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 -
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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