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-_-_-_-_-  2d ago (text post)   998 thread views

Fertility Crisis: Which women/couples should be having more children?

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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Pregnancy only needs to take you out of the economy for a few weeks. I really don't understand why its effect on women's careers is exaggerated so much.

Physically, sure. Mentally? By my 3rd trimester I felt stunningly stupid and that persisted through my child's early years. My coworkers and managers swore I was fine, I continued getting raises and promotions, but I felt like I was fighting through mental quicksand. It was harder for me to come up with elegant solutions for novel problems. I felt my brain come back online once I started getting decent sleep again and my body wasn't building and sustaining another person. If I were less capable (or in a career for which I was less suited) pregnancy definitely could have knocked me out of my career or paused it. And then after pregnancy there's the whole baby thing. You can't just seal them in a barrel. Even Mark Twain suggested not doing that til they're 12.

Uh, have you been around moms?

Okay, so the woman takes a few weeks off from her job to have the baby and recover. And then what? She goes right back to work and leaves the baby in a daycare? Great, so now much of her salary is going to that. And since she doesn't have time to feed the baby, she can buy formula and switch to take out when the kid is old enough for solid food. And speaking of old enough, once he gets to kindergarten age she can sink most of her remaining wages into a zero-sum competition for the scarce real-state with the good schools attached . And...

Or, you know, she could just cut out the middleman. Specially if she is planning to have more than one child.

What's the point of having a baby only to see it raised by strangers?

Children need mothers. They don't need girlbosses.

This is an argument for children being expensive, not for children being a big drag on women's careers.

But mothers can save most of those expenses by staying at home, thus making quitting those careers a much more attractive option. Put another way, children dramatically reduce the value of a woman's career.

It does perhaps create a career ceiling for high SES women until they are perceived as being "done" having children though. If you make a lot of money, you are at least somewhat indispensable, but your employer must consider that you will be out for a couple months 2 or 3 times over the next several years, so you can only become so indispensable. One solution to this is making paternity leave as robust as maternity, which has its own fun side effects of making 20-30 year olds of any gender who are likely to start families less attractive to employ.

That does seem like a good way to discourage the current massive discrimination against anyone over 40.

Although the equilibrium probably looks like "companies prefer to hire people who've made a visible precommitment to not having children, through public castration rituals and gleeful participation in anti-natalist subcultures."

So basically the same as right now really. HR had better see that funkopop collection when they check your Facebook bluesky page.

Yes, both of these are what I find funny! The anti-straight discrimination in high end consulting is very real, and it can be a good move in interviews to volunteer that you already have kids.

I wonder if some of the twitter posts about not hiring anyone over 30 (because they are probably aware of their value and will negotiate more aggressively) is also to do with the fact that so many professionals delay starting families until their 30s these days.

Only if you're thinking of very high SES women, who are likely to have the number of children they want already. But they still choose not to, because going back to work two weeks postpartum is awful.

Maybe I'm biased by the possibly unusual experiences of my close family members, but my mother for example had four children and that didn't stop her from being highly successful. From what I've heard it, she didn't find pregnancy difficult and couldn't wait to go back to work. But who said it had to be two weeks? You can take more than that off, but it doesn't need to be the whole year that some people take.

Who was your main carer as a baby?

I do know a decent number of families where a grandparent or father is the main carer. I've seen situations with the father as main carer when the wife is in a stable job with family insurance, such as teaching, and the husband is in a high variance job without benefits and with odd hours, such as professional musician or small business owner of a somewhat irregular business. My family is in that category. It's kind of stressful, but better than newborn daycare.

I guess you said "a few," which could, technically, mean more than two or three. I wouldn't generally interpret a few as six, the age at which commercial daycares will usually accept newborns. But, also, most people don't like sending a six week old to a commercial daycare, they feel bad about it. The last daycare I sent kids to has no early morning (before 8) coverage of children below four, and no coverage of babies that cannot yet walk. Another that I looked into did accept six week olds, but previous employees thought it not a very good environment, so we're continuing with the current arrangement until about a year.

They hired a housekeeper to babysit us and clean while my parents worked during the week. They sometimes worked late, but I not usually both on th same night and we had an older sibling who could babysit in the evenings. My grandparents did not live nearby.

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