one in computer science or English.
Right - as a counter to the last argument, consider this Recess episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2h3LDIWcqU
Does the college degree in general make someone more caring and empathetic, or knowledgeable about the practicalities of children? Will they be kind to your child, love your child? Will they care and be responsible? Does a degree in Early Childhood Education, specifically, confer these magical qualities?
Of course, the care-giving field and profession is somewhat self-selecting, but not perfectly.
I know you're being sarcastic, but yeah the law is horrible.
It makes something already scarce scarcer and more expensive (like other untimely regulatory hoops - e.g. extra occupational licensing requirements for trade workers or truck drivers). Read the parenting boards about how hard it is to find childcare, and what the pay expectations are these days.
Daycare work is hard work, can be thankless. If you can make comparable money doing e.g. DoorDash or working at Target, why would you do the daycare work? But if you're running the daycare, you have certain overhead costs (e.g. rent, insurance) and there's only so much you can charge your families.... or they'll just opt for a nanny. So there's a limit to how much you can pay staff, and still make a living, while also conforming to maximum kid to teacher ratios.
Increase the hoops for a SAHM to provide care, for someone looking for part-time work to take daycare hours... and those people go underground or they just choose different work that is less hassle and perhaps more money. Or the SAHM has to enter the workforce to make money, further increasing childcare demand.
Now, the BACHELORS college requirement is only for daycare DIRECTORS. Teachers have to get an associates, which is a lower barrier to entry, but still: 1 to 2 years. A college student in, say, nursing or teaching, looking to make money and possibly get exposure to children, who might have taken a daycare job, will not be able to now.
I suspect a UBI would be a good plan for increasing children. It's Universal, meaning no age requirements. A flat rate per person payment. So if a single unemployed woman has a baby, their UBI payment instantly doubles.
Replace "fit" with "foot" https://english.stackexchange.com/a/17136/86519
Government subsidizing children could have rather concerning effects tho. It further reduces incentives for people to pair up. I mean, just look at these articles:
"Why a shortage of Mr Rights means single mothers hold the key to the falling birthrate": https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/11/why-a-shortage-of-mr-rights-means-single-mothers-hold-the-key-to-the-falling-birthrate
Article claims that fertility is low because there are no "good men", and the solution is to make being a single mother more viable financially.
I mean, it would work, probably. But that policy is making single men indirectly pay for child support - while also pumping up amount of single men. This comment on Reddit illustrates it pretty well: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/1132m36/birth_rates_are_plummeting_in_the_west_a_guardian/j8ou30d/
> TBF **if women have enough power to not need a male provider they may decide to do without**. It might be the real reason conservatives are making sure there is no universal childcare and good maternity leave and so on, it results in too much independence.
> Iceland has shown that a good support system for women leads them to not marry men nor wait for a marriage to have children of their own. In 2017, over 2/3s of babies were born to mothers who were not married.
> It seems if you give women the social support they need to have families, they will just have them without waiting for someone to put a ring on it. Some women have children from multiple fathers. And we see none of the hand-wringing we hear about someone getting pregnant and the father is crap and what to do. Icelandic women just have the children they want when they want them. I am sure it is easy to sign men up for that when there is little to no requirement to personally support these children. **Men could become drones in this scenario.**
And a NYT article: "Are Men the Overlooked Reason for the Fertility Decline?": https://archive.is/20230215143702/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/15/opinion/fertility-decline.html
"Skirbekk argues, in part, that it’s because of a lack of “‘suitable’ men, as women have become increasingly selective.”
"That men are increasingly living lives in which they feel they are unable to fully flourish, causing women to not want to have children with them, is a problem(...)"
Any policy which makes having children without a partner more financially viable will just make things worse, ultimately. Sure, you can boost fertility rate—but also, such society won't be stable. As I responded to that Reddit comment:
> If you structure things that way, there's absolutely no reason to not reproduce with the most attractive willing man availalble. Since a single man could (& would, if it doesn't cost him anything personally) impregnate a large amount of women, vast majority (90%?) of men won't. Yet they would, for some reason, be expected to provide for all of this.
This is a problem, and I would go so far as to say a tragedy, but probably not as much of a problem as chronic demographic decline.
And I personally believe that"fixing" the issue with increase immigration would have an even worse cultural impact, so it becomes a matter of picking the least terrible alternative.
You make a good point and I'm not debating it. Just a small nitpick:
> Iceland has shown that a good support system for women leads them to not marry men nor wait for a marriage to have children of their own. In 2017, over 2/3s of babies were born to mothers who were not married.
It could be that couples just chose not to go through with the actual marriage, but still live and raise children together. Given that Iceland is probably as non-religious as they come, it's a thing that should be checked - depending on what the reality is it may suggest different ways of handling the situation.
And you consider lifting requirement for pairing up to have children to be bad beca-a-ause? "But that policy is making single men indirectly pay for child support - while also pumping up amount of single men" sounds, economically, like a dream come true if you want more money given to parents.
According to a friend who lives in Hungary, there's been a large exodus of highly educated women (and men) due to dislike of Orbán's policies and this is a large confounding factor in any attempts to look at the changes in fertility rate (as obviously the fertility rate is going to increase if you change the population's composition like that, educated people largely have less children) - did you have a chance to research the intricacies involved here?
Very good point.
Subsidizing fertility treatments seems like low-hanging fruit to increase reproduction by people who want to have children but are limited by a combination of biology and wealth. I have many friends who would like to have children or more children, but who can't afford to do so because of the costs of fertility treatments/surrogacy/adoption. While subsidies for fertility treatments, surrogacy, etc. would partially go to people who would have chosen to spend the money anyway, it would pretty clearly move the needle at the margin, and for people who very much want to have children (or more children).
In Hungary, mothers under 30 don't get tax exemption for life, only until their 30th birthday. This is very clear from Hungarian sources (I am Hungarian), but it's also how most of the English language media reports it. https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/current/hungarian-family-policy-in-action-no-income-tax-for-young-mothers/
Business Insider just misunderstood one of their sources, if you click on their linked source, there is an ambiguous sentence about mother under 30 and mothers with 4 children, which the journalist apparently misunderstood.
This makes this policy much less of a big deal than the post suggests, changing many of the conclusions.
On the other hand, the preferential mortgages are under-emphasized in the post, anecdotally this seems to be maybe the biggest deal for people, and the mechanism is pretty interesting.
https://www.euronews.com/2019/07/29/hungary-offers-30-000-to-married-couples-who-can-produce-three-children
Married couples can apply for $30,000 mortgage, which they don't have to repay at all if they have 3 children in the next 10 years. If they have 1 or 2 children, they get favorable interest rates, but if they don't have any children, they have to repay it in full with worse than the market interest rates on loans. Couples who already have 3 children they are currently raising can also apply and just get the $30,000 for buying a new home. The bad part is that this mortgage can only be used for newly-built apartments (with 3 children, you can also get a $7,000 subsidy for buying any apartment, but that's much less money). This is partially probably because of the lobbying of the construction industry, and partially for excluding poor people (a subsidy that can be interpreted as subsidizing the Roma to reproduce would be unpopular), as a newly-built apartment is expensive, so a poor couple can't buy one even with the subsidy. Unfortunately, newly-built apartments are often really expensive, so this implementation of the mortgage often exclude middle-class people too and creates various perverse incentives, also driving up apartment-prices (I can't assess how bad Hungary is in NIMBYism, but it's not particularly good).
I also want to make a general Gell-Mann amnesia note: understanding the policies of foreign-language countries is hard, both for journalists and bloggers working from second or third-hand sources. Even if a newspaper doesn't make such a serious mistake as Business Insider, it's hard to catch the (very significant!) small print about newly-built apartments in a foreign language law. So I wouldn't trust the analysis of other country's policies in this post very much either. (Although the broad conclusion that country's spend less on this than reasonable, probably stands.)
Is China doing more than is generally being reported?
If not, it seems strange how subdued the CPC's response to this is. They'll go to the ends of the earth to increase GDP growth, even if this is done in a largely unproductive way (e.g. malinvestment in worthless infrastructure/housing), but this huge, ticking time bomb that will unravel so many of their long-term ambitions apaprently isn't enough of a kick in the ass to even scrap restrictions of the number of children people can have (the limit was increased but there is still a limit), let alone going all out and fixing it in a characteristically CPC brute force way.
I mean, every government is like this. There are low hanging fruits, like government-funded dating apps, which wouldn't have a problem of misaligned incentives. Invest into creating third places (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place) appealing to young people. Don't discourage use of drugs lowering inhibitions.
Invest into making young people more appealing to each other. It's absurd that we have GLP-1 analogues, which solve obesity - we had them for years, at this point (Ozempic was approved in late 2017) - and they are still not deployed at scale.
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimagrumab | "to treat pathological muscle loss and weakness". The thing is, it works whether you have "pathological muscle loss" or not. But of course we will restrict it like this.
Boost testosterone levels in men; at least don't restrict access to steroids. Height surgery is a thing. Make it affordable. I'm pretty sure it would not cost a lot, at scale. Most of the cost is apparently hardware, and I don't believe it costs that much to manufacture. Subsidize plastic surgery.
Stop doing braindead things like restricting housing supply. Bully corporations to drop the attempts to reverse shift to remote work. Legislate away bullshit jobs, drop workhours by half. Productivity would probably increase that way, if anything. Having more time makes the prospect of raising a child less onerous. Possibly modify social contract a little, by taxing kids 10% of their income (lifetime), directly transferred to parents. It would incentivize having kids.
You might get me to support payments for having kids, but I see this going over like a lead balloon with my right leaning friends. They already complain about 'welfare mothers', taking their tax money. As a way to incentivize two parent families, you could pay a little for the parent staying home with the kids and give 'nice' tax breaks to the parent who is working.