1. There are already functional mechanisms for contribution. A single, childless person is already contributing more through their taxes. The government already heavily subsidises child-rearing.
2. Child-rearing is given an arbitrary pass that other equally charitable actions wouldn't get. A single, childless person couldn't let his commitment to Doctors Without Borders affect his work performance.
3. I'm not sure if "children are our future" is our future. This model might not be viable forever as the world population keeps growing. This is a whole other can of worms.
Ah yes, the lofty government subsidy of x < $600 on average per family that has enough taxable income to receive the CDCTC (x < $100 all families with children)[0]. The cost of raising a child for an average family is $12,000 per year[1].
> Child-rearing is given an arbitrary pass that other equally charitable actions wouldn't get.
Raising a child is spending 20-40 hrs a week for 18 years and a boatload of money to create another person in the workforce who will spend ~40 years generating GDP and paying taxes. Considering GDP per capita in the USA is ~$62,000 and rising, I think it is pretty safe to assume that your average-ly skilled single childless person contributing anything less than 20 hrs/week to just about any charity isn't even in the ballpark of "equally charitable."
>This model might not be viable forever as the world population keeps growing. This is a whole other can of worms.
Yeah, this is the "The Population Bomb"[2] argument that could possibly be the case but so far has no real evidence beyond hypothesis to support it... since 1968.
[0] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/publicat... [1] https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2017/01/13/cost-raising-chil... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
> Raising a child is spending 20-40 hrs a week for 18 years [...] to create another person [...] who will spend ~40 years generating GDP and paying taxes
Let's not forget that this person will eventually retire and require increasingly expensive care.
That makes me curious. If the current economy can only function with a growing population, then it takes > 1 person to subsidise your upbringing/retirement. Does that mean that 1 human life costs more than the output of a human's entire life?
Those people making $62K are getting paid for their work, not donating it.
You chose one particularly inexpensive subsidy, and ignored everything else. 200 days/year of free childcare is not free. Maternity/paternity leave is coming out of someone's pocket. Many social programs are heavily skewed towards children (SNAP participants are around 1/2 children, despite them only being 1/4 of the population, for example).
I'm not saying we shouldn't do these things - modern society makes having children expensive, and it's obviously best for all of us if we ensure some base level of care for them. But we don't have to pretend it isn't happening.
In the case of SNAP I think you've confused secondary/tertiary effects of a subsidy with a subsidy itself. In the case of education, I think you've confused an externality of an investment in education with a subsidy. I'm not sure you can even consider maternity/paternity leave a government subsidy considering what federal law exists for leave is unpaid (maybe if you consider the continuation of healthcare benefits?).
I can see how some would think I'm splitting hairs here. Taken to its logical conclusion, I could argue with your broad definition that just about any subsidy or tax on anything is also a subsidy or tax on raising children. E.g. families have more cell phones and higher cell phone bills, so taxes on cell phone bills are also taxes on having children. Gas taxes are a tax on extracurricular activities for your kids. That's a little much for me, I prefer to call them what they are, secondary/tertiary effects of a subsidy or tax.
I can't see this as anything other than a deliberate misrepresentation of my stance. In the SNAP case, the key point is not that children benefit from it, it's that children benefit to an enormously out-sized degree - they're over-represented by a full 100%. I pretty deliberately did not say the words you're putting in my mouth - any tax or subsidy that affects children to an approximately equivalent degree as others are obviously not related to this discussion.
As to the education bit, I don't see why the reason we're spending a ton of money subsidizing children affects whether we're subsidizing children - which education very clearly does. You can wave away any subsidy that way, if you so choose.
2. Donating to Doctors Without Borders is just enabling someone else to do a good deed, the donator has zero responsibility. Parents are legally required to look after a child for 16 (i think, in most countries) years.
3. The world population won't keep growing, fertility rates are only above 3 in Africa. Other "developing" countries are on course for the population to stabilise, western developed countries will see population dropping. Google tells me 2064 for current projected population peak.
We must control population to conserve non renewable resources. So we can comfortably perpetuate our species without burning the house down and killing everyone.
That 'heavy subsidy' doesn't even begin to cover the economical costs, let alone the crazy amount of work.
>I'm not sure if "children are our future" is our future. This model might not be viable forever as the world population keeps growing. This is a whole other can of worms.
What's the alternative? Hoping that the children of other countries will just work for your retirement out of the goodness of their heart? Well, maybe you're rich and invested in foreign markets so this isn't a worry for you, but for the vast majority of people this isn't an option.
I think you bring up some good points and also I can sympathise with the parents in my workplace that had this issue thrust upon them due to covid. I won't comment on them nor does it personally affect my work much, if at all - barely anyone on my team are parents and those that are are making it work so I'm not picking up any extra work because of their kids.
But I have never heard of any parent ever say that they are having kids because children are the future so it's odd for me to see so many people say that in this thread. I don't need parents to justify to me why it's harder for them, I already agree with that but the future thing is a very interesting viewpoint I've never personally come across before.
It's not a model, a mental experiment, or a charitable action. It's the x2 amount of work you need to do, day and night, 365 days a year.
What do you think nannies, daycare centers, and schools are doing? It is exceedingly rare for a child to be raised from birth to adulthood by just their close family.
"That’s how we evolved"
BS. We evolved to live in groups of 100-200 people (i.e. villages). Primates generally live in such groups (size varies by species) and will generally help with raising the young within the group, often with some form of social structure determining which group member is helping or being helped (e.g. lower-ranking females will act as "nannies" for higher-ranking females prior to mating and having their own offspring). Moreover, humans evolved a many-to-many mating pattern, so the "village" was the smallest unit of genetic closeness until extremely recently (and even so, people often break the social rules and have adulterous sex, and often change partners multiple times in their lifetime, resulting in a large number of half-siblings).
It would be interesting to model around insect populations rather than ape societies as we have increased in population and there are way too many unique sets of specializations.
I like modeling villages around 125-250. It’s closer to the Dunbar number and we can have diff age groups. And cluster several ‘villages’ together for services that scale.
(*) For example, if you saw a lost child wandering around crying, your first thought would probably be to try to help the child find his parents, even if it was inconvenient to do so, despite not knowing who the child or his parents actually are. Most people would at least stay with the child to wait for the police (or whoever) to arrive and take over, and many would willingly give the child food, an umbrella or coat, or whatever else the child needs.
This, 1000%.
2. It's not an arbitrary pass. A childless person's commitment to Doctors Without Borders is much more flexible than a parent's commitment to a living a human.
3. The world population is only really growing in less developed countries. But it doesn't matter because if you have too many people they will either die because the system can't support them. Or the system will innovate to be able to support them.
why exactly? generally, it is rational to subsidize things that society does not have enough of and tax things that we have too much of. are we currently not producing enough children? this is not necessarily implied by birthrates being below the replacement rate.
2. Child-rearing is a thing tens of millions of people actually do interleaved with full-time work, and has to be addressed by high-level decision makers. There are lots of hypothetical things a specific individual might want to do that maybe have high social utility, and that's an interesting question for them to sort out with their manager and isn't really relevant to how parents are treated.
3. A stable population -- not growing -- requires a little over 2 children per woman, and the US fertility rate is waaaay below that right now.
From companies? The market doesn't care about all that. It's supply and demand. If parents get "perks" from companies it's because the companies need to provide them to attract workers(on the whole).
Society does in fact mediate the purely rational economic incentives and companies thus don't act purely rationally, nor are they society in and of themselves. America isn't the best about it relative to European countries but even here in the U.S. the FMLA bars employers from dropping employees just because they're pregnant or having a kid.