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 -
From a pure numbers perspective most of the drop in births per woman since 1976 is driven by women who do have children having fewer children, rather than women choosing to forego children entirely. The latter has increased from 10 to 17% but the former has decreased from 3.4 children per woman to 2.3.
On the topic of women having more children, society should pay women a competitive wage to do so. If it really is the case that the most valuable thing a woman can do is to bear and raise children, moreso than whatever other work they were doing, then society ought to be willing to compensate them competitively with that other work. This is how markets for labor ordinarily work. If I want someone to put their scarce labor power to my purpose instead of some other I need to pay them more! This isn't a new idea, of course, it's over 100 years old.
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