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This is my wife and I's position. We're child free by choice. I've even gotten a vasectomy to prevent this possibility. When I look at my friends or siblings who have had children it seems like having children has had a clear negative impact on their quality of life in terms of the things we care about. Hell, having a dog is almost more responsibility and imposition on the way we want to live our lives than we're willing to tolerate. Forget raising another human.
I think "people are by and large no longer raised in a memeplex that views having children as the terminal goal in life" is underrated as an explanation for why people no longer want to have children. It turns out when you tell people they should be able to live the kinds of lives they want to lots of people are no longer interested in having children!
What is the liberal argument against removing the right to vote and other civil rights from 'childfree' people?
What would go wrong if we made them untouchables?
The issue with a lack of justice is that people's families are going to take justice in their own hands and seek revenge which might spiral down into vendetta and worse.
But what happens when an elderly childfree citizen gets murdered, if the police just files the case away?
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Strongly agree. That memeplex - and people raised in it - are going to construct a lot of societal expectations and systems.
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Oh absolutely. Assuming no singularity, society needs kids though, they generate a huge positive externality that everyone benefits from. The natural solution is to subsidise having kids relative to not having them, but society is also not willing to tolerate the level of subsidy necessary to have a noticeable impact ($100,000+ per child). For a time while the going is good this inconsistency can be elided, but eventually the contradiction gets too big and something will have to give, either massive collapse of the welfare system or massive taxes on the childless relative to those who have kids.
Subsidizing children seems difficult. If you give the same amount per child to everyone, you've incentivized poor people way more than rich ones. That is, in a social circle where having kids means violin lessons and their own room, let alone private school, 100k/18yrs=5.5k/yr ain't gonna cut it. If your goal is equity, maybe this is a good thing. Otherwise, you're incentivizing spready of whatever social/genetic reasons lead to poverty.
Maybe subsidize but only for incomes in the 50th to 90th percentiles? Boy would that be unpopular.
You could specifically tie it to marriage, which has the side effect of excluding the poor in the USA.
I've been thinking that something like this is probably the way. But to fix the problem @null brings us, you need to also incorporate a piece of what I recall reading here that Hungary did recently: tie it directly to tax rates, too. IIRC, they basically said that women, after having some number of kids before some age or some such test, would not have to pay income taxes for the rest of their lives. However, that is imperfect for at least a couple reasons. First, the benefit really only comes so long as the woman is working again, which means she's rushing to get back to work and to work as much as possible, not pumping out more babies and raising them. Second, it's untethered from marriage, so she can just pump and dump random dude for baby batter (or even just swing by a sperm bank) to get her required allocation of children before going back to her now-tax-free life.
One of the things most people think we've lost in the last century is a strong incentive to stay married, even when the marriage isn't like, perfect perfect. The motivation for trying to get rid of that strong motivation is that if the motivation is too strong, then some people will end up staying in marriages that are not just not-perfect, but which are actively horrid. However, trad folks today think that we've gone too far and that we need more incentive for folks to stay together.
If the old tools to incentivize couples to stay married won't work anymore, and the best tool we can come up is tax policy, then we've got to use tax policy. Make a husband's income tax free for the rest of time, so long as two conditions are met: 1) Whatever conditions like what Hungary already has on a woman pumping out a sufficient number of babies before whatever age, and 2) The parents are still married and caring for their children.
The biggest problem is that (2) might be hard to police. That said, in the US, we already have a scheme for doing basically exactly this, so it's probably not completely impossible. We have conditional green cards for immigrants-by-marriage. You have to demonstrate (by means of tax/property/bank records, records of pattern-of-life together, testimony of family/friends, whatever) that you are still in a loving marriage, and that it's not just a sham for scoring immigration benefits. This system would have be massively scaled up (which will obviously cause plenty of problems on its own, most unforeseen), but it is in principle possible.
In any event, I meant to include somewhere in there that if it hits directly at a husband's tax rate rather than a fixed amount, it'll provide more incentive for higher-earners. Of course, there is no way this will be palatable for the left; they won't stomach what appears to be giving more money to rich people. Maybe there's a plausible middle-ground that doesn't skew the tax benefit quite as far as the tax burden itself has been skewed, but we're not really talking about political feasibility here; we're mostly just talking about the feasibility of the social engineering solution.
There was a bill proposed in the Texas house this session- which will almost certainly not pass because its author is caught up in a sex scandal that might lead to Texas recriminalizing adultery- which offered married, never divorced couples enormous property tax breaks for high parity births(specifically requiring 4 children for eligibility). The left’s screams were probably a minor prefigurement of the freak out from exempting the husbands of stay at home mothers with many children from income tax, and I don’t think it’s due to being ‘regressive’, it’s because to progressives that’s not who the government is supposed to be giving money to. Sort of like pregnancy centers.
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Please don't take this as a personal criticism.
A few threads back I said the following:
I got some good pushback on that post, but ... here you are making my point for me. Having kids is an imposition on the way you want to live your life. Raising children requires putting the good of others above your own in a way that requires serious effort and self-sacrifice and that doesn't sound so appealing to the folk who inhabit modern times.
I suspect the data above about women who want to have kids but aren't is falling prey to known issues with polling -- women say they want to have kids, revealed preference says they actually don't. My own guess is that having kids maybe seems like a nice idea and it costs nothing to say you want them, but by and large at any given moment it's too daunting and difficult and hard. People don't want to do hard things anymore without obvious benefit to them.
What more is there to say, really?
I missed the initial thread but this sort of attitude is exactly why I continue to maintain that utilitarianism is fundamentally evil/incompatible with human flourishing. For the umpteenth time, utility is not fungible and the moment you start acting like it is you're fucked because utilions and qualia don't exist.
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Isn't the trick to want to live your life to facilitate and optimize for children?
Adding one child to our DINK lifestyle was just about possible. Child care was expensive and when he was small the extra stuff when traveling or out was a pain. Once we had two, something needed to change.
Now single income with 4 kids, my wife is a homemaker. We only travel where we can drive. We're we are now in New England this hasn't been terribly limiting.
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I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, I can say without hesitation that having kids had a severely negative impact on my life. Most of that was due to my poor selection of partner/her post-partum/outside elements that don’t have anything directly to do with the kids themselves. On the other hand, the moments of joy I experience when my children are happy and loving… it’s a higher high than any other sensation I’ve been able to find in this life. And then, egotistically, I get the satisfaction of fulfilling my belief that a reasonably-good-looking National Merit Scholar is the type of person who should be reproducing.
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