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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30744 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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A little today I learned about fertility and income:

Within western countries fertility is inversely related to income, that is poor people have more kids. At least that’s what I’ve thought and it is apparently the case in the USA: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/

However, in my native land where you have 18 months paid parental leave, daycare costs about 150 dollars/month and the government literally pays you 100 dollars/month/kid (barnbidrag) there is a strong positive correlation between fertility and income: https://imgur.com/a/RBFrBZ2

This has also been the case for some time: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00324728.2022.2134578

And also a positive correlation with IQ: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.0359

So in the country where it’s cheap to have kids, high income people have more kids and where it’s expensive they have fewer kids. This is surprising.

That correlation seems really unusually strong. Is it adjusted for age and other demographic information?

Women born in Sweden no other adjustments.

The same applies to all Nordic countries (the measure used here is education, but it also goes for income). See here.

Anecdotally I think it's a real possibility this reflects a surprising end result to the Western secularization development. While widespread societal secularization is ongoing, it affects the upper and middle classes before the working class, but once the cycle is "complete" (ie. working class has moved from religiousness to apatheism), active religiousness (of the sort that contributes to childbearing) seems to become a middle-class pursuit, at least looking at people I know. Conceivably this might even eventually create a pendular movement.

It might not be because childcare is cheaper. 18 months paid parental leave is a very large subsidy that is proportional to income. So it isn't surprising that this would at least reduce the negative correlation between income and fertility.

So in the country where it’s cheap to have kids, high income people have more kids and where it’s expensive they have fewer kids. This is surprising.

Is it though? Shouldn't we expect rich people to be more responsive to monetary incentives? They have already demonstrated some level of caring about and being capable of responding to such incentives.

Not to relatively small monetary incentives. Nor would I think that anyone espousing Scandinavian parental policies saying it would primarily benefit the rich.

Well, that depends on your model of the mentality of rich people.

If you think of rich people as "those who are no longer bound by minor economic incentives", then sure, they will... not be affected by minor economic incentives, and you are obliged to think up another reason as to their counterfactual fertility.

But if you think of rich people as "those who are compulsive money-grubbers and coupon-clippers which is why they're rich" then the amount of money they have in the bank has nothing to do with how they respond to minor economic incentives, and their fertility follows naturally from their exposure to those incentives.

Explanation #2 wins at Occam's Razor.

Cheap daycare doesn't seem like something small. At least according to UNICEF it makes up a large portion of the average couple's salary in many rich countries:

In 2020, a couple of two average earners would need to spend 14 per cent of one wage to keep two children in childcare. The spending would range from nothing, due to free childcare (Chile, Malta and Italy) to Ireland, New Zealand and Switzerland where a couple would need to spend between a third and a half of the average wage (see Figure 9). Due to recent reforms, especially the new 30 hours of free access and the disadvantaged two-year-olds offer, the cost of childcare for such a couple in the United Kingdom fell from 44 per cent in 2015 to 30 per cent in 2020. Still, the country remains one of the five countries with the most expensive childcare services.

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