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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.
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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.
True, I was thinking marginally so the first would be much higher. I am highly skeptical women would only sleep with the top 5% of men.
It’s probably about $4 trillion to just pay to raise tfr to 2.3. (75 million roughly 0-18 years olds now) and a 30% increase gets to about a 100 million. Times 40k = $40 trillion. Plus whatever tax income you lose from women not working.
Men provide two things. Sperm and financial support for mothers raising children. If you cut out financial support then it’s just sperm and females would maximize for whose sperm has the highest probability of creating talented children.
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