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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27720 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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Solution isn’t simple. Countries have tried economic incentives and mostly failed or slowed the decline.

It also introduces a huge deadweight loss of higher taxes. Since most of these ideal heavily bread females would be supported by heavily taxed men who are their husbands it’s wooing just further depress economic activity. The past would have expected the man to man up and work 80 hrs a week if he needed and transfer directly to his wife instead of using the government as a middleman.

Probably far easier to propandize all the Instagram executives. Instead of filling young females with attractive girls traveling to Bali bombard them with pretty pregnant chicks with 5 children and a dutiful loving husband. You can change economic incentives sure but changing what people value changes how the evaluate incentives. If real life hot pussy is begging men to man up I am guessing there is no shortage of men willing to work 80 hours a week for that deal.

Social media turned a not insignificant faction of young girls into Hamas lovers so I would bet on social media being able to make young girls obsessed with cute little humans.

Solution isn’t simple. Countries have tried economic incentives and mostly failed or slowed the decline.

So I've heard a sort of interesting argument regarding these incentives in general. What they are mostly designed to do anywhere they are enacted is convince couples in stable marriages with one child to have a second one. That's it. It's because it's the one incentive the majority of citizens are still willing to support, because just handing out wads of cash to women for birthing babies isn't politically acceptable anywhere. So of course they won't end up doing much, because the people they're meant to help are not the majority to begin with.

Countries have tried economic incentives and mostly failed or slowed the decline

Have they tried economic incentives that are at least a 2 digit percentage of the opportunity cost of having additional children?

Hungary spends 5% of gdp on boosting fertility. So yes they cross that threshold. Without verifying that number it’s going to be very hard for governments to go any higher than 5% of gdp. Countries need to do a lot more things than subsidize fertility.

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-populist-right-want-you-make-more-babies-viktor-orban/

What they need to do is guarantee mothers the same career income they would otherwise have. So, eg. if a female doctor aged 28 has three children, she receives $2m in cash over a certain number of years. If a shop assistant of the same age has three children, she receives only $200k. No country subsidises kids to the extent that an even moderately successful woman would notice the difference.

This wouldn't work at all, women would just get whatever degree would "pay the most" and then have 3 kids starting at 22. It would bankrupt the system in no time.

It wouldn't happen if the guaranteed subsidy to mothers was calculated according to their actual income before conception.

Medical school places are limited and handed out based on intelligence and conscientiousness, that isn’t a flaw with the system at all.

I can imagine the admissions scandals already. It's already bad enough that people think that there's a vague but strong-enough link between getting a degree from a particular school/program and expected lifetime earnings. Can you imagine if there was a literal government-backed guarantee of a multi-million dollar payoff?

And after admissions, hooo buddy. I went to school in what was considered a difficult field of study. A couple other students stick out in my memory as being relevant here. I remember right after one guy gave his capstone senior presentation; it was atrocious. Just hilariously bad. By that point, I had a pretty decent relationship with the assistant department chair, and we were talking right after it. I think I was remarking on how it was possible that he was even getting a degree. I think I even pointed out that my view was that giving such folks degrees devalues my own degree, because if people in the market hire guys like him and start thinking, "This is the kind of people we get from Program X?!" they're going to think we all suck. His comment was, "His GPA is ___. Who the hell is going to hire him?" [Yes, he literally told me the kid's GPA. Yes, I know that's totally not supposed to be allowed.] The message is, of course, there is very little incentive to not go ahead and give people a degree, so long as they can just barely sneak through (aided by rampant grade inflation and such).

The second example is a girl who pretty honestly told me that she wasn't really planning on using her degree in the workforce. It was an interest, a hobby, maybe even a status symbol that look at how smart and cool she is to have gotten such a difficult and neat-sounding degree. She legit was planning to be a mother. Sure enough, within a couple years of graduation (I don't recall exactly how long), she was a stay-at-home mother. I don't believe she's ever used her degree in the workforce. [FYI, I think she was actually mostly interested in the subject matter, and she wasn't an atrocious low-performer; she was actually reasonably smart. But I kinda don't think she was always the most motivated to really push herself all the time like some of the other students; she really was able to just sort of focus on the stuff she was interested in and then sort of skate by on the stuff she wasn't.]

In any event, putting them together, a multi-million-dollar government guaranteed payout would cause some hella targeting of programs. I'd say that I could imagine an underground website that details exactly how much a degree from every specific program out there is guaranteed to be worth, but it wouldn't have to be underground! It's the government! They'd have to use a public formula and make determinations, in public, of which programs are in/out of which pay bracket. Once you've gotten in, by hook or by crook or by bribing the admissions department, what incentive is there to not graduate you? Like both of my examples, everyone knows what you're doing and what the outcome will be. Everyone knows that you're not, like, actually going to be out there performing surgery on people or whatever. "Nobody's going to hire you," and you don't even want to get hired anyway. And since you're probably not going to cause any harm anyway, do we really want to be jerks and get in the way of a poor young woman's multi-million-dollar payout? If we try, she might even protest or sue or do any number of things that cause extensive paperwork and unneeded headache. Much easier to just let it go.

If you move it to, "Well, you have to at least get hired and have a salary," that helps with part of the problem, but would almost certainly contribute to hiring discrimination, combining features that already currently exist, from parental leave policies to affirmative action. It will almost certainly give a company pause when considering hiring a brand new female grad if they think some combination of, "On top of having weeks/months of leave if she gets pregnant; she has a literal multi-million-dollar payout coming to incentivize her getting pregnant," and, "Does she really even want to do this job? Did she just do enough to get into/through school, so she could max her payout?"

This already happens with teachers. Online diploma mill masters so they get a pay bump based on union rates for masters/phd, but realistically does not improve teacher quality.

The simplification for what you are talking about would be to basically IQ test as a proxy for income potential.

I mean projected lifetime earnings is already a concept regularly used in the legal/insurance sectors, in settlements and so on. Someone crippled on a summer internship at college to the extent that they can’t pursue their chosen career can sue based on expected lifetime earnings, actuaries are familiar with the relevant models.

There is a huge difference between incentivizing children with a guaranteed payout based on what degree you have and getting into an accident that paralyzes you.

Solution isn’t simple. Countries have tried economic incentives and mostly failed or slowed the decline.

This is because the economic incentives they offer are pitiful compared to the costs they are asking people to bear. Defraying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs and lost income with tiny payments.

It also introduces a huge deadweight loss of higher taxes. Since most of these ideal heavily bread females would be supported by heavily taxed men who are their husbands it’s wooing just further depress economic activity. The past would have expected the man to man up and work 80 hrs a week if he needed and transfer directly to his wife instead of using the government as a middleman.

I am skeptical that doubling the hours of work men do would totally compensate for the loss of all the extra workers in the form of women. Structuring the transfer this way also requires a women become almost totally dependent on a man, which has its own issues.

Probably far easier to propandize all the Instagram executives. Instead of filling young females with attractive girls traveling to Bali bombard them with pretty pregnant chicks with 5 children and a dutiful loving husband. You can change economic incentives sure but changing what people value changes how the evaluate incentives. If real life hot pussy is begging men to man up I am guessing there is no shortage of men willing to work 80 hours a week for that deal.

I am skeptical about the number of men who would sign up for this, or the extent to which women could be propagandized into it. We had this kind of arrangement once. We ceased having it for a reason.

You said it was a simple solution to just pay women to have kids. Now it sounds like you are arguing being a mother sucks so we need to pay them a lot of money? How much like a million a kid? More? Obviously we do not have that much government money. So government paying women money to have kids instead of worker would not be viable. At the end of the day women being homemakers and taking care of children has to be funded by basically the earning capabilities of one man (whether direct or indirect thru taxation of men). It sounds like your saying one man can’t make enough money to fund a women staying home which means we should just accept low fertility.

If women prefer being boss babes and going to Bali instead of motherhood then just isn’t a solution. Personally I think the current viewpoint is the propaganda and most would prefer motherhood if society did not pressure them to oppose it. But if Bali is preferred to babies there really is not a solution. Motherhood is evolutionary programmed into females since well it’s necessary to survive so I think it’s the other side doing the propaganda.

You said it was a simple solution to just pay women to have kids.

I imagine there's actually no society anywhere that'd even want to do this. And for good reasons.

I am down with it. It’s the one thing that would make communism better than capitalism. The ability to force your tfr higher.

If the choice is national suicide or communism then communism is better. And as we discussed in the taxes needed to fund a sufficient incentive it would basically take communism to raise that level of money.

Commies tried it in Romania, but they didn't have the political will to keep enforcing it (and it led to a massive amount of orphans, though again that could arguably be solved with sufficient political will)

Decree 770 did boost the fertility rate, but it didn’t do so by paying women for motherhood- it did so by banning contraception unless you already had 5 kids.

It's not that motherhood "sucks" as an activity, but being a stay at home mother does have significant opportunity costs in the form of lost income and other expenses. A million a kid is probably far too much. I suspect you would raise fertility pretty significantly if you paid women merely they wages they would have had if they had not stopped working in a kid-independent way.

So like $2 million a kid? For the people you want breeding the most. IQ >110. That’s a yearly income of probably $150k give or take which capitalizes to $2 million plus or minus.

Having someone carry your biological kid for you thru pregnancy runs 50-150k and that’s recruiter lower class. Doesn’t include the 18 years of motherhood. I don’t think we have anywhere close to enough money to boost tfr at the rates you imply by paying people. You need people to desire motherhood as it’s own reward.

Maybe $2 million for some people, true. Most would be much less. According to FRED the median US personal income in 2022 was $40,480. According to the US census there are about 74M women between the ages of 15 and 50 (the age categories used for calculating TFR). Let's say we get half of them to have a child (that would boost US TFR to ~2.3). If we gave each of them the median income that comes out to about $1.5T per year. That would be about 15% of the US federal budget, 10% more than we spend on Social Security. This is much less than I expected it to be!

IMO at least some of that should be back-loaded. For example, count child-rearing years as median income or last earned income (whichever is higher) * number of children for the purpose of calculating social security benefits. Advantage: selects for low time-preference. Advantage: Defers payout contingent on future taxbase able to support it. Advantage: Provides the long-term spousal independence that women seem to crave.

Explain your math I’m not following. Also would be reducing taxes by a lot.

If half of women had one child you would have a tfr of .5.

We have about 74M women that are the denominator for our TFR calculation. According to the World Bank the United States has a TFR of 1.7. That means if all those 74M women had 0.5 babies (or half of them had 1 baby) that would raise US TFR by 0.5 to 2.2 (woops, I said 2.3). I assumed we'd pay each of these women the US median income as a stand in for knowing their actual income distribution. So the cost is 74,000,0000.540,480=1,497,760,000,000.

You are talking marginal pricing. You would also need to pay everyone for the first 1.7 tfr. The costs would be 4-5x plus less income tax collected.

This would take like an additional 30% VAT. That every man needs to pay. And since women are getting funded by the government they would only mate with the top 5% of men. A literal slave state for the other 95% of men.

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