Often, when we look at disincentives for childbearing, we think of them in terms of opportunity costs for the individual. But if children are cumulatively being considered a societal good, we should also weigh the cumulative opportunity costs to the individuals as a societal tradeoff. It seems to me that Ron Hosh's substack (of "luxury belief" fame) generally lives up to its tagline of "general incoherence," but he raised this point/question in this post. The kids have to come from somewhere; what tradeoff(s) should society make?
Teenage pregnancy? Major tradeoff against developing the human capital of the parents and, thusly, the parents' ability to develop the human capital of the children. (And, if you want to follow the HBD line of inquiry, you might hypothesize dysgenic selection effects.)
College students? Lesser tradeoff than above, but same general issue.
20-something professionals? We're taking human capital out of the economy, just after investing in its development, rather than trying to maximize its compound interest.
Hosh also brings up geography and sexual orientation (same-sex couples using IVF is a thing), though I don't think the tradeoffs here are as clear.
Have any of you thought about this? My answer to "Which couples should be having more children" is "All the couples who don't have as many children as they want" which I don't think cleaves cleanly enough across any demographic to give a more clear tradeoff than the subsidies required to support the children not-conceived out of financial concern. But others here are more open to social engineering than I am.
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Notes -
I've heard it referred to as an "eating the seed corn" situation at a societal level. A civilization can get high growth by having all its potential mothers do other things instead, but then in addition to not having enough children in the next generation, you also don't have as much social cohesion, because when the kids aren't absolute babies, those were the women volunteering for the churches, organizing social occasions, running the children and youth clubs, sending out cards to recognize everyone's birthdays and holidays and so on. Now, if you want those services, you get to pay market rate for it -- and the market rate is high!
Technological change is busy clearing out a bunch of female heavy positions just now, anyway. Society will lose nothing by a bunch of graphic designers running a household instead, for instance. If they want to. Running a household is harder than graphic design, and as there has been much opining about lately, harder to get status from. Some of the things making women not want to marry the men that would be willing to marry them seems a more pressing issue.
This another of those things on which the expert class utterly fucked up. When I grew up I was taught that this is the "demographic dividend" and that we modern people benefit from a more "sustainable" fertility rate. Only now that my parents' generation is about to retire, and the utterly predictable consequences set in, they panic and try to change things around last-minute.
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