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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26636 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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The issue therein is that the amount of money you'd need to pay to move the needle is uh, astronomical. We're not talking about the price of baby formula here, we're talking about six figure sums per person. And what you're essentially paying people to do is stay home, not work, and consume more. The better the program works, the more it costs and the less money you have to pay for it. And all this is also massively regressive if targeted at the middle class.

2rafa is on the right track here in terms of scale, but even big shovels can't turn the tide. You end up digging the earth out from beneath your feet. Do we really want to encourage parents to work more, and the childless to work less? Will young childless people sit still and let themselves be dragooned into working as nannies and cleaners for the fruitful and then taxed to pay for their own service?

And will any of this work? Low fertility is not a symptom of poverty, but of some of the richest societies to ever exist. Which then turn around and say - but not rich enough. Just a bit more money. can we really buy virtue, really bribe ourselves into having kids?

Low fertility is here to stay. It is a symptom of an industrial society that has refined every process of production except for human procreation. When we want cattle, we roll up our sleeves and make them. But human children are not even at the level of a medieval cottage industry. Maybe it's for the best that we don't see babies as commodities. But that is a choice, and it follows from that choice that we will not have very many of them.

It’s actually pretty easy to solve low fertility with money; it’s expensive and politically incorrect, but it’s very doable. You just need a big increase in male purchasing power relative to female, targeted at the reproductive years. It probably helps if you discriminate in favor of married couples. That’s basically the story of the baby boom.

Helpfully, everything about doing that is illegal.

Expensive and politically unfeasible make it sound hard, not easy. Perhaps it would be better to say that it's simple - depositing a hundred thousand dollars in the bank account of every pregnant woman would be very simple, but also very hard.

Ending all college subsidies would help it seems.

The fact that there are something like 25% more women in college then men is a huge problem. Women won't date down in status and college education is a heavy status signal.

The fact that there are something like 25% more women in college then men is a huge problem. Women won't date down in status and college education is a heavy status signal.

Yes; once a woman graduates college she thinks herself too good for a man without a degree.

The solution is to stop sending women to college.

The issue therein is that the amount of money you'd need to pay to move the needle is uh, astronomical.

In the US, anyway, it's not that the money does not exist and is not currently being spent on children, but more some combination of:

  1. some parents are terrible at parenting, and would not spend the money on properly raising children, leaving them even more illiterate, innumerate, and unprepared for life in a civilization than currently
  2. The government isn't very good at telling the terrible parents apart from the decent ones in advance, and is obsessed with disparate impact.
  3. Most costs for having a stay at home mom (or equivalent) are fixed, such that even if a state were diverting all their education costs into the program, and that was $15,000 per year per child, and the family was totally fine raising 4 children for $60,000/year, it still doesn't quite work out temporally, since the children (and therefore the income) will likely be staggered about 2 years apart, and so the first child, especially, will put the family in a bad position.
  4. Most of the people in a position to take advantage of a program like that, because they're able to form a stable relationship (which would ideally be part of #2, but of course would go wrong for political reasons), are already having children anyway. It's the people practicing serial monogamy, looking for the ideal partner and maybe finding him at 40 or not at all, who should be having children but aren't.

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