I have strong opinions on all of this, but first I would like to know what Dakka is. Google AI said this: Dakka has multiple meanings, including:
A raised platform in a mosque: A dikka or dakka is a raised platform in a mosque where the Quran is recited and where the muezzin chants. In Turkish, it is known as a müezzin mahfili.
A term for firearms in Warhammer 40,000: Dakka is a term used to describe the firearms used by Orks in Warhammer 40,000.
A trope for solving problems by firing rounds of ammunition: The trope "More Dakka" is used to describe the idea of solving problems by firing as many rounds of ammunition as possible.
An Austronesian language: Dakka is an Austronesian language spoken in Sulawesi, Indonesia.
A resort town in Pakistan: Ghora Dhaka or Ghora Dakka is a resort town in northeast Pakistan.
A Syrian footballer: Abdulkader Dakka is a Syrian footballer born in 1985.
A game: Dakka Squadron is an aerial shooter game for the Nintendo Switch and other platforms. In the game, you play as an Ork Flyboy who fights in air battles across war-torn landscapes.
You're correct in your assessment, but as a minor addendum, the trope originates from the immediately preceding list item. The Orks in Warhammer 40k are the faction most inclined to solve problems by brute force, and hence a problem that Dakka isn't solving is one that naturally suggests that the solution is "More Dakka."
Only German policies from 1933 to 1945 worked well. We must inscrease not only in quantity, but mainly in quality. Israel, India and Africa are worsening the curve. Importing muslims will bring more problems instead of solving them. We must work with the Nordic populations in the diaspora and raise and rise them to the pole positions. Heroic culture, leadership principle, education in raciology and race pride and exclude the unfit. It worked once and it will work again. God with us
By "nazis", a word coined by a pharisee, you may be relating to the ashkenazim, and they indeed lost. The holocaust was commited against the German people and I agree it was disgraceful but National-Socialist will be back soon to save the world definitely.
The PGS sceeening study introduces a good dose of bias by checking whether the respondents actually understand the issue (must score 5/7 on a questionnaire)
Therefore respondents are significantly over educated vs general population.
Wonder how much we should correct the 77% figure to account for this. Probably possible to poll the less educated specifically by taking more time to explain the issue in another follow up study.
88% of the general public supports IVF. Once they do IVF, self interest will take care of the rest for most people. It already does with screening Downs Syndrome.
Getting people that don't need IVF to do it for eugenic purposes is a harder road. I suspect making the actual onerousness of the process easier would go a long way, but that's science not policy.
Most people aren't aware of the options - self interest would lead to people saying "yes" if screening is offered, but I doubt many people would ask it of a doctor that didn't mention the possibility
In central Europe, encouraging the "right" kind of fertility (generally middle-class and rich people) is a huge part of the discussion and very politically sensitive. Not encouraging poor people to have more children is 100% by design. The Hungarian tax subsidies make a lot of sense in this context.
I'm curious to hear your opinion on this. You seem to criticize the Hungarian approach at first, but then you endorse similar approaches later (e.g. Bryan Caplan's tax subsidy).
The Hungarian approach would be fine if it actually did what it said on the tin. It does not, all it does is remove a (relatively) small tax and only for the *mother's* wages, so the father can't even use the subsidy.
Actually do "no tax for 4+ kids for life for both earners"... and I'd expect TFR to soar above 2.0 within a few years, conditional on this change being somehow binding and irrevocable by future governments.
I faced a fertility issue not mentioned here: my wife had pregnancy-induced Crohn's Disease. After the second child they warned us not to have another kid for fear for her life.
I would generalize this: making pregnancy less medically dangerous, unpleasant, and generally scary might help people whose main hurdle to having kids is childbirth. Better treatments for things like nausea/morning sickness, other GI issues, pelvic floor issues and back pain, other musculoskeletal issues, metabolic issues like gestational diabetes (which increases your risk for type 2 diabetes later even if it goes away postpartum), perinatal depression and psychosis... there's a lot to be worried about.
This is half the reason we're stopping at 2 (the other half is housing; fix both and we'd probably have 4). Not your specific issue, but the lack of research into pre-eclampsia, given it is relatively common and very dangerous, is stunning.
In the UK, pensioners often justify their massively overprotected state pensions by saying things like "we paid into the system when we were younger, now we deserve to be repaid". Of course that's not how state pensions actually work, and it's an unfunded liability that relies on the working population funding those older than them.
In my mind that prompts the question of whether people without kids should get state pensions. Overall, the system breaks if the dependency ratio keeps increasing, but also individually older people without kids should have significantly more privately held assets with which to fund their own retirement.
Removing pensions for child-free adults couldn't be further from the ideal of providing cash up front, but has the benefit that it would be a saving rather than a cost to the state.
1) The system requires each generation to both fund the previous, and raise the next. If you don't have kids, arguably you've only done half the duty.
2) I'm not sure that makes much difference. My point was more the money they have/could save through not bringing up children can be invested privately for their retirement.
3) This could be solved by announcing long in advance that a change will happen, similar to how changes in retirement age etc work. You'd still get the changes in incentives to have children now, without needing to affect people close to retirement for whom it's too late anyway.
Just raising tax rates would help too. Taxes increase the relative cost of arm’s length economic transactions, as opposed to informal and non-monetary transactions. In other words, the higher payroll taxes are, the worse off you are in relative terms when your retirement plan hinges on giving money to unrelated young people in return for services.
Make sure that both kids and elderly parents can be treated as dependents by working age people, and that having more dependents gives large tax reductions, ideally scaled by income.
But yeah, I worry that incentive effects are going to be really weak with any scheme that mostly doesn’t kick in until retirement age.
However, the up front payroll tax burden should be lower for those that have kids versus those that don't.
In the US you could eliminate employer FICA taxes (7.65%) for 2+ kid households and all FICA taxes (15.3%) for 3+ kid households at a cost of around $240B a year.
Collect the FICA taxes up front and then refund them out of the general fund (trust fund untouched, even if its just an accounting gimmick). FICA income is easy to calculate, can't really be manipulated, and is a nice flat tax with a cap that everyone with any kind of income pays.
You could easily pay for that by eliminating the SALT deduction ($210B). Mortgage interest deduction ($80B) and removal of the SS CAP above $400k ($110B) are also potential revenue sources along the same lines.
"We are going to tax a few rich childless blue staters by eliminating distortionary tax breaks so that we can give the median family $8k/year for the second child and another $8/year for the third."
I think I can sell that on the campaign trail.
The incentives are also a lot better. Marriage, earnings, and large families are all promoted. A regular refundable child tax credit doesn't do that and using income taxes is too exclusionary and complicated.
My basic rule for child benefits is:
1) Cash is king!
2) Scale with income, but income taxes themselves a bad vehicle for calculation
3) Keep it SIMPLE. If I'm submitting a PDF receipt (I'm looking at you Dependent Care FSA) its too complicated.
4) There is always a tradeoff between targeting and political support.
You could for instance only target a large lump sum at birth, but all of a sudden any family in like their 40s that has kids in the house and is done isn't a beneficiary anymore. Paying $2k credit for an 18 year old might not be the perfect use of funds, but it widens the net of people that feel they benefit (and thus will support) such policies.
So I prefer a wide dispersal of benefits but scaling them up at the points of most efficiency.
I like this idea, and we already have some allowance for it in that mothers can claim national insurance credits via child benefit rather than working, and that more broadly you make NI contributions to earn your full pension.
So you could tinker with this to make motherhood more rewarding in the pension, add fatherhood as well perhaps, or as you suggest, a penalty for those without any years of motherhood or fatherhood.
Seems that the best leverage points are in starting early (marriage and children), social contagion (everyone has kids, so we need to as well), and status games.
With this in mind, if I was spitballing…
1) Free college for marrieds or those with kids (with day care provided of course)
2) require elite colleges to save half their slots for students with kids
3) government reduces or subsidizes home loan interest rate substantially for under 30s with 2 kids
4) Au Pairs are paid by the government for any family in 30s with two kids and any age of 3 plus. Then let au pair stay and have kids of her own after brief time.
5) SS employer contribution doubles or triples for workers without kids, stays same for one kid, and goes down from there with more, eventually disappearing
6) Require large employers to affirmatively hire people with large families. Penalize those that don’t.
7) Massive increases in young family immigrants that speak English, and have college degrees.
Try this and other stuff and see what works. Or don’t and disappear.
> You know what it would take to make housing that cheap?
> The cube.
That image appears to be from https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-building.html , only with the credit link cropped out? Also note, it's using "could hold [everyone]" rather literally, as how many bodies can theoretically be packed in. ("6.06 people per cubic meter") Not quite viable housing.
I don't understand why we should worry about fertility rates?? AGI is close and policies to boost fertility rates will only have a meaningful impact in 20+ years.
1. Maybe it's not close. 20 years ago some people thought it was close.
2. Even if it is close, who and how many people live on the planet in 20 years will still plausibly have a major effect on the future.
3. Many people want to have more children then they are having. Many people would plausibly like to have more children if there were easier ways to do so. Having children is good. More people existing is good. We should encourage good things.
Here’s a recent Finnish proposal tackling low birth rates by incentivizing early parenthood. In a report commissioned by the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, the rapporteur is proposing a financial benefit (around €10,000–€30,000) for having a first child before age 30, applied to housing loans, student loans, taxes, or pensions. The goal is to counteract societal delays in family formation. Read more at the English description of the report from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, which contains 20 proposals in total: https://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/-//1271139/rapporteur-proposes-ways-to-stop-declining-birth-rate
The proposal in question is described in Finnish under section 5.2 Timing of Parenthood, Education, and Employment so use your favorite translator!
Proposal to Increase Fertility in Finland: Timing of Parenthood, Education, and Employment
5.2 Timing of Parenthood, Education, and Employment 5.2.1 Timing of Childbearing in Life Course
Proposal #3 Develop a financial incentive for having the first child before a woman’s 30th birthday. This incentive could apply to, for example, housing loans, student loans, taxation, or pensions—or several of these.
Why? In Finland, people become parents later on average than in other Nordic countries, and the proportion of people without children is one of the highest in Europe. A significant part of unwanted childlessness arises because attempts to have children begin at an age that is, from a reproductive biology perspective, too late. Four out of five Finns hope to have at least two children, suggesting that efforts to achieve this should start before the woman turns 30. The reasons for delaying parenthood are not solely individual; societal values promote a prolonged youth and may even discourage "too early" childbearing.
Research suggests that influencing the timing of parenthood with financial incentives is, to some extent, effective policy. For example, Hungary and Germany have recently invested heavily in family policies targeting timing, and this has apparently been more effective than other measures. In Norway, tax breaks and income transfers for families with children boosted birth rates among women aged 20–24 during the 1980s.
Several studies indicate that incentives offered at the birth of a baby (such as a "baby bonus" in the form of cash or service vouchers) typically affect the timing of childbirth but not necessarily the final number of children. Families may form sooner than they would have otherwise, without affecting the total number of children. However, timing incentives may be wise when declining birth rates primarily concern firstborns.
A timing-based incentive would also serve as a strong societal signal. It would convey that it is desirable, for the well-being of both young people and society as a whole, for people to have children when the likelihood of success is highest. Since role models and peer behavior influence family planning, such incentives may also help prevent the formation of "low birth rate spirals."
The incentive might feel unfair to those without a partner or those who face difficulties in conceiving. However, there are also direct or indirect societal costs when people have children later in life or not at all. This new support would express that having a first child at an age favorable to reproductive biology is desirable.
How? Develop a financial incentive to encourage having a first child before the mother turns 30. The incentive would be worth approximately €10,000–€30,000 and could apply to housing loans, student loans, taxation, or pensions, or a combination of these. For example, in Hungary, childless couples can take out loans with subsidized interest rates and delayed repayment terms, with portions of the loan forgiven if children are born. Similarly, in Finland, one might envision a 20% reduction in housing loans or a 25% reduction in student loans upon the birth of a first child before age 30.
It is advisable to investigate the potential impacts of such incentive proposals, including any unintended consequences, in further planning stages. Symbolic incentives could also be considered. The core of the incentive would be to express a strong state commitment to supporting families with children and to signal that Finland is a safe and welcoming place for having children.
It's my understanding, based on a little searching, that Japan permits research involving modified embryos, but does not permit these researchers to use the modified embryos for births.
>Eventually, the mothers even benefitted from a child premium compared to women who were not initially successful with IVF.
I have spoken to people who recruit or hire peoppe for big companies in Denmark. Anecdotally there is often a preference for young mothers or even pregnant women because 1) people aren't grinding the long hours in Denmark anyway, so leaving "early" to pick up kids isn't a big deal, and 2) they are much more loyal employees, tend to not switch jobs all the time and tend to be generally very low hassle.
I have strong opinions on all of this, but first I would like to know what Dakka is. Google AI said this: Dakka has multiple meanings, including:
A raised platform in a mosque: A dikka or dakka is a raised platform in a mosque where the Quran is recited and where the muezzin chants. In Turkish, it is known as a müezzin mahfili.
A term for firearms in Warhammer 40,000: Dakka is a term used to describe the firearms used by Orks in Warhammer 40,000.
A trope for solving problems by firing rounds of ammunition: The trope "More Dakka" is used to describe the idea of solving problems by firing as many rounds of ammunition as possible.
An Austronesian language: Dakka is an Austronesian language spoken in Sulawesi, Indonesia.
A resort town in Pakistan: Ghora Dhaka or Ghora Dakka is a resort town in northeast Pakistan.
A Syrian footballer: Abdulkader Dakka is a Syrian footballer born in 1985.
A game: Dakka Squadron is an aerial shooter game for the Nintendo Switch and other platforms. In the game, you play as an Ork Flyboy who fights in air battles across war-torn landscapes.
I assume it's not the Syrian footballer
Never mind, I'm guessing it's the trope one. Missed that on my first reading.
You're correct in your assessment, but as a minor addendum, the trope originates from the immediately preceding list item. The Orks in Warhammer 40k are the faction most inclined to solve problems by brute force, and hence a problem that Dakka isn't solving is one that naturally suggests that the solution is "More Dakka."
Also, Warhammer Orks do not have low fertility issues!
See this post by Zvi, titled "More Dakka": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z8usYeKX7dtTWsEnk/more-dakka
It looks like you are referring to Lyman Stone with female pronouns in this?
oh my I've been doing that for YEARS.
Great roundup! Yes, Polybius is one of many who comment on fertility in the ancient world. Also see Aristotle and Plato. One such article here:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26307513
Only German policies from 1933 to 1945 worked well. We must inscrease not only in quantity, but mainly in quality. Israel, India and Africa are worsening the curve. Importing muslims will bring more problems instead of solving them. We must work with the Nordic populations in the diaspora and raise and rise them to the pole positions. Heroic culture, leadership principle, education in raciology and race pride and exclude the unfit. It worked once and it will work again. God with us
The Holocaust was one of the most dysgenic events in human history.
It also kicked off the boom in 'white guilt' you're probably seething about.
And BTW, the Nazis lost.
By "nazis", a word coined by a pharisee, you may be relating to the ashkenazim, and they indeed lost. The holocaust was commited against the German people and I agree it was disgraceful but National-Socialist will be back soon to save the world definitely.
Imagining Taylor swift personally blessing each third child for fertility gains in the US
I mean you'd need to do it as part of the stadium tour, but if you included free tickets...
This might unironically actually work. Taylor Swift tickets for free if you have a baby.
Or get 20 of the most popular celebrities in America, and you get to choose your own adventure. Don't let the Swifties have all the fun.
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/fertility-roundup-4?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
The PGS sceeening study introduces a good dose of bias by checking whether the respondents actually understand the issue (must score 5/7 on a questionnaire)
Therefore respondents are significantly over educated vs general population.
Wonder how much we should correct the 77% figure to account for this. Probably possible to poll the less educated specifically by taking more time to explain the issue in another follow up study.
88% of the general public supports IVF. Once they do IVF, self interest will take care of the rest for most people. It already does with screening Downs Syndrome.
Getting people that don't need IVF to do it for eugenic purposes is a harder road. I suspect making the actual onerousness of the process easier would go a long way, but that's science not policy.
Most people aren't aware of the options - self interest would lead to people saying "yes" if screening is offered, but I doubt many people would ask it of a doctor that didn't mention the possibility
In central Europe, encouraging the "right" kind of fertility (generally middle-class and rich people) is a huge part of the discussion and very politically sensitive. Not encouraging poor people to have more children is 100% by design. The Hungarian tax subsidies make a lot of sense in this context.
I'm curious to hear your opinion on this. You seem to criticize the Hungarian approach at first, but then you endorse similar approaches later (e.g. Bryan Caplan's tax subsidy).
The Hungarian approach would be fine if it actually did what it said on the tin. It does not, all it does is remove a (relatively) small tax and only for the *mother's* wages, so the father can't even use the subsidy.
Actually do "no tax for 4+ kids for life for both earners"... and I'd expect TFR to soar above 2.0 within a few years, conditional on this change being somehow binding and irrevocable by future governments.
I faced a fertility issue not mentioned here: my wife had pregnancy-induced Crohn's Disease. After the second child they warned us not to have another kid for fear for her life.
Medical research needed.
I would generalize this: making pregnancy less medically dangerous, unpleasant, and generally scary might help people whose main hurdle to having kids is childbirth. Better treatments for things like nausea/morning sickness, other GI issues, pelvic floor issues and back pain, other musculoskeletal issues, metabolic issues like gestational diabetes (which increases your risk for type 2 diabetes later even if it goes away postpartum), perinatal depression and psychosis... there's a lot to be worried about.
This is half the reason we're stopping at 2 (the other half is housing; fix both and we'd probably have 4). Not your specific issue, but the lack of research into pre-eclampsia, given it is relatively common and very dangerous, is stunning.
In the UK, pensioners often justify their massively overprotected state pensions by saying things like "we paid into the system when we were younger, now we deserve to be repaid". Of course that's not how state pensions actually work, and it's an unfunded liability that relies on the working population funding those older than them.
In my mind that prompts the question of whether people without kids should get state pensions. Overall, the system breaks if the dependency ratio keeps increasing, but also individually older people without kids should have significantly more privately held assets with which to fund their own retirement.
Removing pensions for child-free adults couldn't be further from the ideal of providing cash up front, but has the benefit that it would be a saving rather than a cost to the state.
The counter-counter argument is that:
1. Their wages have paid for the retirement benefits of the previous generation, so they've done their duty as well
2. They weren't provided a choice of not paying the tax or at least using it in a manner similar to 401k. The only country that lets you do this is AFAIK Malaysia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employees_Provident_Fund_(Malaysia)
3. They weren't warned about the policy change in advance
1) The system requires each generation to both fund the previous, and raise the next. If you don't have kids, arguably you've only done half the duty.
2) I'm not sure that makes much difference. My point was more the money they have/could save through not bringing up children can be invested privately for their retirement.
3) This could be solved by announcing long in advance that a change will happen, similar to how changes in retirement age etc work. You'd still get the changes in incentives to have children now, without needing to affect people close to retirement for whom it's too late anyway.
Just raising tax rates would help too. Taxes increase the relative cost of arm’s length economic transactions, as opposed to informal and non-monetary transactions. In other words, the higher payroll taxes are, the worse off you are in relative terms when your retirement plan hinges on giving money to unrelated young people in return for services.
Make sure that both kids and elderly parents can be treated as dependents by working age people, and that having more dependents gives large tax reductions, ideally scaled by income.
But yeah, I worry that incentive effects are going to be really weak with any scheme that mostly doesn’t kick in until retirement age.
"Removing pensions for child-free adults"
Is dead on arrival.
However, the up front payroll tax burden should be lower for those that have kids versus those that don't.
In the US you could eliminate employer FICA taxes (7.65%) for 2+ kid households and all FICA taxes (15.3%) for 3+ kid households at a cost of around $240B a year.
Collect the FICA taxes up front and then refund them out of the general fund (trust fund untouched, even if its just an accounting gimmick). FICA income is easy to calculate, can't really be manipulated, and is a nice flat tax with a cap that everyone with any kind of income pays.
You could easily pay for that by eliminating the SALT deduction ($210B). Mortgage interest deduction ($80B) and removal of the SS CAP above $400k ($110B) are also potential revenue sources along the same lines.
"We are going to tax a few rich childless blue staters by eliminating distortionary tax breaks so that we can give the median family $8k/year for the second child and another $8/year for the third."
I think I can sell that on the campaign trail.
The incentives are also a lot better. Marriage, earnings, and large families are all promoted. A regular refundable child tax credit doesn't do that and using income taxes is too exclusionary and complicated.
My basic rule for child benefits is:
1) Cash is king!
2) Scale with income, but income taxes themselves a bad vehicle for calculation
3) Keep it SIMPLE. If I'm submitting a PDF receipt (I'm looking at you Dependent Care FSA) its too complicated.
4) There is always a tradeoff between targeting and political support.
You could for instance only target a large lump sum at birth, but all of a sudden any family in like their 40s that has kids in the house and is done isn't a beneficiary anymore. Paying $2k credit for an 18 year old might not be the perfect use of funds, but it widens the net of people that feel they benefit (and thus will support) such policies.
So I prefer a wide dispersal of benefits but scaling them up at the points of most efficiency.
Propose: If you have kids, you get a percentage of their Social Security work credits as a bonus to your own account.
I like this idea, and we already have some allowance for it in that mothers can claim national insurance credits via child benefit rather than working, and that more broadly you make NI contributions to earn your full pension.
So you could tinker with this to make motherhood more rewarding in the pension, add fatherhood as well perhaps, or as you suggest, a penalty for those without any years of motherhood or fatherhood.
Seems that the best leverage points are in starting early (marriage and children), social contagion (everyone has kids, so we need to as well), and status games.
With this in mind, if I was spitballing…
1) Free college for marrieds or those with kids (with day care provided of course)
2) require elite colleges to save half their slots for students with kids
3) government reduces or subsidizes home loan interest rate substantially for under 30s with 2 kids
4) Au Pairs are paid by the government for any family in 30s with two kids and any age of 3 plus. Then let au pair stay and have kids of her own after brief time.
5) SS employer contribution doubles or triples for workers without kids, stays same for one kid, and goes down from there with more, eventually disappearing
6) Require large employers to affirmatively hire people with large families. Penalize those that don’t.
7) Massive increases in young family immigrants that speak English, and have college degrees.
Try this and other stuff and see what works. Or don’t and disappear.
> You know what it would take to make housing that cheap?
> The cube.
That image appears to be from https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-building.html , only with the credit link cropped out? Also note, it's using "could hold [everyone]" rather literally, as how many bodies can theoretically be packed in. ("6.06 people per cubic meter") Not quite viable housing.
I don't understand why we should worry about fertility rates?? AGI is close and policies to boost fertility rates will only have a meaningful impact in 20+ years.
1. Maybe it's not close. 20 years ago some people thought it was close.
2. Even if it is close, who and how many people live on the planet in 20 years will still plausibly have a major effect on the future.
3. Many people want to have more children then they are having. Many people would plausibly like to have more children if there were easier ways to do so. Having children is good. More people existing is good. We should encourage good things.
Here’s a recent Finnish proposal tackling low birth rates by incentivizing early parenthood. In a report commissioned by the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, the rapporteur is proposing a financial benefit (around €10,000–€30,000) for having a first child before age 30, applied to housing loans, student loans, taxes, or pensions. The goal is to counteract societal delays in family formation. Read more at the English description of the report from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, which contains 20 proposals in total: https://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/-//1271139/rapporteur-proposes-ways-to-stop-declining-birth-rate
The proposal in question is described in Finnish under section 5.2 Timing of Parenthood, Education, and Employment so use your favorite translator!
Here it is, translated by GPT-4:
Proposal to Increase Fertility in Finland: Timing of Parenthood, Education, and Employment
5.2 Timing of Parenthood, Education, and Employment 5.2.1 Timing of Childbearing in Life Course
Proposal #3 Develop a financial incentive for having the first child before a woman’s 30th birthday. This incentive could apply to, for example, housing loans, student loans, taxation, or pensions—or several of these.
Why? In Finland, people become parents later on average than in other Nordic countries, and the proportion of people without children is one of the highest in Europe. A significant part of unwanted childlessness arises because attempts to have children begin at an age that is, from a reproductive biology perspective, too late. Four out of five Finns hope to have at least two children, suggesting that efforts to achieve this should start before the woman turns 30. The reasons for delaying parenthood are not solely individual; societal values promote a prolonged youth and may even discourage "too early" childbearing.
Research suggests that influencing the timing of parenthood with financial incentives is, to some extent, effective policy. For example, Hungary and Germany have recently invested heavily in family policies targeting timing, and this has apparently been more effective than other measures. In Norway, tax breaks and income transfers for families with children boosted birth rates among women aged 20–24 during the 1980s.
Several studies indicate that incentives offered at the birth of a baby (such as a "baby bonus" in the form of cash or service vouchers) typically affect the timing of childbirth but not necessarily the final number of children. Families may form sooner than they would have otherwise, without affecting the total number of children. However, timing incentives may be wise when declining birth rates primarily concern firstborns.
A timing-based incentive would also serve as a strong societal signal. It would convey that it is desirable, for the well-being of both young people and society as a whole, for people to have children when the likelihood of success is highest. Since role models and peer behavior influence family planning, such incentives may also help prevent the formation of "low birth rate spirals."
The incentive might feel unfair to those without a partner or those who face difficulties in conceiving. However, there are also direct or indirect societal costs when people have children later in life or not at all. This new support would express that having a first child at an age favorable to reproductive biology is desirable.
How? Develop a financial incentive to encourage having a first child before the mother turns 30. The incentive would be worth approximately €10,000–€30,000 and could apply to housing loans, student loans, taxation, or pensions, or a combination of these. For example, in Hungary, childless couples can take out loans with subsidized interest rates and delayed repayment terms, with portions of the loan forgiven if children are born. Similarly, in Finland, one might envision a 20% reduction in housing loans or a 25% reduction in student loans upon the birth of a first child before age 30.
It is advisable to investigate the potential impacts of such incentive proposals, including any unintended consequences, in further planning stages. Symbolic incentives could also be considered. The core of the incentive would be to express a strong state commitment to supporting families with children and to signal that Finland is a safe and welcoming place for having children.
> Japan to become the second country to allow gene editing before birth. https://x.com/Jiankui_He/status/1861956926822904201
It's my understanding, based on a little searching, that Japan permits research involving modified embryos, but does not permit these researchers to use the modified embryos for births.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Science/Japan-allows-gene-editing-for-research-only https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10324961/
Perhaps Jiankui He is trying to make a prediction, rather than an announcement.
>Eventually, the mothers even benefitted from a child premium compared to women who were not initially successful with IVF.
I have spoken to people who recruit or hire peoppe for big companies in Denmark. Anecdotally there is often a preference for young mothers or even pregnant women because 1) people aren't grinding the long hours in Denmark anyway, so leaving "early" to pick up kids isn't a big deal, and 2) they are much more loyal employees, tend to not switch jobs all the time and tend to be generally very low hassle.