Parenthood is by far the most subsidized personal choice in the universe.
Let's not pretend it's not.
Some countries give more than a year paid parental leave, in what can only be described as vote purchasing.
Parenthood is compensated.
Let's not pretend it's not.
Some countries give more than a year paid parental leave, in what can only be described as vote purchasing.
Parenthood is compensated.
And it's also not personal in the sense that the government often takes an active role in raising and educating kids (wether you like it or not).
I just wish parents stop acting as victims of their own choices, and that they should bare no consequences.
And people won't stop having kids, subsidies or no subsidies. So that's a non-issue.
Birth rates are below replacement levels in most Western countries.
What we do know is what we used to have, the population pyramid, definitely won't work going forward, long term.
Multiple countries in GDP leadership positions are incentivizing having and raising children because women who are able to - exercise bodily autonomy - pursue an education - and generally have rights, though in no country are they equal choose to have less kids.
IMHO they choose to have less kids because its clear the current set-up is a raw deal for women at best. Not having enough kids to replace the current working generation is an issue in: the US, the UK, Italy, Spain, and a number of other countries. This greying of a population is a massive concern and also one of the reasons that some have pushed and bet on robotics. To replace human workers.
Separately, its mostly women, if not exclusively women, bearing the consequences of the action of you know. propagating the species. Its absolutely mind-boggling when you think about the fact that propagation is a requirement of our continued existence and only half the species pays a massive tax
At the same time you can't mandate it. And there's no denying that statistically women choose family more, when choice is given to them.
I know several couples where the wife is essentially asking to retire (in their thirties), to be home with the children and video games, and that the man should continue working for them. Even if it jeopardizes their shared FIRE plans.
If they do that, who is actually paying the tax? Financially the wife for sure. Life quality the husband for sure.
As for replacement, the population age pyramid is not sustainable. It relies not on stability, but growth. The greying of population is inevitable (compared to the classic pyramid) thanks to medical advances and the fact that exponential growth has to stop, mathematically. We can choose starvation, war, plague, or reduced births.
I hear this often and it's such an incorrect assumption. People had kids way before subsidies. Humans won't stop having kids if subsidies stop.
It is worth it though for most people (because of the extra happiness) so I'm not saying that we should necessarily compensate it further, just that financially it's not compensated for.
It's a personal choice to have children, and it's impossible to be a parent X hours a day and also spend those same X hours "in the lab".
Just like it's not possible to spend all your time in the lab and also be a (present) parent.
The limited time for everything that can be done in a lifetime is not about "fairness", and nobody owes you to be able to do all things in life, even if it were possible, which it isn't.
- pay taxes
- make good governance choices
- buy the products you may be making
- make the products you might be selling
- make the products you consume
the list goes on...
But this is the most subsidized one of all (even in the US), and people do it whether it's subsidized or not.
You could say that they are getting "paid in love".
If it's already worth it for them, why should they be paid twice?
Most of the benefits you list may be better off with fewer kids with the same government support.
I definitely think we should invest in schools and such, to make the best people we can. But I'm sick of parents complaining that children affects their economy or has opportunity cost.
Parents don't deserve a handout. Children do, however, deserve a good education.
Literally everything in in life has opportunity cost. Nobody owes removing that cost for anyone else.
If you spend all your money on partying nobody owes you the cost of nice clothes.
I am not a parent but when's the last time you called a parent of yours and paid them with that love? I 100% have not done so recently.
Parents aren't getting a handout, we're ensuring the continuation of our society and so many forces are attempting to shape it actively.
What's the point of paying you for it, if the act actually is its own reward?
It feels like you and I agree that maybe kids aren't for our lives and yet we're pretending its just a wildly rewarding activity like watching movies and not a situation of basically being worried or having to pay for or care for another human for the rest of your natural life.
Even for two people who (I am assuming) do not have kids that feels kind of insincere.
We know its not like watching a movie, or riding a bike or even going to the gym unless the gym costs you ~250k while simultaneously acting like the rude jerk I did when I was a teen.
I hear that the smile on your child's face is infinite reward.
> We know its not like watching a movie, or riding a bike or even going to the gym unless the gym costs you ~250k while simultaneously acting like the rude jerk I did when I was a teen.
Yet, like I said, people do it gladly. They do it even knowing about the way it affects the woman's body, knowing about the sleep depravation, knowing about the terrible two's, knowing about the "you're stupid and I hate you" teens.
If it were as simple as "this activity costs 250k and is a rude jerk" then nobody would do it. Yet they say it's so worth it.[1]
So if it's so worth it for you, then do it. But I don't want to hear about how you're the victim of your own choice. Everyone is. I'll never be a fighter pilot, nor an astronaut.[2]
Pilot and astronaut is the road not taken, for me.
If someone chooses to have a baby and stay home for 5 years, then that's about 11% of their working life not spent improving their career. You'll never have those 11% again, and I won't pretend you walked two roads at the same time. Because nobody can.
And those 11% are placed in a critical point. If someone took age 60-65 off, then that won't affect their career as much.
If someone leaves university at 25, has a baby and takes five years off, then they are now 30 with zero work experience.
That's not fairness, that's physics.
[1] Though one guy I know said he used to not be able to comprehend why anyone would not want children. Now after he's had children he understands. He would absolutely do it again, but at least he understands people who don't want them.
[2] not a real one, anyway. Maybe if prices go down a lot in my lifetime I'll be able to take a lap, but that's it.
As for subsidizing parenthood and children: the more the better. I don’t have kids, but as a human person I have an interest in the next generation of people being happy, healthy, well adjusted and well educated. And that of course begins with creating an environment in which the parents of those children can be successful.
if you’re not looking to inherit while you’re young, you end up in a whole different social hierarchy
Well, if I were going to argue the case I would probably start with the impossibility of any man ever getting that opportunity. Of course, whether those figures are enough or given out in the right way to the right people at the right time, all of those details can be argued over, but if you're going to start with fairness as your argument you'd better address the elephant in the room first.
> AND that men are forced to take an equal time of
Why is it right that anyone is forced to do anything so that your political views are enacted?
let me give you an example
good equality: have more women enter workforce so the pool of candidates is bigger and the salaries (expenses) decrease
bad equality: pay for parental leave of both parents
What year is it again?
> That's a pretty hefty price to pay for everyone, to save those women who were unlucky to have a cruel or unfair husband.
Uh, I don't think that's the trade off here.
> I don't know if it's possible to say if it's "worth it" or not, but this independence sure does not come for free.
When one option is to go full Taliban, it's actually pretty easy to say if it's "worth it".
It makes perfect sense, and it would also be fair and benefit both single/childless people as well as people with children.
I agree with you that it might be impossible to enforce such a law without having the downsides you mentioned. However I would very much like being able to take 6 months of parental leave without being called lazy. This goes both ways.
I'm confused.
I didn't say it was fully compensated. Of course it's not.
But why should you have children, and expect "someone else" to pay for everything?
Nothing else in life works like that.
But yes, I've heard of the German child benefits, and tax rules for married couples, that are not optimal for an equal and fair society.
You say the compensation is "not enough". What would be? That "someone else" pays for the entire cost of your child? Why stop there? Why not demand salary from the government for choosing to raise a child?
There are many choices people make that they expect others to pay for.
I saw a study saying smokers are a net financial gain for society because of the huge savings on pension payments.
(And there are other reasons, that are more important)
But it is a life choice. Other ones are to become an artist. But barely anyone says that anyone who chooses to be an artist (bad or not) deserves for "someone else" to foot the bill for their life.
Or maybe you'd be happier we me saying that yes, in the same way that you must be this net worthy to collect fancy cars. Makes it easier, sure. But nobody owes paying for your choices.
You may feel that having kids is an optional luxury; the evidence suggests this is not a majority perspective.
Yet there's no right to sex, and rape is illegal.
But fact is our world is overpopulated, it would.be better if we'd size down, and we have superegoistic societies in general. (But who would push our wheel chairs if we all wouldn't be so superaltruistic and raise children? Simple answer is there still would be enough, because people want children, even if it is a lot of sacrifice. I fully agree that it costs a lot and is a huge sacrifice, still its a free personal (if you so want lifestyle) choice that most won't regret.. or do you?
For the young and poor who only have their labor to sell, the situation would seem pretty decent.
There is no practical need for this to be centrally managed, other than you can't trust people to be responsible and plan for the future.
People already manage a big part of the pension savings by themselves.
Watch this talk: https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY
Tl;DW: we can not prevent the end of exponential population growth. We can only choose how it ends. By starvation, war, disease, or fewer births.
Pension systems have relied on growth for a long time, but it's just not mathematically possible is the long run.
I know some advocate shrinking for sustainability reasons, but a policy of shrinking is a policy of irrelevance. Other cultures with a growth mindset will continue growing and ruin your sustainability plans.
Let's have abundance instead of austerity. Instead of intentionally reducing the population for sustainability, we can make the current population sustainable with technology. We don't need to stop population growth. It's already stopping. We now need to stop population shrinkage to reach a stable equilibrium.
Others in this thread have, in so many words, said that being a parent should be paid by tax payers as a full time job.
It's a waste of resources and society's investments to pay doctors and lawyers to quit and instead be paid to be full time takers.
So that lessens abundance, creating a poorer world.
It's like the conversation about UBI. If it's actually U and (as often stated by proponents) enough for a middle class lifestyle I would quit today. No way I'd be a sucker paying taxes to support government funded FIRE, without doing it myself.
And so would most of the population.
On a small scale I've soon this in friends' relationships. "Can I stay home with kids and video games, and you just support us?".
I think you should examine this statement a little more. If the time of economically successful people is too valuable to "waste" on childcare, what you are saying is that either economically successful people should not have children (with the obvious corollary being that only economically unsuccessful people should have children), or economically successful people should not spend time raising their children (meaning they should foist their children into the care of economically unsuccessful people instead). I hope you can see the clear issue with the former, and while the latter is pretty much status quo it has big issues as well.
If the children of doctors and lawyers do better when their parents care for them instead of other people, and become doctors and lawyers too, then society didn't lose after all. Childcare is an investment in the future, not pure waste to be avoided.
I don't think society should pay doctors and lawyers their regular hourly rate for childcare for 18 years per child. But I do think that parenthood deserves to be subsidized, and more than it is now, even for economically successful people, up to the point where the fertility rate stabilizes at the replacement rate.
But we pretty much are already.
First with paid parental leave (sometimes over 400 days) and then forever after that, by pretending that this is not a gap in work experience and therefore calling anything short of bumping salary and seniority in line with people who were working as "discrimination".
Like people who are away for a year, and come back promoted.
And that's not even mentioning how much of the slack coworkers he to pick up from a parent needing to leave at 3pm every day from now on. We're all meant to pretend they work just as hard, and deserve to be paid just as much.
(Not every parent offloads work like this onto their coworkers, but a lot of them do. So it's a huge cost statistically not paid by the person who made the choice)
LOL sorry, not even close. But it doesn't matter whether we are or not, not in the slightest. What matters is whether we're subsidizing enough to stabilize the fertility rate. Which we're empirically not.
People no longer want to have 4-5 kids, no matter if you 10x the paid time off or double the subsidies. This too empirically.
And no, actually. Your "LOL" aside, we actually are. Anyone who takes time off for child raising gets a bump literally forever.
So yes, actually.
I'm not saying fully compensated, obviously.
But people do it or don't do it based on if they want, not the money (given a basic level of comp, which we are waaaay beyond).
To increase birth rates we have to start paying people who DON'T want to have children, to do it.
Like wow, how much would you have to pay people who would only do it for money? One million in cash just day one?
Just the physical toll for the parent is huge.
And statistically rate of happiness goes down during thirties for people who have children.
And then on top of that your idea is to have people who don't want children raise them? I'm not betting on this improving quality of life for the child, if the child is just a paycheck.
So we really want people who have children no actually want to, too.
Having young kids I think it's more like full time parenting, on top of any regular day job. Unless you can find a spouse willing to do all the kid work, which is like non-stop 12-16h days until all are in school.
Heaven forbid your SO wants to homeschool and expects you to do at least 40% of parenting, with your day job.
And one gives up so much time and energy being a parent, unless you're wealthy enough to outsource large chunks of the work. (Daycare in the US is 10-25K per year.)
The whole point is that being a parent is compensated in a way that no other choice is.
Parents take on a significant burden. They are compensated for it. There is no choice I can make as a non-parent that will provide me with similar compensation.
If just this financial support provided by some governments then consider you could take on a very low pay job with a nonprofit and get similar 'compensation'. Albeit spread across the length of that career instead of front loaded as paternity leave/credits.
> Some countries give more than a year paid parental leave
You yourself are making my point by saying “similar compensation” “albeit spread across the length of a career.” There is nothing for non-parents that is equivalent to parental leave.
And these leave benefits are just so miniscule compared to the effort and finances required for each child. So why complain about missing them?
> If society does nothing to help then more parents will choose to have fewer, or no, children.
Fewer people is our best option (it is still a terrible option, don't get me wrong) for mitigating the effects of climate change.
Your parents having you is a miniscule benefit to you?
Parents who are highly educated doctors, pilots etc argue that they should be able to stay at home for 1-2 years with almost full salary, which the tax payers should subsidise, and at the same time they also pay an uneducated 16 year old 10 bucks an hour to babysit when they go to the movies?
And you have 1 educated child care professional easily caring for 10 small children, and making a very modest salary.
It doesn't really add up.
That is my point.
Most would consider the implications of that to be highly immoral.
I think it's already immoral how society punishes people for being childless when it's a natural thing and can be 100% caused by characteristics that you are born with and have no control over.
Only because of the subsidies. It's hardly "natural" for all humans to reproduce.
All living humans come from a long unbroken chain of natural selection and rejection of bad genes and reproduction of only the fittest to enable adaption to a changing environment.
If you create subsidies so that every human can reproduce, you are going to reverse natural selection and create survival of the unfittest where every bad gene will reproduce endlessly.
Not having children is just as "natural" as having children, it all depends of how your particular set of characteristics do in the current environment and foreseeable future.
It is “natural” in the sense that we wouldn’t be here to talk about it if it wasn’t the case.
Obviously the human race somehow made it until we created developed societies. I think you are confusing survival of the human race with survival of our current pension system.
Who knows if it's really better or worse to suddenly allow everyone to reproduce?
For sure it's not "natural", and as far as I can see it would actually reverse evolution to regression instead.
And it seems like we can't really stop it anyway with how many men today are becoming outsiders in society because they get rejected to reproduce.
Yeah that's the point, so there really is no need for every man to have children, should it be the norm I'm wondering. Can we get rid of this natural selection, and should we? I don't know. Why is it so self-evident that every person should have children? Clearly it's not natural. It's just another artificial "equality" of a social welfare state.
The whole idea that child bearing should be perfectly and equally distributed across the whole population is a construct of the social welfare state, enabled by subsidies, and is just an artificial form of equality like any other. As such I think it should be examined and debated like everything else, and not taken for granted as self-evident or "natural".
The median is close to the average in kids per women in the developed world. Having four kids is harsh on many women’s bodies; eg my grandma had 8 kids, but she died in her late 50s. While no doubt some couples will want to go for four kids or more, I don’t think it’s ethical to encourage it over a more standard 2 something for most couples.
This is an incredibly bold statement. Most people like having sex, and in a natural state (sans birth control, online dating, internet porn, etc) there are going to be a lot of pregnancies. The idea that tax credits, welfare or parental leave is what is driving this situation is ridiculous. This feels more like a dog whistle about the welfare state, but even if you take away those "subsidies", people ain't gonna stop having kids, that's just not how the majority of young people of child-bearing age think.
We balanced this out up until recently by sending men to war and other dangerous jobs that made them die before they had a chance to reproduce.
There is an enormous asymmetry between the sexes in our biology and that's the feature that drives natural selection and evolution.
The only reason why all people are able to reproduce are subsidies, otherwise natural selection would reject a lot.
Better medical treatments and lack of wars are not child subsidies.
Lower education and religion is probably the biggest cause for these higher birth rates. In the victorian era, people would simply not get married if they didn't have the means to raise children, and they would be childless, and there was nothing strange about that. To give subsidies for everyone to have children comes from the post ww2 politics.
Using your own logic: if natural selection is that fragile, then it should evolve or die. We're not called to uphold it in any way; our own selfish genes inevitably predispose us not to worry about an evolutionary mechanism that does not directly affect us or our children.
The amount spent on keeping shipping lanes protected, the world "stable", and older people having access to medical care are, in the US, subsidized more I believe.
It's not my choice to need care when I get old.
So ROI is infinity, without comp.
It's finite with comp. And note that I'm not even saying the right level is zero.