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Notes -
One simple solution would be to make parents of young children Priority Candidates for all government jobs. In other words, to hire someone who doesn’t have at least one child under ten at home, you need to show there are no viable candidates who do.
The nice thing about this policy is that it could be sold to both left and right in different terms. For the left, it’d be about reducing the child-rearing associated with careers, and it pattern matches to affirmative action. For the right it’s about raising TFR.
The best thing about this is that I think it would encourage people to have children younger too. Very often climbing the early rungs of the ladder is more difficult because there are more viable candidates for any one position. You can imagine professional couples in their early or mid 20s saying things like “if we want a shot at the big leagues we should have kids before we’re 30.” And while this would only apply to government jobs in the first instance, soft pressure could be put on private employers to copy it.
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