So own the libs by increasing immigration. And with a bigger tax base, we make social security solvent without having to significantly increase taxes or cut parental benefits. Thereby, increasing U.S. citizen birth rates.
Yeah, I really don't understand the Republican stance against almost all immigration since immigrants from many countries are more likely to be conservative
People have legitimate concerns about changes in culture. All people everywhere have this concern. It is not just an American White Nationalist concern. My guess is it goes back a very long time and is embedded in our tribal instincts. It is rooted in a very deep instinct for survival.
How much is Biden's controversial asylum legal immigration reducing entitlement costs by? I feel like I would've heard him brag about it by now if it was a big number...
I should've said shortfall instead of costs, thanks for clarifying. But my question remains what fraction of that shortfall is being fixed by Biden's move.
I agree with this broadly, but given the wage structure of our current immigrants, it is not true in a broad sense. Yes, more immigrants will help SS and Medicare/Medicaid, but given the wage structure of our current immigrants, the total costs exceed the total benefits for about a generation. This is one reason you see states (who actually fund the services used) freaking out about immigration, even (or lately especially) blue states.
I would like to see more immigration (a lot more actually) but balance it so that it allows more highly skilled immigrants who will make above median wages and roughly the same amount of lower-skilled immigrants. We need more people, period. This approach would also lessen income inequality, and I suspect it would introduce a less conservative political balance. It would also increase the benefits of immigration to lower skilled US workers by increasing demand for their skills, further decreasing income inequality and potentially building support for more immigration.
Unfortunately, I do not see this happening as Republicans are generally opposed to immigration, and the democratic political base of upper-middle-class professionals has been resistant to allowing people with comparable skill sets into the country.
It’s not just spending, it’s regulation too. Retirees are less likely to support pro growth regulation because they have far less participation in the upside. They’re gonna be impacted by the disruption of building that new semiconductor fab but they’re not gonna get a job working there or even live to see the majority of the economic benefit it will provide for the community.
Not only do they not support growth but they believe they have the greatest standing in being against it. I’ve lived in this community for 35 years and….
A lot of it is status quo bias. Older people have already went through a lot of existing hoops, and reforming various regulations puts them in a position to be worse off.
Now, if those laxing of regulations makes it so that there is more wealth around, people feel like starting up families and working more, then the case is obvious that the old would be better off.
I agree that some regulations can support growth - by building confidence in new, unknown technologies or procedures - but in what sense is building a semiconductor fab "pro growth regulation"? Did you mean *removing* regulations, like land use? Or were those two different thoughts? (And it's hard to imagine seniors objecting to the regulations I'm talking about here).
Ok, but how elastic is fertility to parental allowances. Don’t most of the European countries with child allowances have low fertility? Would $350/monty really make you want to go out and get someone pregnant?
Quote: "The core point here is merely to illustrate that yes, government policies absolutely can increase birth rates, and can do so at reasonable prices. Prospective parents choosing how many children to have, or whether to have children at all, very much respond to incentives about what their lives and finances would look like."
Boy's club hyuk hyuk sex joke nonsense like this always just makes me think of dogs going around pissing on streetlamps and fire hydrants to mark their territory.
If I may speak in my own defense, I found David A's idea that men "go out and get someone pregnant" funny, but unintentionally so. If I was marking my territory, it was only to say, hey, bud, I write the punchlines here.
It's not that forums have to be female-coded. They just have to be female-dominant. I'm in plenty of forums or online social circles for gender-neutral interests (genre fiction, art, outdoor activities, etc.) that are female-dominant, but usually they were started by a woman or had a big female userbase early on that generated some gendered momentum.
The politics forums tend to be male unless female-coded, though - but female-coded tends to be about schools or reproductive rights or healthcare, and those are all pretty big topics people get passionate about.
A weird half-baked idea that I have is that we should have a massively generous child tax credit (like $10K+ a year or something) but it should be non-refundable. It won't incentivize people to have kids they can't afford and would be a net transfer from childless adults to parents.
Isn't this exactly the opposite of proposals to extend and enhance the Child Tax Credit (i.e., making it more refundable)?
I've read so much commentary about how the pandemic-era expanded Child Tax Credit was an unparalleled way to end child poverty, without even mentioning the possible negative consequences it might have for child-bearing behavior.
France and Sweden have much more generous family benefits than the rest of Europe and they also have non-catastrophic TFRs, although still below replacement. I think the Occam's Razor approach to declining fertility is to spend as much as France before seeing if other steps are needed. (The benefits would be expensive, but the US doesn't have a value-added tax so bringing one in would be an option for financing them.)
According to Ezra’s guest in a recent podcast episode the TFR for the US is 1.66. The TFR for Sweden is 1.67. Is that an improvement we should shoot for? How much should we spend on it?
That was an interesting episode! But it really just cemented the fact that the factors driving lower birthrates in developed economies are so deeply multifaceted and seemingly non-solvable.
There are so many different factors in play, you can't just isolate one. For example, the religiosity of Americans probably cancels out some of the effects.
But do you think that Sweden’s policies (visavi the US) only adds up to a 0.01% increase in TFR? That sounds weird. I think it increases it (a bit) more but there are other factors which increases US fertility.
I don't think we should be doing it to improve the birth rate. I think we should be doing it out of concern for kids and families. That episode also discussed how little we seem to care for you g families - not just financially, but culturally - than peer countries.
Desired fertility rate is a thing and building a society that doesn’t care about it causes real people real pain. Native-born American women deserve to have the children they want to raise and we should prioritize ways that allow them to do so.
They also have free public child care, which must cost a lot more. (I don't think that's the right approach; it should all be cash so parents have freedom of choice.)
A cash benefit of $1000 per month for every child under 18 would cost a little over 3 percent of GDP. Since the US is a low-tax country with no VAT, that could easily be done if the political will existed. And I think it would virtually wipe out poverty among families with children, not to mention making the old-age programs more solvent.
There's no other type of welfare state expansion that could potentially get buy-in from the right, so this is worth pushing
"I don't think that's the right approach; it should all be cash so parents have freedom of choice."
The Swedish Christian Democratic Party still advocates for - and managed to implement once in the past - giving a lump sum of money to parents which they can spend on kindergarten or on themselves to stay at home with the kids, but it was abolished (rightly so IMO) since the left thought it was bad for women (more women staying home which affects all women's career opportunities and makes some women dependent on their husbands for pension etc) and the right thought it was bad for the economy since it kept many women from participating in the work force.
lol I love how a policy where some women choose to stay home with their children is labelled “bad for women” and required changing to remove this choice and put a thumb on the scales of women going back to work and having someone else care for their child. I think feminists should take a hard look at themselves if they favour this position.
France comes in at just under 3 percent, with Sweden at 3.4. So these wouldn't be crazy levels of spending, especially for an economy that's already lower-tax than Europe's.
Totally agree, and my kids are mostly grown. I know so many people who miss days of work because of child care issues. On the lower end of the income spectrum, this means people losing their jobs, high turnover, etc. it seems like a program for under 5s would be good for business too.
I would love to see the program also pay for training and certification of child care workers. There are not enough people doing this job, and it is something that would not take a lot of training to give people interested in working with kids a way to a job. With subsidized care, those jobs might be more stable, too.
You could structure it a lot of different ways. (I think benefits should be much higher for the first child than for subsequent children, because it's with the first child that women's lifetime earnings take a huge hit. And they should probably be higher in the first few years than afterwards.)
I just wanted to put a number down that shows the right order of magnitude for total spending. Three percent of GDP is what France and Sweden allocate, and it does seem to make a significant difference to the birth rate.
I think the gap in Sweden is pretty large. They have a sizable Muslim underclass due to their generous asylum policies in the past.
This may be one reason they've stuck with the free public daycare. It's not worth anything to a family where the mother stays home, so one effect is to encourage migrants to adopt more Scandinavian gender norms.
I suspect a lot of white voters think the incentives of an all-cash family policy for those communities would be... suboptimal.
Except, as Ruxandra Teslo writes, echoing Anna Rotkirch, research director at the Family Federation of Finland’s Population Research Institute: "there is no obvious policy-level explanation for the European country with the highest birth rate - France" (https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/culture-over-policy-the-birth-rate). Not to say it's hopeless, and she argues otherwise in the rest of her piece (as does Zvi in the pieces MondSemmel linked). Nonetheless it is not simple, and I am very pessimistic, as industrialized countries have struggled just to claw back a tiny fraction of our premodern birth rates.
I don't care about TFR. What I do care about is the reality that productive abilities are more broadly distributed in the population than income is. It's bad for the future productivity of the nation to be constrained by the luxury childcare preferences/economic indifference of the electorate.
Ezra just did a podcast on how Sweden provides a heavenly level of benefits compared to the US and still hasn’t managed to raise its birth rate more than one-hundredth of a kid above ours; that’s what, a . The route to more naturally born citizens does not run through increased parental/childcare benefits.
I think that's the wrong comparison. Sweden's TFR is well above the European average. So unless there's a specific reason to think they're more culturally similar to the US than to the rest of Europe, the spending does seem to have an effect.
Yeah, it certainly seems like a deeply shady assumption to say that Sweden's natural TFR is equal to America's, and the marginal effect of their natalist policies is +0.01 TFR.
My general impression of Sweden is that it's very culturally different from America, and kind of nihilistic.
Population aging is a consequence of things that most of us— correctly— consider desirable (economic growth, medical technology improving, lengthening lifespans), but it really has created a bunch of tough political problems. I’ll be interested in seeing how Japan and South Korea try to handle it; they’re the closest to having population pyramids which break everything.
Yes. So we need to figure out how to manage those pyramids with better productivity and distribution of assets. We ain't going to breed our way out of it short of handmaid's tale forced birth.
But we may need to only delay it for a few more generations before AI/robots essentially solve the problem for us (for good or bad depending on your outlook!).
"but it really has created a bunch of tough political problems."
The population aging isn't what caused those problems, it's anti-growth policy all the way down. Restricting supply and stimulating demand, in tandem, in many areas of the economy.
Again, as talked about a few days (?) ago in here, this is part of the reason, just like I'm sure the ordenous regulations at the corners, and that combines why our TFR in 1.67, not 1.87, but the main reason is all women in the US are far more educated (including young barely high school educated girls via 16 & Pregnant + IUD's not having as many babies), raising a baby is a tough time, especially with heightened non-economic expectations for being a good parent, plus as noted below, even programs I support as a good social democrat who believes in a welfare state, not natalism, doesn't seem to help things.
I don't think the cost of child rearing is why TFR is declining greatly basically everywhere but some African countries and among ultra-orthdox people in Israel.
As a woman, I always find these conversations really creepy. I have one kid because I want one kid. I could afford another but it would limit my career options, free time, public engagement, and time that I get to spend with my current child. You could offer to pay me $300 a month or $3,000 a month and I am not having another kid for you to avoid a population age distribution problem.
I think we should be supporting families with kid more because I care about the families and kids in my community and because I think supporting families and kids is a good investment in our future.
I do think that there are probably women who would be having a few more kids if there were better financial supports for both infertility treatment and parenting. But I think that is going to be on the margin. For them, great because people who want to parent should have that opportunity.
But I think we may just have to deal with the reality that in a society in which women have both free access to family planning and anything approaching economic and social equality we are going to see mostly smaller families which appears to be a widespread preference by women. Where you see big families it is mostly in areas with low rates of equality for women, limited access to birth control, and low rates of infant survival. Most women are not looking to go back to that.
So we are going to need to come up with solutions that don't involved forcing or ineffectually bribing women to birth more babies. Some of that is allowing for immigration into richer countries to spread the young around. But it probably also involves actually using increased productivity in more socially meaningful ways so that a smaller group of younger people can economically afford to support a large aging population.
Right now, our society is structured such that having kids comes with very high costs, in terms of both money and time, that are not borne by childless adults.
I don’t think of pro-natalist policy as being about bribing people to be parents. I think of it as restructuring our modern economy and society sufficiently that people are not dissuaded from having children due to these kinds of costs.
Within our existing primarily market-driven system, a person can say, “I really love to travel, so I’m not looking to have kids anytime soon.” and this is completely comprehensible and rational on its own terms.
But imagine if taxes, transfers, airline tickets, hotels, and childcare worked in such a way that the one thing didn’t really have anything to do with the other. If DINK couples and couples with young kids both went on similar numbers of vacations per year. That kind of rough equivalence is the goal as I see it, and I don’t think it requires rejecting modernity, family planning, or equality.
I guess, I just see a significant part of those costs in time and opportunity loss and lifestyle limitations as being baked into the parenting package independent of expense.
When someone says, as my of my friends do, "I don't want kids because I really love to travel," they are not primarily thinking about the costs of bringing along extra bodies in terms of airline tickets and hotel rooms. They are thinking that they want the sponiatity to travel whenever they want without regard to school vacation schedules. They want to be able to visit romantic or exotic locations without having the romance ruined by having a crying toddler at the table or having to worry about how to keep a little kid safe. They want to be able to go a museum and linger over art without having to worry about a six year old's attention span or stay out late eating dinner in Madrid without worrying about bedtime meltdowns.
Having kids necessitate a reduction in your freedom of movement and time. They are little dependent humans whose needs are going to have take priority over yours or at least be considered with them. I can't think of anything that would necessitate a larger lifestyle change than taking in a elderly parent with dementia or inviting a friend with an ongoing heroine addiction to move into your place.
The research suggests that kids actually do reduce the day to day happiness of their parents in meaningful ways even as they increase their sense of purpose, meaning, and joy. It's a real trade off. Each additional kid adds differently to each side of that scale.
The only way to have my happily childless friends not face those tradeoffs would be to give them so much stinking money that they could hire a full time nanny which doesn't seem like a viable option.
When I think about my friends who would ideally like to have kids but don't or don't have as many as they might the reasons are usually tied up with either not have stable romantic partnerships, disability concerns, or issues with fertility. There are probably some policy changes we could make that would make it easier for folks to marry and maintain marriages by reducing economic stress for everyone and we could certainly work to make fertility treatments more widely available.
But my friends who don't want kids are not going to bought at a price anyone wants to pay them and honestly probably shouldn't have kids. They love hanging out with mine but are happy to hand her back when they are done. Folks who don't find the idea of parenting joyful or enticing may just not be the right people to parent. We can find them other "it takes a village jobs." My friends who have small families also never mention cost as why they don't have more.
The only things I have heard with regard to expense and kids is folks who say they are delaying having kids because they want to buy a house or pay of student loans first. That might be a population who would parent if they could afford it but they would probably need to be bought with debt forgiveness and cheaper housing prices rather than a per child credit.
Again, all about the child tax credit because parenting is important and should be done well and money helps. I just don't see it making anything but a tiny shift in family size.
"The research suggests that kids actually do reduce the day to day happiness of their parents in meaningful ways even as they increase their sense of purpose, meaning, and joy. It's a real trade off. Each additional kid adds differently to each side of that scale."
This has been my exact experience since becoming a parent. Especially as a relatively older one who really enjoyed his day-to-day life prior to becoming a father.
Most of the declining fertility rate, I believe, is explained by smaller family sizes not childless couples. That is an easier problem to solve (though still very hard) and doesn’t squash quite so many preferences. For example, earlier family formation is highly correlated with more kids. People have their first kid at 22 are much more likely to have multiples than the recent trend of late twenties / early thirties. There are a lot of things baked into our society to delay family formation, which we should consider changing.
I’m not saying tax credits wouldn’t be part of it, but it feels like there’s a lot of non-monetary low hanging fruit as well.
How are parents’ lives different if public schools are actually trying to optimize for parental convenience, rather than mostly ignoring that as a concern? How many more people do get full-time nannies if the State Department’s Consular Bureau is instructed that their new top priority is making it maximally cheap and easy for American parents to hire an au pair?
It feels like right now there are a lot of areas where we’re just not even trying.
This ^^, as a fellow having-bred female ;P I completely agree. I would add as well that pregnancy itself is hard, I went through it once, and I am so very grateful for my one son and would never trade him for anything, but pregnancy was not overall physically easy, and my delivery was not ideal (required a C-Section and had some complications), I could not see going back through what was a very taxing physical experience on purpose - even for a refundable tax credit lol. And I was relatively younger (27 at the time), healthy and fit (not overweight or experiencing any pre-existing health conditions) - the risk of complications increases the older a woman and of course the less healthy so if it was hard for me, it's probably even more of a potential physical risk for the current generation of childbearing aged women that is overall heavier and on average older before their first pregnancy (the average I think now is around mid-30's!)
I would also add that our society is particularly not very friendly to the "post-pregnancy" body that most women will experience, even under the best circumstances, and there may be some more subliminal incentives from women not wanting to undergo the physical changes that will mark them as "less attractive" in our society - which is not just an abstract concern as these "ideals" can be very much filtered down to and expressed by their partners... It just seems that up through the Boomer generation of parents, it was a lot more common (and acceptable) to "look old" as soon as the 30's hit. I can look at photos of my parents, relatives and their peers from that era and it's very noticeable how much older adults in their 30's presented up through the 90s even than adults in their 30's present today (and it's not just the styles of the era but the big distinction between how a "mom" dressed and styled versus single women in their 20s even in the styles of that era, where now that distinction is a lot blurrier). And they had more kids (although Boomers definitely had fewer kids than their parents, my mom from a family of 9 where this was not uncommon in the 1950s had only 2, and 2-4 kids was about the norm for suburban/middle class families in the 80s I think?), which accelerated that "older" appearance, whereas today having more kids and leaning into "old" seems much less the norm. And the appearance as very much hand in hand with adapting into an "older" lifestyle habits that is also becoming more socially normed for people well into their late middle ages to continue having "fun" and "experiences" whereas for my parents in the 80s settling into the middle class "family" lifestyle was the expectation and norm, whereas now there are many other options that have been "normed" for what early-to-mid-to-late middle age can and even "should" look like (or aspire to).
Lifestyle, culture, the sheer physical difficulty of pregnancy/childbirth, appearance and attractiveness standards, yeah these are all likely pretty salient (dis)incentives that may be factoring in sub-consciously (or not) in the decisions to not have/limit child bearing that go beyond the (relatively more) simple solvable-by-policy prescriptions of the cost factors. Shallow (or not, I don't think it's shallow IMO), women don't want to be prematurely aged by their 30's, having had multiple by then pregnancies perhaps as they saw their grandmothers and mothers experienced, their partners likely also would not prefer to have (or to be prematurely aged themselves in companionship), young singles/couples enjoy having a longer young adulthood it seems with options for leisure, travel and personal/career development that childbearing necessarily interrupts (at best), etc.
Not to say we shouldn't be better subsidizing of those families that do want to have more children - we should! And particularly for the lower income end of the scale where considerations like "taking more vacations" and "looking fit and sexy at age 35" are probably not as salient disincentives for not having kids but costs really are. But it shouldn't be expected as the cure-all for an overall lower birthrate across society, as I do strongly think there's a lot of non-monetary reasons for that.
"I could afford another but it would limit my career options, free time, public engagement, and time that I get to spend with my current child."
Well, I think the point is that to the extent we can shift the American economy so that a second child does *not* reduce your "career options, free time, [and] public engagement," we should do so. It's fine to say that a tweak to tax policy can't do that, but I don't think it's justified to give up entirely on the project and assume "that in a society in which women have both free access to family planning and anything approaching economic and social equality we are going to see mostly smaller families."
I don't see how the "economy" could be shifted to accomplish this. Parenting a second child would take time from my career, free time, public engagement, and time with my current child" simply because parenting in the way most of us understand it is time consuming and time is a finite thing and choices have tradeoffs. I think the only thing that could change that really would be a change in expectations about how much time parenting requires.
Some of that could be relatively easily reduced by providing free or reduced childcare before and after school so that was more universally available. But otherwise, I think we hit up against some cultural norms that are hard to shift. I personally think it would be lovely to reduce some of the ultracompetetive norms and keeping up with the Jones parts of modern parenting.
But ultimately, I think that part of what makes parenting more time consuming is the desire on the part of both parents to spend time with their kids and having meaningful careers and lives. Some of us grew up in the first generation where a lot of mom's worked and that meant less active care than a prior generation of stay at home mom's could provide. Many of us wanted something different. We could do that by not having careers or we could do that by starting families later in life and having fewer kids.
I am a parent of an only child and was an only child. My parents both had very successful and high pressure careers. My mom in particular broke a lot glass ceilings in her profession, mostly by working twice as hard as her male colleagues. I had a good childhood and a lot of good quality time with my parents because they prioritized it. But there were still a lot of mixed school concerts, making my own dinner, and unsupervised time in my teens. If I try to imagine the attention that I got and splitting it in half, it would have been less than I needed.
I opted for a career with a more flexible schedule but still one kid so I would be as torn as my mother was. I can't imagine having two or three more and not feeling spread too thin. Frankly, I end up picking up a ton of slack for the parents of my friends who have more kids. I end up doing the carpools, chaperoning the field trips, and planning activities for lots of my daughter's friends. I don't mind but I don't feel like there is this whole untapped capacity for parenting in my world other than the ones who don't have kids at all. Folks who wanted two have two. Folks who wanted three have three. Folks who have four got hit with twins they weren't expecting.
Correction. I do have friends who want more kids than they have but that is because of fertility issues. I do think more universal access to fertility treatment would be good for many reasons and would result in more kids.
I also have friends who birthed fewer kids than they intended because they ended up adopting one or more dids out of the foster care system and took up their capacity to parent. One of my friends was planning to have two kids. She signed up to be a temporary foster parent for 18 months until the 12 year could be placed with family members who needed to prove they could stay drug free. She got pregnant and three months before she had her kids, DHSH let her know the family had failed to be in compliance and they were going to put her foster daughter up for adoption. They offered to adopt her and she said she would like that but what she was most looking forward to with going to her family was being able to live with her two siblings who were also in other foster care homes and asked if they would adopt all three of them. So within 3 months they went from having 0 kids to 4 kids aged 0, 10, 12, and 14.
I have several other friends who also signed up to foster and ended up adopting one or more kids. One adopted their first and then ended up adopting each of their siblings as they were born to their first's birth mother as her parental rights got terminated each time due to drug use. They ended up with five kids in the end without having any bio kids of their own.
These adoptive parents are all great but they face real challenges with kids who have to deal with some early life trauma or medical issues.
My overall sense is that the US ought to be doing a much better job of taking care of the kids we have now in terms of feeding them, housing them, providing them adequate medical care and mental health services, and providing them with safe communities and excellent public education before we start trying to figure out how to churn out more.
Yup, it also doesn't help that even supposed liberal-minded people who say, write books about this issue and the reason behind it, and claim don't want to shame women who don't want kids or single mothers, end up openly allying with conservatives who openly talk about their support for lessened reproductive rights and general conservative policy, because of seemingly a couple of overheated negative reviews.
I think defeatism about fertility is dangerous. It is going to cause huge problems and as you note one reliable solution is to restrict the freedom of women. Which is bad!
Increasing productivity is good in its own merits of course but “we just need to make this giant problem no longer a problem with unspecified productivity gains” doesn’t fund pensions or increase the workforce.
1. Spend a disproportionate amount of the budget on medicare and social security
2. Wage earners are taxed and parental benefits are cut to pay for this
3. People feel it's too expensive to have kids
4. The electorate skews older and votes for more spending on medicare and social security
5. And the cycle repeats
So own the libs by increasing immigration. And with a bigger tax base, we make social security solvent without having to significantly increase taxes or cut parental benefits. Thereby, increasing U.S. citizen birth rates.
Yeah that's my preferred solution.
Owning the libs to do liberal things is generally a good approach to policy.
Throwback to Matt's blog days at The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/07/whig-measures-and-tory-men/43273/
Yeah, I really don't understand the Republican stance against almost all immigration since immigrants from many countries are more likely to be conservative
Conservatism is substantively against changes in the population composition, even if the new people are conservative in their own ways.
People have legitimate concerns about changes in culture. All people everywhere have this concern. It is not just an American White Nationalist concern. My guess is it goes back a very long time and is embedded in our tribal instincts. It is rooted in a very deep instinct for survival.
Hint: skin color
Neither party seems to understand this. Don't know why.
How much is Biden's controversial asylum legal immigration reducing entitlement costs by? I feel like I would've heard him brag about it by now if it was a big number...
It doesn’t reduce costs at all - it just increases revenue and keeps the actual costs (which remain unchanged) affordable for longer.
I should've said shortfall instead of costs, thanks for clarifying. But my question remains what fraction of that shortfall is being fixed by Biden's move.
I agree with this broadly, but given the wage structure of our current immigrants, it is not true in a broad sense. Yes, more immigrants will help SS and Medicare/Medicaid, but given the wage structure of our current immigrants, the total costs exceed the total benefits for about a generation. This is one reason you see states (who actually fund the services used) freaking out about immigration, even (or lately especially) blue states.
I would like to see more immigration (a lot more actually) but balance it so that it allows more highly skilled immigrants who will make above median wages and roughly the same amount of lower-skilled immigrants. We need more people, period. This approach would also lessen income inequality, and I suspect it would introduce a less conservative political balance. It would also increase the benefits of immigration to lower skilled US workers by increasing demand for their skills, further decreasing income inequality and potentially building support for more immigration.
Unfortunately, I do not see this happening as Republicans are generally opposed to immigration, and the democratic political base of upper-middle-class professionals has been resistant to allowing people with comparable skill sets into the country.
The amount of immigration needed to fix the problem would be unacceptable to about 80% of the population
It’s not just spending, it’s regulation too. Retirees are less likely to support pro growth regulation because they have far less participation in the upside. They’re gonna be impacted by the disruption of building that new semiconductor fab but they’re not gonna get a job working there or even live to see the majority of the economic benefit it will provide for the community.
The biggest example is housing imo.
Not only do they not support growth but they believe they have the greatest standing in being against it. I’ve lived in this community for 35 years and….
A lot of it is status quo bias. Older people have already went through a lot of existing hoops, and reforming various regulations puts them in a position to be worse off.
Now, if those laxing of regulations makes it so that there is more wealth around, people feel like starting up families and working more, then the case is obvious that the old would be better off.
I agree that some regulations can support growth - by building confidence in new, unknown technologies or procedures - but in what sense is building a semiconductor fab "pro growth regulation"? Did you mean *removing* regulations, like land use? Or were those two different thoughts? (And it's hard to imagine seniors objecting to the regulations I'm talking about here).
I think the main problem is housing, not income transfers.
Yeah my thinking is you're right
Ok, but how elastic is fertility to parental allowances. Don’t most of the European countries with child allowances have low fertility? Would $350/monty really make you want to go out and get someone pregnant?
Reposting an earlier comment (from https://www.slowboring.com/p/sunday-thread-49d/comment/51365554 ):
Zvi has looked into the topic of whether government policy can increase fertility, and IIRC his conclusion was that it was definitely possible in principle, but that governments typically don't make efforts commensurate with the size of the problem. See here: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/fertility-rate-roundup-1 and https://thezvi.substack.com/p/fertility-roundup-2
Quote: "The core point here is merely to illustrate that yes, government policies absolutely can increase birth rates, and can do so at reasonable prices. Prospective parents choosing how many children to have, or whether to have children at all, very much respond to incentives about what their lives and finances would look like."
“Would $350/month really make you want to go out and get someone pregnant?”
I’d do it for free.
We really need more female commenters here on Slow Boring.
I don't want to attempt to speak for them but . . . . ewww.
Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and second that.
I find it very weird that that Ken in MIA's comment is what's getting the pushback. David Abbott's comment was the creepy one.
It was a ferocious battle for first place. I think the making it personal pushed Ken's into the winner's circle.
Am I *that* hideous?
Stop digging that hole, Ken.
yeah
Boy's club hyuk hyuk sex joke nonsense like this always just makes me think of dogs going around pissing on streetlamps and fire hydrants to mark their territory.
If I may speak in my own defense, I found David A's idea that men "go out and get someone pregnant" funny, but unintentionally so. If I was marking my territory, it was only to say, hey, bud, I write the punchlines here.
This is the whitest, most middle class comment I've ever seen on SB (with Ben's being #2).
Re the female commenters or lack thereof, I’m curious how much this has been a topic of discussion behind closed doors in meetings of SB management
Basically every online forum in the world that isn't about a female-coded topic is heavily male.
Men love to share opinions!
It's not that forums have to be female-coded. They just have to be female-dominant. I'm in plenty of forums or online social circles for gender-neutral interests (genre fiction, art, outdoor activities, etc.) that are female-dominant, but usually they were started by a woman or had a big female userbase early on that generated some gendered momentum.
The politics forums tend to be male unless female-coded, though - but female-coded tends to be about schools or reproductive rights or healthcare, and those are all pretty big topics people get passionate about.
I'm a female subscriber! But not a commenter. I love sharing my opinions in real life. On the internet? Not so much.
Socialist! : D
That really is the biggest complaint about Ken, around here. Too much goddamn socialism.
I know! It's like KEN stop talking about dialectical materialism and the inevitable failure of the capitalist class!
Charity is not socialism.
A weird half-baked idea that I have is that we should have a massively generous child tax credit (like $10K+ a year or something) but it should be non-refundable. It won't incentivize people to have kids they can't afford and would be a net transfer from childless adults to parents.
Always want to hear more half baked ideas in the comment section
Isn't this exactly the opposite of proposals to extend and enhance the Child Tax Credit (i.e., making it more refundable)?
I've read so much commentary about how the pandemic-era expanded Child Tax Credit was an unparalleled way to end child poverty, without even mentioning the possible negative consequences it might have for child-bearing behavior.
income and education are negatively correlated with fertility (because opportunity costs)
How much is choice based around opportunity cost and how much is way fewer unplanned pregnancies?
seems like those are endogenous
France and Sweden have much more generous family benefits than the rest of Europe and they also have non-catastrophic TFRs, although still below replacement. I think the Occam's Razor approach to declining fertility is to spend as much as France before seeing if other steps are needed. (The benefits would be expensive, but the US doesn't have a value-added tax so bringing one in would be an option for financing them.)
According to Ezra’s guest in a recent podcast episode the TFR for the US is 1.66. The TFR for Sweden is 1.67. Is that an improvement we should shoot for? How much should we spend on it?
That was an interesting episode! But it really just cemented the fact that the factors driving lower birthrates in developed economies are so deeply multifaceted and seemingly non-solvable.
There are so many different factors in play, you can't just isolate one. For example, the religiosity of Americans probably cancels out some of the effects.
In that case I consider it a little weird that the Swedish rate so closely followed ours from 2015-today despite our significant cultural differences.
But do you think that Sweden’s policies (visavi the US) only adds up to a 0.01% increase in TFR? That sounds weird. I think it increases it (a bit) more but there are other factors which increases US fertility.
I don't think we should be doing it to improve the birth rate. I think we should be doing it out of concern for kids and families. That episode also discussed how little we seem to care for you g families - not just financially, but culturally - than peer countries.
Desired fertility rate is a thing and building a society that doesn’t care about it causes real people real pain. Native-born American women deserve to have the children they want to raise and we should prioritize ways that allow them to do so.
I just googled, and the Swedish allowance is 1250 kroner (~$120) a month.
They also have free public child care, which must cost a lot more. (I don't think that's the right approach; it should all be cash so parents have freedom of choice.)
A cash benefit of $1000 per month for every child under 18 would cost a little over 3 percent of GDP. Since the US is a low-tax country with no VAT, that could easily be done if the political will existed. And I think it would virtually wipe out poverty among families with children, not to mention making the old-age programs more solvent.
There's no other type of welfare state expansion that could potentially get buy-in from the right, so this is worth pushing
"I don't think that's the right approach; it should all be cash so parents have freedom of choice."
The Swedish Christian Democratic Party still advocates for - and managed to implement once in the past - giving a lump sum of money to parents which they can spend on kindergarten or on themselves to stay at home with the kids, but it was abolished (rightly so IMO) since the left thought it was bad for women (more women staying home which affects all women's career opportunities and makes some women dependent on their husbands for pension etc) and the right thought it was bad for the economy since it kept many women from participating in the work force.
lol I love how a policy where some women choose to stay home with their children is labelled “bad for women” and required changing to remove this choice and put a thumb on the scales of women going back to work and having someone else care for their child. I think feminists should take a hard look at themselves if they favour this position.
OECD data on "family policy" expenditures as a share of GDP:
https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/family-benefits-public-spending.htm
France comes in at just under 3 percent, with Sweden at 3.4. So these wouldn't be crazy levels of spending, especially for an economy that's already lower-tax than Europe's.
Totally agree, and my kids are mostly grown. I know so many people who miss days of work because of child care issues. On the lower end of the income spectrum, this means people losing their jobs, high turnover, etc. it seems like a program for under 5s would be good for business too.
I would love to see the program also pay for training and certification of child care workers. There are not enough people doing this job, and it is something that would not take a lot of training to give people interested in working with kids a way to a job. With subsidized care, those jobs might be more stable, too.
You could structure it a lot of different ways. (I think benefits should be much higher for the first child than for subsequent children, because it's with the first child that women's lifetime earnings take a huge hit. And they should probably be higher in the first few years than afterwards.)
I just wanted to put a number down that shows the right order of magnitude for total spending. Three percent of GDP is what France and Sweden allocate, and it does seem to make a significant difference to the birth rate.
What's the native born birth rate compared to immigrant birth rate in those countries?
I think the gap in Sweden is pretty large. They have a sizable Muslim underclass due to their generous asylum policies in the past.
This may be one reason they've stuck with the free public daycare. It's not worth anything to a family where the mother stays home, so one effect is to encourage migrants to adopt more Scandinavian gender norms.
I suspect a lot of white voters think the incentives of an all-cash family policy for those communities would be... suboptimal.
Except, as Ruxandra Teslo writes, echoing Anna Rotkirch, research director at the Family Federation of Finland’s Population Research Institute: "there is no obvious policy-level explanation for the European country with the highest birth rate - France" (https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/culture-over-policy-the-birth-rate). Not to say it's hopeless, and she argues otherwise in the rest of her piece (as does Zvi in the pieces MondSemmel linked). Nonetheless it is not simple, and I am very pessimistic, as industrialized countries have struggled just to claw back a tiny fraction of our premodern birth rates.
I don't care about TFR. What I do care about is the reality that productive abilities are more broadly distributed in the population than income is. It's bad for the future productivity of the nation to be constrained by the luxury childcare preferences/economic indifference of the electorate.
Ezra just did a podcast on how Sweden provides a heavenly level of benefits compared to the US and still hasn’t managed to raise its birth rate more than one-hundredth of a kid above ours; that’s what, a . The route to more naturally born citizens does not run through increased parental/childcare benefits.
I think that's the wrong comparison. Sweden's TFR is well above the European average. So unless there's a specific reason to think they're more culturally similar to the US than to the rest of Europe, the spending does seem to have an effect.
Yeah, it certainly seems like a deeply shady assumption to say that Sweden's natural TFR is equal to America's, and the marginal effect of their natalist policies is +0.01 TFR.
My general impression of Sweden is that it's very culturally different from America, and kind of nihilistic.
"Songs from the Second Floor" is one of my favorite films. But you can see how those people might just give up on reproducing the human race
Population aging is a consequence of things that most of us— correctly— consider desirable (economic growth, medical technology improving, lengthening lifespans), but it really has created a bunch of tough political problems. I’ll be interested in seeing how Japan and South Korea try to handle it; they’re the closest to having population pyramids which break everything.
Yes. So we need to figure out how to manage those pyramids with better productivity and distribution of assets. We ain't going to breed our way out of it short of handmaid's tale forced birth.
But we may need to only delay it for a few more generations before AI/robots essentially solve the problem for us (for good or bad depending on your outlook!).
"but it really has created a bunch of tough political problems."
The population aging isn't what caused those problems, it's anti-growth policy all the way down. Restricting supply and stimulating demand, in tandem, in many areas of the economy.
(A) key error here is that it is wage earners rather than consumers that are being taxed. Substitute a VAT for the wage tax.
Plus deficit drag on growth contributes to fewer kids.
"3. People feel it's too expensive to have kids"
Again, as talked about a few days (?) ago in here, this is part of the reason, just like I'm sure the ordenous regulations at the corners, and that combines why our TFR in 1.67, not 1.87, but the main reason is all women in the US are far more educated (including young barely high school educated girls via 16 & Pregnant + IUD's not having as many babies), raising a baby is a tough time, especially with heightened non-economic expectations for being a good parent, plus as noted below, even programs I support as a good social democrat who believes in a welfare state, not natalism, doesn't seem to help things.
I don't think the cost of child rearing is why TFR is declining greatly basically everywhere but some African countries and among ultra-orthdox people in Israel.
As a woman, I always find these conversations really creepy. I have one kid because I want one kid. I could afford another but it would limit my career options, free time, public engagement, and time that I get to spend with my current child. You could offer to pay me $300 a month or $3,000 a month and I am not having another kid for you to avoid a population age distribution problem.
I think we should be supporting families with kid more because I care about the families and kids in my community and because I think supporting families and kids is a good investment in our future.
I do think that there are probably women who would be having a few more kids if there were better financial supports for both infertility treatment and parenting. But I think that is going to be on the margin. For them, great because people who want to parent should have that opportunity.
But I think we may just have to deal with the reality that in a society in which women have both free access to family planning and anything approaching economic and social equality we are going to see mostly smaller families which appears to be a widespread preference by women. Where you see big families it is mostly in areas with low rates of equality for women, limited access to birth control, and low rates of infant survival. Most women are not looking to go back to that.
So we are going to need to come up with solutions that don't involved forcing or ineffectually bribing women to birth more babies. Some of that is allowing for immigration into richer countries to spread the young around. But it probably also involves actually using increased productivity in more socially meaningful ways so that a smaller group of younger people can economically afford to support a large aging population.
Right now, our society is structured such that having kids comes with very high costs, in terms of both money and time, that are not borne by childless adults.
I don’t think of pro-natalist policy as being about bribing people to be parents. I think of it as restructuring our modern economy and society sufficiently that people are not dissuaded from having children due to these kinds of costs.
Within our existing primarily market-driven system, a person can say, “I really love to travel, so I’m not looking to have kids anytime soon.” and this is completely comprehensible and rational on its own terms.
But imagine if taxes, transfers, airline tickets, hotels, and childcare worked in such a way that the one thing didn’t really have anything to do with the other. If DINK couples and couples with young kids both went on similar numbers of vacations per year. That kind of rough equivalence is the goal as I see it, and I don’t think it requires rejecting modernity, family planning, or equality.
I guess, I just see a significant part of those costs in time and opportunity loss and lifestyle limitations as being baked into the parenting package independent of expense.
When someone says, as my of my friends do, "I don't want kids because I really love to travel," they are not primarily thinking about the costs of bringing along extra bodies in terms of airline tickets and hotel rooms. They are thinking that they want the sponiatity to travel whenever they want without regard to school vacation schedules. They want to be able to visit romantic or exotic locations without having the romance ruined by having a crying toddler at the table or having to worry about how to keep a little kid safe. They want to be able to go a museum and linger over art without having to worry about a six year old's attention span or stay out late eating dinner in Madrid without worrying about bedtime meltdowns.
Having kids necessitate a reduction in your freedom of movement and time. They are little dependent humans whose needs are going to have take priority over yours or at least be considered with them. I can't think of anything that would necessitate a larger lifestyle change than taking in a elderly parent with dementia or inviting a friend with an ongoing heroine addiction to move into your place.
The research suggests that kids actually do reduce the day to day happiness of their parents in meaningful ways even as they increase their sense of purpose, meaning, and joy. It's a real trade off. Each additional kid adds differently to each side of that scale.
The only way to have my happily childless friends not face those tradeoffs would be to give them so much stinking money that they could hire a full time nanny which doesn't seem like a viable option.
When I think about my friends who would ideally like to have kids but don't or don't have as many as they might the reasons are usually tied up with either not have stable romantic partnerships, disability concerns, or issues with fertility. There are probably some policy changes we could make that would make it easier for folks to marry and maintain marriages by reducing economic stress for everyone and we could certainly work to make fertility treatments more widely available.
But my friends who don't want kids are not going to bought at a price anyone wants to pay them and honestly probably shouldn't have kids. They love hanging out with mine but are happy to hand her back when they are done. Folks who don't find the idea of parenting joyful or enticing may just not be the right people to parent. We can find them other "it takes a village jobs." My friends who have small families also never mention cost as why they don't have more.
The only things I have heard with regard to expense and kids is folks who say they are delaying having kids because they want to buy a house or pay of student loans first. That might be a population who would parent if they could afford it but they would probably need to be bought with debt forgiveness and cheaper housing prices rather than a per child credit.
Again, all about the child tax credit because parenting is important and should be done well and money helps. I just don't see it making anything but a tiny shift in family size.
"The research suggests that kids actually do reduce the day to day happiness of their parents in meaningful ways even as they increase their sense of purpose, meaning, and joy. It's a real trade off. Each additional kid adds differently to each side of that scale."
This has been my exact experience since becoming a parent. Especially as a relatively older one who really enjoyed his day-to-day life prior to becoming a father.
Most of the declining fertility rate, I believe, is explained by smaller family sizes not childless couples. That is an easier problem to solve (though still very hard) and doesn’t squash quite so many preferences. For example, earlier family formation is highly correlated with more kids. People have their first kid at 22 are much more likely to have multiples than the recent trend of late twenties / early thirties. There are a lot of things baked into our society to delay family formation, which we should consider changing.
I’m not saying tax credits wouldn’t be part of it, but it feels like there’s a lot of non-monetary low hanging fruit as well.
How are parents’ lives different if public schools are actually trying to optimize for parental convenience, rather than mostly ignoring that as a concern? How many more people do get full-time nannies if the State Department’s Consular Bureau is instructed that their new top priority is making it maximally cheap and easy for American parents to hire an au pair?
It feels like right now there are a lot of areas where we’re just not even trying.
This ^^, as a fellow having-bred female ;P I completely agree. I would add as well that pregnancy itself is hard, I went through it once, and I am so very grateful for my one son and would never trade him for anything, but pregnancy was not overall physically easy, and my delivery was not ideal (required a C-Section and had some complications), I could not see going back through what was a very taxing physical experience on purpose - even for a refundable tax credit lol. And I was relatively younger (27 at the time), healthy and fit (not overweight or experiencing any pre-existing health conditions) - the risk of complications increases the older a woman and of course the less healthy so if it was hard for me, it's probably even more of a potential physical risk for the current generation of childbearing aged women that is overall heavier and on average older before their first pregnancy (the average I think now is around mid-30's!)
I would also add that our society is particularly not very friendly to the "post-pregnancy" body that most women will experience, even under the best circumstances, and there may be some more subliminal incentives from women not wanting to undergo the physical changes that will mark them as "less attractive" in our society - which is not just an abstract concern as these "ideals" can be very much filtered down to and expressed by their partners... It just seems that up through the Boomer generation of parents, it was a lot more common (and acceptable) to "look old" as soon as the 30's hit. I can look at photos of my parents, relatives and their peers from that era and it's very noticeable how much older adults in their 30's presented up through the 90s even than adults in their 30's present today (and it's not just the styles of the era but the big distinction between how a "mom" dressed and styled versus single women in their 20s even in the styles of that era, where now that distinction is a lot blurrier). And they had more kids (although Boomers definitely had fewer kids than their parents, my mom from a family of 9 where this was not uncommon in the 1950s had only 2, and 2-4 kids was about the norm for suburban/middle class families in the 80s I think?), which accelerated that "older" appearance, whereas today having more kids and leaning into "old" seems much less the norm. And the appearance as very much hand in hand with adapting into an "older" lifestyle habits that is also becoming more socially normed for people well into their late middle ages to continue having "fun" and "experiences" whereas for my parents in the 80s settling into the middle class "family" lifestyle was the expectation and norm, whereas now there are many other options that have been "normed" for what early-to-mid-to-late middle age can and even "should" look like (or aspire to).
Lifestyle, culture, the sheer physical difficulty of pregnancy/childbirth, appearance and attractiveness standards, yeah these are all likely pretty salient (dis)incentives that may be factoring in sub-consciously (or not) in the decisions to not have/limit child bearing that go beyond the (relatively more) simple solvable-by-policy prescriptions of the cost factors. Shallow (or not, I don't think it's shallow IMO), women don't want to be prematurely aged by their 30's, having had multiple by then pregnancies perhaps as they saw their grandmothers and mothers experienced, their partners likely also would not prefer to have (or to be prematurely aged themselves in companionship), young singles/couples enjoy having a longer young adulthood it seems with options for leisure, travel and personal/career development that childbearing necessarily interrupts (at best), etc.
Not to say we shouldn't be better subsidizing of those families that do want to have more children - we should! And particularly for the lower income end of the scale where considerations like "taking more vacations" and "looking fit and sexy at age 35" are probably not as salient disincentives for not having kids but costs really are. But it shouldn't be expected as the cure-all for an overall lower birthrate across society, as I do strongly think there's a lot of non-monetary reasons for that.
"I could afford another but it would limit my career options, free time, public engagement, and time that I get to spend with my current child."
Well, I think the point is that to the extent we can shift the American economy so that a second child does *not* reduce your "career options, free time, [and] public engagement," we should do so. It's fine to say that a tweak to tax policy can't do that, but I don't think it's justified to give up entirely on the project and assume "that in a society in which women have both free access to family planning and anything approaching economic and social equality we are going to see mostly smaller families."
I don't see how the "economy" could be shifted to accomplish this. Parenting a second child would take time from my career, free time, public engagement, and time with my current child" simply because parenting in the way most of us understand it is time consuming and time is a finite thing and choices have tradeoffs. I think the only thing that could change that really would be a change in expectations about how much time parenting requires.
Some of that could be relatively easily reduced by providing free or reduced childcare before and after school so that was more universally available. But otherwise, I think we hit up against some cultural norms that are hard to shift. I personally think it would be lovely to reduce some of the ultracompetetive norms and keeping up with the Jones parts of modern parenting.
But ultimately, I think that part of what makes parenting more time consuming is the desire on the part of both parents to spend time with their kids and having meaningful careers and lives. Some of us grew up in the first generation where a lot of mom's worked and that meant less active care than a prior generation of stay at home mom's could provide. Many of us wanted something different. We could do that by not having careers or we could do that by starting families later in life and having fewer kids.
I am a parent of an only child and was an only child. My parents both had very successful and high pressure careers. My mom in particular broke a lot glass ceilings in her profession, mostly by working twice as hard as her male colleagues. I had a good childhood and a lot of good quality time with my parents because they prioritized it. But there were still a lot of mixed school concerts, making my own dinner, and unsupervised time in my teens. If I try to imagine the attention that I got and splitting it in half, it would have been less than I needed.
I opted for a career with a more flexible schedule but still one kid so I would be as torn as my mother was. I can't imagine having two or three more and not feeling spread too thin. Frankly, I end up picking up a ton of slack for the parents of my friends who have more kids. I end up doing the carpools, chaperoning the field trips, and planning activities for lots of my daughter's friends. I don't mind but I don't feel like there is this whole untapped capacity for parenting in my world other than the ones who don't have kids at all. Folks who wanted two have two. Folks who wanted three have three. Folks who have four got hit with twins they weren't expecting.
Correction. I do have friends who want more kids than they have but that is because of fertility issues. I do think more universal access to fertility treatment would be good for many reasons and would result in more kids.
I also have friends who birthed fewer kids than they intended because they ended up adopting one or more dids out of the foster care system and took up their capacity to parent. One of my friends was planning to have two kids. She signed up to be a temporary foster parent for 18 months until the 12 year could be placed with family members who needed to prove they could stay drug free. She got pregnant and three months before she had her kids, DHSH let her know the family had failed to be in compliance and they were going to put her foster daughter up for adoption. They offered to adopt her and she said she would like that but what she was most looking forward to with going to her family was being able to live with her two siblings who were also in other foster care homes and asked if they would adopt all three of them. So within 3 months they went from having 0 kids to 4 kids aged 0, 10, 12, and 14.
I have several other friends who also signed up to foster and ended up adopting one or more kids. One adopted their first and then ended up adopting each of their siblings as they were born to their first's birth mother as her parental rights got terminated each time due to drug use. They ended up with five kids in the end without having any bio kids of their own.
These adoptive parents are all great but they face real challenges with kids who have to deal with some early life trauma or medical issues.
My overall sense is that the US ought to be doing a much better job of taking care of the kids we have now in terms of feeding them, housing them, providing them adequate medical care and mental health services, and providing them with safe communities and excellent public education before we start trying to figure out how to churn out more.
Yup, it also doesn't help that even supposed liberal-minded people who say, write books about this issue and the reason behind it, and claim don't want to shame women who don't want kids or single mothers, end up openly allying with conservatives who openly talk about their support for lessened reproductive rights and general conservative policy, because of seemingly a couple of overheated negative reviews.
I think defeatism about fertility is dangerous. It is going to cause huge problems and as you note one reliable solution is to restrict the freedom of women. Which is bad!
Increasing productivity is good in its own merits of course but “we just need to make this giant problem no longer a problem with unspecified productivity gains” doesn’t fund pensions or increase the workforce.