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I'm still convinced that the fertility problem is 100% economic in nature, it's just underestimated how serious it is. "But countries with lower GDP per capita have more children" you say. You are only measuring one variable, you forgot to consider the cost of children which in the west has skyrocketed.
For example, just in the past 50 years the cost of clothing a child has grown by a factor of 20.
Then factor in that the fertility window has become smaller, because everyone goes to college, that the period that children are dependent economically on their parents has grown, because child labor was made illegal and then everyone decided to go to college, that free childcare dried up, because women entered the workforce and people move away from their little village to seek jobs in the big city. Etcaetera, etcaetera. Childrearing is an externality, in an efficiently run country there's better ways to use anyones time than raising children.
None of this applies to Georgia in the mid-2000s of course and economic interventions don't work because they are not enough by orders of magnitude. It's too expensive, to the point that it's probably unfixable and everyone is coping about it. The left copes by thinking they can import slave labor from the third world and it will be just as good thanks to our magic soil. The right copes that if we push hard on religion we can scam everyone on making really bad economic moves.
I think economics are part of it, but I really don't think raising a kid is as expensive as people think. Like the Korean test prep mentioned in the threat, the things that seem expensive are things besides the actual raising of the kid (e.g. swim lessons, private school, tutoring...)
But just "having a child and raising them to adulthood" is not that expensive from what I can tell.
Yeah I'm 6 months into fatherhood (and whilst there's a bunch of schooling etc. fees that I'm obviously not paying yet). My partner and I are reasonably frugal/happy to procure second-hand things from marketplace and I'd be surprised if my daughter has cost us more than a thousand or two so far. We've probably come out far ahead considering savings on stuff we'd normally be spending.
I mean, to be fair, it's easy to be cheap when the kid has no real personality or interests yet.
True but there's been plenty of opportunity to spend up if we'd wanted to buy first-hand.
Walk around your average baby store and it's amazing how much you can drop on a stroller and a bed.
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It’s not just Georgia, you know- in America church attendees are above replacement. In Holland and Ukraine religious fundamentalists are growing as a share of the population through differential fertility- and yes both dutch Calvinists and the UGCC are fundamentalist groups. Religion, or at least abrahamaic religion, really does improve fertility.
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Same here. Societal shifts around 'status' or 'what we value' are necessary, but they will never gain traction unless the economic incentives align as well. Economics is about money, Money is about labor, Labor is about time.
These statistics are misleading, because it doesn't measure what qualitative changes it seeks to drive.
Can women return to the workforce in high-status roles after being out of the market for 5-10 years ? Can they take long maternity breaks without being fired ? Do the fathers gets long paternity breaks to contribute to housework ? Can they afford to add another room to their house without breaking the bank ? Is it possible for the kids to set your kids up for strong economic outcomes without dooming them to a horrible rat race ?
This is just motherhood. But you have to see economic incentives for long term romantic partnerships too. Can you stay in the same city longterm without affecting career prospects ? Do you have time for dating in your 20s, or is there immense pressure to be in the office instead ?
No amount of money is going to make up for misaligned incentives on these primary questions.
The trads complain about changing values which disincentivize motherhood. Free-market capitalists talk about bad economic incentives. Both have a point. But, the latter is lot easier to fix than the former. To top it off, capitalists have economic power, while trads are bleeding social power like a slit aorta. So, pretty large difference in agency as well.
Ofc, govts pick the worst of both worlds by spending money on bad economic outcomes and accommodating some real crazies who keep moving the value system further away from the metaphorical God's light.
P.S: Alongside economics, building environment and infrastructure also plays a huge role here. That's a topic for another day.
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Our insane economic success (in markets that aren't completely whack to to TRBL gov't intervention like healthcare, education, and housing) has allowed people's standards for how much they spend on children to go through the roof, rather than standards magically rising on their own beyond our economic means. Perhaps one could argue that child rearing is one of the few areas where there's a one-way ratchet, such that any increases in standards are 'locked in', such that any decreases in economic ability present significant challenges and drive huge decreases in fertility, but it really seems quite unlikely, especially given that we're still not significantly struggling economically by almost any real measure and that TFR doesn't really track things like recessions all that well. I'm much more likely to believe that it's general cultural/status factors.
Children are expensive, and have become far more expensive over the past century, in currencies which we have not become wealthier in, namely time and effort. Once responsibilities are non-delegable, no amount of money can make them lesser, and anyway cost disease and regulation has made most delegation of even the reasonably delegable parts of childcare out of reach to all but the wealthy. Except for the underclass, who simply fail to pay the extra costs.
I think the economic term for the phenomenon you're describing is 'opportunity cost'. That seems plausible to me, perhaps even likely. It's a similar explanation to what I've heard given as the reason why people seem to think they're always "busy"; they just have so much damn money and economic power/opportunity that choosing to not spend your time traveling, skiing, whatever, has a higher opportunity cost.
But I would stress that this is not strictly lack of material wealth or access to affordable goods. In any event, I had forgotten about this explanation, and would consider it a contender with other murkier cultural/status factors.
You can look at it that way, but I don't think it gets to the point. Parenting children is a lot of non-delegable work that takes up time. It's less that you could be doing other things in that time and those other things have become more valuable (which is "opportunity cost") than that the time has increased, and the attention required during that time has increased. That's an issue even if the only thing you could do with the time was no more valuable than it was a century ago.
I don't know why this would be the case. In papers I've read that analyze the results of the American Time Use Survey over time, they do observe that time spent has gone up, but they mostly attribute it to people feeling like they have to take their child from one activity to another and do all the things. That's kind of a sub-phenomenon of the general opportunity costs -> more "busy" result. Since people are so productive and so wealthy, they feel like they have to "do stuff" with their time (stuff that costs all that money they're making), and whether that's taking a fancy trip or taking your kid to fifty-three activities, it all feels like the same phenomenon to me.
Backing out, though, it really is just a different claim to say that children are more expensive, monetarily, in terms of the purchases required (with the intermediate step being that material wealth hasn't kept up with the increased monetary requirement) and saying that people are so wealthy that the real resource being budgeted and subject to opportunity cost is time. It brings us to substantially different conclusions about the underlying dynamics and possible policy considerations.
That time counts!
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I assume in bygone times the normal method of acquiring children's clothes was for the women in the family - especially grandmothers and spinsters - to make them by hand, and this distorts such calculations.
Those bygone times are more than 50 years ago.
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Putting aside deeply illiberal solutions that both sides refuse to even consider, it seems like the most viable solution suggested by your post is to simply cut down on college as a necessary rite of passage.
How many people really need to spend four years (and an increasingly large amount of money) on a degree, if we're being honest?
Increasingly, anyone who wants to do anything better-compensated or more-dignified than working at McDonald's or stocking shelves at Walmart. But that's only if we exclude trade apprenticeships or 2-year technical degrees, which I'd count under "college."
But the road to success for non-college-educated has eroded.
Isn't that a bit far-fetched?
I'm not completely sure what you mean. You could make a good argument for trade apprenticeships not being college, but people who get associate's degrees in HVAC or IT or aviation maintainence get them at community colleges, and they're counted as college degrees.
I know I worded it weirdly, what I was trying to say is, "While four years may be unnecesary for many, some sort of post-secondary education (whether an apprenticeship or two-year degree) is ultimately necessary for most people who want to progress farther in a career than low-skill service jobs." I'm not saying we should get rid of 2-year degrees, or anything like that. In fact I think they're a great alternative to a lot of four-year programs for many people.
I meant that it doesn't fall into the category of overall life experiences and phase that average people normally associate with the word.
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Sure. But even cutting a lot of degrees down to 2-years would be a not-insignificant gain.
And I'm unconvinced that certain non-technical fields especially need a long stint in college.
I definitely agree that a lot of white-collar jobs don't actually require higher education -- just some interpersonal skills and Microsoft Office expertise. IMO very few non-technical fields actually require the level of education provided by 4-year degrees. Very little of it is retained, anyway, particularly if it isn't being used.
Ultimately what I believe is going on is that employers are using college education as a proxy for conscientiousness and IQ, whether consciously or unconsciously. You want to hire people for your office positions who are genuinely better employees than fry cooks. And testing directly for the desired traits is either illegal or too gauche. You try convincing Linda the HR lady you want to ignore qualifications and hire based on IQ tests. So college performance becomes the acceptable proxy, and it includes the relevant payoffs to interest groups like under-represented minorities and women that are the cost of doing business.
Yes. This is the standard response I get, and it seems plausible (though one wonders why less "woke"/diverse nations don't simply institute IQ tests).
I guess the only real response is "I said 'most viable', not 'easy'". Yes, cutting away whatever makes businesses unwilling to do straight IQ testing and starving the large administrative sector attached to colleges is not going to be easy. And huge swathes of the educated populace are not in favor of it for both self-interested and ideological reasons.
But, if the government is going to be involved in backing and forgiving loans, there has to be rationing. Much stricter rationing.
I can see employers get more legal leeway on IQ tests and other disparate impact bait before you actually roll back women in the workplace or actually pay to fully compensate people for their perceived economic loss they suffer when they have kids
It's not just about IQ. I know plenty of smart people -- people smarter than me -- who couldn't finish college, because they kept on sleeping through class and missing deadlines. It's about IQ, and conscientousness, and either having low neuroticism or enough coping mechanisms to maneuver through the neuroticism you have, and being pro-social. Heck, conscientiousness might be more important than IQ for most things.
They do! We're talking about South Korea's fierce competition down below. And East Asian Confucianist competition is nothing more than an elaborate proxy for IQ, conscientiousness... and all of the aforesaid traits.
It needs to be grueling and competitive, because we know of no other way to test for industriousness other than actually putting people to work and seeing who sticks to deadlines and persists and who doesn't. There is no lab test we can do to measure that value, everything in the short term reduces to IQ. But for employment, it's the long term we care about.
The only other way we have to measure that part of people's personality is by straight up asking them -- "Do you keep deadlines?" "Is it important for you to work?" "Are you lazy?" -- and the second we try to measure a property by self-report and tie it to outcomes anyone with an above-room-temperature IQ will start simply lying.
College is just the West's version of Confucian examinations. Only the actual competition comes in secondary school, before anyone submits an application to any university, and we don't publicize the fact beforehand so most of the population doesn't realize how much their petty high school activities and extracurriculars will define the course of their life. And unlike the Confucian system, it's explicitly designed to favor children of the elite, while letting in some token minorities so the college brochures don't look 'too white.' China can point to the Western university and say, "not only is this fundamentally less valid as a measurement than our traditional form of examination, but it is an affront to our socialist value of equality." And I'm sure they do. A lot.
Not to make a snide quip, but I doubt they do, because they seem fine with sending their kids to our colleges--because, for all of Western education's sins, there's still enough value in it for it to be a potential matter of geopolitical strategy.
For all its problems on the student side, Western universities are still on top when it comes to research quality. I tend to think of our universities as top-tier research institutions glued precipitously to crappy status-stratified indoctrination centers and finishing schools. I mean, I can't tell you how many professors my peers had at university who very clearly hated teaching (particularly undergraduates). Chinese students come to the West to study because, unlike most local students, they're motivated to actually participate in research and aren't repelled by disagreeable professors.
The goal of the Chinese is a) to participate in the status system of Western universities and therefore enhance the prestige of China (even if they believe it's not as meritocratic as it should be, they still want in on that sweet status while it's for the taking) and b) to bring knowledge and expertise from the West to China.
Their geopolitcal strategy is to use Western institutions to springboard Chinese research. I have a friend who works for a technology firm out of a non-Western country, that has satellite locations in the US placed in strategic locations specifically to pull away talent from American R&D divisions and enhance their homegrown research. My belief is that Chinese students at American universities are there for very similar reasons. And that's particularly why a lot of the geopolitical debates concern Chinese students who study at American instutions and return home.
I have no doubt the eventual goal of the Chinese is to make their own universities better than Harvard or Yale, and presumably a combination of Han supremacism, Confucianism, and Communist ideology motivates their belief that they'll come out on top.
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They want to spend 4 years drinking and fornicating. The diploma is just a side effect.
And their parents want them to spend 4 years establishing a social circle with other college students of similar background, and to marry one of those students. Which is basically the same thing, with the diploma indeed being of secondary importance.
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Admirable goals. But if you can't actually pay for your rumspringa yourself some pragmatism has to seep in.
Maybe two years of fornicating and drinking and less debt to worry about is a good compromise.
The 18 years old horny guys and gals, brainwashed by numerous films about the party life and the whole society to follow their dreams are hardly the most levelheaded and pragmatic demographic.
I think Europe has a better solution - not so lavish student lifestyle, but heavily sponsored. Where I live the cost per semester for EU nationals is around the median monthly salary. And that is if you pay out of pocket. If you actually do well on the exam you can get subsidized which is roughly in half. Of course for foreigners it is a lot more expensive. So it is totally doable to study and work and be financially self sufficient.
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For some of us it's a matter of work hard play hard. Hedonism and ambition can be made compatible.
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