This advice is likely economically bad though. Capital now is better than capital later. I would think money made early and saved by not having children and invested will end up being much more then what will be spent on a fertility clinic later.
Not quite sure that is true: https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mk1AG.jpg
>Also, kids are awesome.
If I am a dollar optimizer, the only thing I care about is money. How much can I sell "awesome" for? Can I skip a step and sell the children directly?
You won't be able to calculate a precise number, but the saying "It's not what you know, it's who you know" shows the dollar price of networks is very high.
This difference can also be taken to absurd extremes though. I honestly wonder why single people without children in my line of work aren't millionaires just based upon the compensation of their day jobs. After having 5 military deployments I can live in a cardboard box and would require only the cheapest of cars to commute to work. I don't spend money very often.
I'm not sure that people who never have children necessarily end up with more wealth than people who do have children, due to psychological impacts.
Having a kid can inspire parents to get their shit together and succeed financially and think about the future, compared to a single person just spending on their hobbies and playing video games.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...
77% increase seems pretty dramatic to me.
To make the point clear: children raised by young and growing parents and different from children raised by old and established parents. Slow startups are different from fast startups. No judgement, they are just different. But the premise that a fast startup is the only way to do a startup is false. It's just choices for different outcomes.
My parents have not come close to being financially recovered relative to later-parents a decade after we've all left the house. The delay you are talking about compounds to absolutely massive differences in my experience. Trying to multi-task both the other "life" check boxes and your work is going to have large hidden costs on work because of these compounding advantages.
The women's "empowerment" movement in this context can be seen as a cynical ploy by capital to convince women their "power" is tied to earning wages and having a career instead of having a family and they must pursue economic independence over over strategic "dependence" on a husband to help them realize commons goals.
At the end of the day women, and men, will ultimately want what they want. The argument here is that in the grand scheme of things they want a family, and will regret early choices that threaten this goal long term. Whether they are distracted away from this goal by capitalist propaganda to increase the labor supply, or they combine forces to achieve it is the challenge.
People will argue "men and women should make their own choices and determine this for themselves". Yes, but what is the default cultural message nowadays? What is promoted as the norm? What is the institutional and political rhetoric around this question? Western liberal democratic, capitalist nations stand firmly on the side of promoting careerism for women over early motherhood and marriage.
If we shifted the norms to allow that, women would be able to make their decisions freely and fairly, rather than just accepting that the lion's share of of parenting should be up to them. Rhetoric that shifts solely to ending careerism for women, but not for men, does indeed disempower women.
Would it be great if we could all have it all? Of course. I'm more concerned with the actual happiness and fulfillment of people who really will regret not having started a family early, and instead wasted their efforts following the neo-liberal careerist path.
Someone's got to have the children and raise them. Someone's got to put in the time at work. Because of the time, effort and physical realities of women bearing children, for most couples the division of labor falls most efficiently on men putting in most of the time rising up the corporate ladder.
People that recognize this happy path and want to go their own way are welcome to it. But we shouldn't lie to people. We should be honest with men and women from a young age what reality is.
If you have multiple children, that can add up to a significant chunk of prime career building years.
Having kids late in life is like a deathbed confessional. people just want to cross "birth children" off their list, but don't really think about being a mother/father for the rest of their life.
If you value career over family thats cool, but you wont get returns on "family-as-an-asset" if you invest late in life. Invest early for greater returns.