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Comment by julianlam | Hacker News Reader

Every time this sort of news pops up, I think "why aren't they incentivising and subsidizing fertility treatment"?

You want to raise the fertility rate, yes?

You could convince an entire population to have more babies the hard way (social or economic pressure).

Or literally just let the people who are already trying, but can't for some physiological reason, have one. They already want children, if they're pursuing fertility treatment, they're already decently well off, too.

To me it seems like a very obvious, targeted solution!

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Fertility treatments have a small impact.

For example, Israel has universal fertility benefiots and this is predicted to contribute ~0.03 TFR. The US and would need a an effect 2,000% (20x) larger to reach replacment. Many EU countries would need an effect 30X stronger.

The bigger challenge is the people wanting to have children in the first place. This is driven by social values, preceived preconditions, and when in life those conditions are met.

I was just hanging out with some friends for the 4th of July. Their immigrant parents chose to have a child while in college working on their Phds and residing in the US on student visas.

I dont know any of my peers that would intentionally make that choice due to the percarious and unstable position.

It makes sense, but it's probably pretty far down on the list of "what could we put money towards in order to increase birthrate". Could probably get a lot more result for the money by funding efforts to pair people together, make them want to have kids, make them more financially equipped to have kids, etc.

Or, why not lean in to falling birthrates and try to build a society that doesn't rely on the population needing to increase infinitely? Everyone just acts as though replacement birthrate is simply something we must meet or exceed, because of dumb "line must always go up" economics. Can't we envision a functional world where the global population is halving every 40 years rather than doubling every 40 years?

Barring not-yet-invented advances in automation, shrinking population means fewer and fewer people providing goods and services compared to the number of people that need them, which means worse and worse poverty for larger and larger fraction of people.

>> fewer and fewer people providing goods and services

Many of them are not needed anyway. Close half of the fast food joints. Or fire half of the IT people. Go back to levels we had in 2006!

> halving every 40 years

Sounds like a road to species extinction.

But who'd pay the pensions then?

It's fairly obvious that to raise the birthrate, all you have to do is get rid of proper sex education and promote abstinence-only education to teenagers (because it doesn't work), and get rid of social media for them. Prohibit them from buying alcohol but give them plenty of ways to acquire it. Use teenage rebellious nature to socially engineer them getting drunk together. Teenage pregnancy is how to get them.

Of course this is absolutely abhorrent to the left, but the article is discussing the left's lowered birth rates, and giving teenagers, especially women, sex education that works can't be ignored. It's some Handmaiden's Tale shit to dupe teenage women into having kids so they're beholden to a man and their family, so they don't get an opportunity to have their own lives, and are instead merely baby making factories, but this is the future of the human race we're talking about here!

No one would ever admit to this being the plan out loud, but it's pretty obvious if you look at it from a societal standpoint, on the level of Dune or the Foundation series of sci-fi writing. Or Idiocracy.

Actually, they do admit it: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/republicans-mad-teen-pre...

Much of the party seems to be obsessed with children's genitals and fertility. Why can't they leave all this on their little island?

Is it so weird to think about the future of humanity? I want my children, and my children's childrens to have a good life as well.

They dont care about humanity. You can see that pretty clearly.

And conservatives were the punishing ones toward pregnant teens - the conservative answer to teenage pregnancy was to make her suffer as much as possible.

That is why it is especially appealing. The political groups that blamed pregnant teenagers and tried to ensure pregnancy destroyes their lives are complaining we dont have enough pregnant teenagers. And you can bet on them being cruel to pregnant teenagers again if that goes up again.

I don't know why this topic would be surprising for people. The elephant in the room is that right leaning people tend to be more religious (or have experienced a religious uprising).

Religion puts an incredible amount of social pressure on children, marriage and families. This is why most conservatives advocate for traditional gender roles, rally against abortion, etc.

My own personal experience of growing in a conservative Islamic country, then converting to Christianity after moving to the West is a testament of how social pressure has an impact on this.

My wife (from South America) was similarly raised in a conservative family. We have delayed having children but it has reached a boiling point where we have to absolutely discuss having kids now.

Yes, there are other factors like affordability that prevents left leaning people from having kids, but to me those are secondary reasons. This social dynamic is simply not there in Liberal circles.

thats the problem, it should be at the top of the list (all the way at the top) and nothing else should be close 100th

It's obvious but not useful:

1. It's been tried and doesn't work.

2. The main reason people can't have kids is waiting too late (or being unable to find a partner and get married). This happens for social reasons. If you make it easier to wait longer and still have children, then people will just up the amount of time they wait and you're back to square one.

Fertility treatment isn't a guarantee. My brother and his wife ended up adopting after treatment failed.

The government paying for it also doesn't make it cheaper, it just moves the costs around.

A fairer, more effective strategy would be subsidizing the first year or so of the child's care- diapers, food, clothes, cribs, vaccines and such. That would benefit a lot more people.

Nah just bump every tax bracket of people over 25 with no children 10% and use the money to care for the vat grown replacement children they didnt have. Cut the taxes back when they hit their 2 kid quota and cut them further for additiinal kids

25 is an odd choice, you incentivise them to have children but you're also making it more difficult for them to do so, and not enough will have children before 25. 30 or even 35 would make more sense.

What about freedom?

If the government can charge me a higher rate of tax because I am not a useless turd with no marketable skills then charging people more for failing to keep population at or above replacement is also not an infringement of freedom. While we are talking about freedom, have you looked at what happens to societies when population growth rates collapse? They tend to not stay societies for very many generations after that. They tend to get invaded and added to an empire that still has a positive population growth rate, or they collapse internally due to the weight of unfullfillable promises and infighting over the shrinking pie and get picked off at the edges. In that regard, policy to preserve the birth rate is a freedom enhancing choice if you think our current society is free. I personally think it's not that great but everything else is pretty bad, so it's the best of a bad situation choice, which makes it worth preserving.

Sound like a totalitarian regime to me. Look at which countries already tried it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_on_childlessness These were all communist countries with at least an intention/policy of providing social services for those children: free health, free education, guaranteed job after that, afordable or even free housing, etc.

USA has none of those. The rich will have a choice; the poor won't. And we already know that children of the poor tend to stay poor and the more children the are, the poorer they'll be. It will be a generation of poor with no hope of escape.

Then there's the slippery slope: What stops the government from increasing the tax to severe punishment levels or levels completely unafordable by anyone?

The taxation scheme on not being a useless turd is closer to a totalitarian regime than taxing people for not having kids is.

Whataboutism and not true.

sigh Very much true and very much not whataboutism because it is valid to compare taxation regimes. If you like progressive taxation then the onus is on you to justify your claims that applying the exact same regime to another characteristic (doing your job at keeping the birthrate above replacement) Is totalitarian while applying it based on income is not (you've failed to do this btw because you can't because they are either both totalitarian or both not because they are the exact same premise).

Also, you fail to appreciate what tax penalties look like. This will incent the rich to have more kids because a 10 % penalty when you are making a million dollars a year is 100k but it's a rounding error if you are in poverty because the first almost 32k of household income is tax free if you joint file. It was said partially in jest, but it is actually a good policy if you can price it low enough that it doesn't cause migration but high enough that it does cause more kids.

I'm going to split your arguments into parts, because they don't make much sense clumped together. I have a hard time understanding it.

> not whataboutism because it is valid to compare taxation regimes.

But this isn't a taxation regime. It's a penalty for choosing a way of life. It's as if the non-parent is responsible for the far future income of the state, especially in a state (USA) with no state-provided pensions; a state that doen't contribute anything back to the future non-parent compared to a future parent.

> the onus is on you to justify your claims

I already demonstrated that the only states that implemented it were totalitarian states. Are you in disagreement with this? Proportional taxation (fixed % of income) and even progressive taxation (higher % of income for higher income) is used everywhere, totalitarian state or otherwise. I'm not going to argue why that type of taxation is a good thing. Ask a LLM.

> (doing your job at keeping the birthrate above replacement)

Not my job. Not _a_ job. Not unless you consider that women should stay at home, cook and take care of children. BTW, do you?

> applying the exact same regime to another characteristic [...] Is totalitarian while applying it based on income is not

Sorry? Should that be the other way around to be comparable? More children, more tax? The state spends money on children, even in USA.

> This will incent the rich to have more kids because a 10 % penalty when you are making a million dollars a year is 100k but it's a rounding error if you are in poverty because the first almost 32k of household income is tax free if you joint file.

The rich have more disposable income. They won't feel 10%. A poor person is already at their limit. 10% will break them, so they'll have more kids and they'll be poor too. They will not contribute to future taxes. "useless turds" as you said - be careful what you wish for.

> the first almost 32k of household income is tax free

Oh, so they're exempt from childless tax too? That's moving goalposts.

What is and isn't a taxation regime isn't up to you, it depends on whether your tax rate is modulated by some choice, which is clearly the case here. Lets flip to the counter example. I can just as easily say "Choosing not be a useless turd and therefore paying more taxes per dollar earned is not a taxation regime, it's a penalty for choosing a way of life." It's literally the exact same statement swapped for what is being taxed and it is just as untrue as your statement.

>I already demonstrated...

Saying totalitarian states are the only people to have tried this is actual what aboutism.There's no valid reason to expect outcomes to be the same when all the other parts of society and economy are so radically different. This is not justification of anything.

>Not my job. Incorrect. Having a birth rate at or above replacement is one of the foundational requirements of having a society. If you are in the society it is definitely your responsibility, it has just never been an issue before because we previously did not have birth control or many women out of the home. No, I don't think that. If I thought that, I wouldn't need a taxation regime to get this outcome, I could just stop educating women and keep them in the home, it would be far simpler and far worse than taxing people who don't do their job and maintain the future society.

>Sorry? Should that be the other way around to be comparable?...

Yes maybe, if we ever get back to the situation where the average women is having 5+ kids. That's not the situation we are in and even if we get there it will take along time to be an actual problem, so there's not really a point in fleshing that out at all.

>The rich have more disposable income. They won't feel 10%...

Yes they will because it's a much larger amount of money and rich people tend to be pretty rational. There is also a complex basket of goals and desires going into the children choice so you don't need to force the entire decision, just tip the balance towards popping out that extra kid or two. If everyone below rich person isn't contributing enough to pay for the government/services that's a bigger discussion than this that requires different policies and likely massive cuts in spending unless the rich guys footing the bill are actually happy with what the money is being spent on.

>Oh, so they're exempt from childless tax too? That's moving goalposts. No,that's presenting an idea on hacker news instead of through a research paper. I didn't rigorously lay out the argument over 30 pages with 100 citations and I'm not going to.

> What is and isn't a taxation regime isn't up to you, it depends on whether your tax rate is modulated by some choice

What are you saying? If the tax is fixed for everyone independent of any choince they make, then it's not a tax? Explain that again.

> Choosing not be a useless turd

Except, for most people (possibly all people), that's not a choice they made. Somebody else made the choice for them. Lack of good parents and good education, role models, or maybe bad genes or birth hipoxia, etc. makes them who they are. No child will spontaneusly want to read boring history, rote learn multiplication tables when there's a calculator in the drawer, or write useless essays about something they're not interested in - in order to not be a useless turd. Someone else makes useful adults out of children that are universally born as useless turds.

> Saying totalitarian states are the only people to have tried this is actual what aboutism.

Or maybe it's because democratic states would never consider it??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

> Having a birth rate at or above replacement is one of the foundational requirements of having a society.

No, you can have a society exclusively maintained by immigration from other societies. Might be a bad society, but still a society.

> If you are in the society it is definitely your responsibility,

Unfortunately, a person alive today has little choice in the matter. We're not allowed to not be part of a society (aka. "must pay taxes to at least one government"). And this is one more reason to not contribute to the society one hates being part of (or enslaved by, depending on view).

I'm saying by the very definition of taxation regime they are both taxation regimes. You choose a variable and you vary the tax rate along the possible values for the variable. I'm also saying, yes, obviously it's a penalty for choosing a way of life, that's what all taxation regimes are that aren't a flat tax or a use tax. Choosing to work hard and succeed so you have higher income and pay a higher tax rate is also a life choice. It's not a worthy argument for or against anything.

>Except, for most people (possibly all people), that's not a choice they made.

Yes, since you are clearly pretty left wing you would believe that, despite it being so simple as to be untrue. The complex version is there is friction in moving between success levels that modulates the outcome of your personal choices. It's a separate issue to what we are talking about here that I am amenable to addressing (Go look at my previous posts, I'm a huge fan of actually using antitrust law again and breaking up most of the fortune 500 and many private companies). Your personal choices still move you into higher tax brackets, The friction is not so bad that your personal choices don't affect what tax bracket you are in each year and, even if it was, it's a separate problem to be addressed, not an argument that is valid here.

>Or maybe it's because democratic states would never consider it?? That is one unsupported hypothesis about what is going on. I can make those too: Or maybe democratic states held onto more religion longer, and had a better economic starting point in freer markets so they are running into this below replacement birthrate fiasco later on?

>No, you can have a society exclusively maintained by immigration from other societies. Might be a bad society, but still a society.

That is historically untrue, at least on civilization timescales. it can works for decades, not permanently. That ends in weakness and losing the country to invasion or takeover from within because the people that immigrated didn't assimilate and instead grew to be a big enough population that they took over from within. It's not a situation you want to end up in.

> this is one more reason to not contribute to the society one hates being part of And that's another reason to implement the tax regime I suggested. Do your job or pay someone else to do your job. Either way, the job needs to be done.

no one (I mean this, not one person on Earth) will be swayed to have a baby given your offer.

Changing the birth rate begins with changing the culture that discourages families of a certain size.

Such a program would be a good first step in stating that bearing and raising children is something we value as a society.

Coincidentally, I had a similar suspicion about the free/subsidized fertility treatments- the rate of people not having children due to needing medical intervention is small enough that subsidizing it would not meaningfully affect the birthrate of the country.

Unless, of course, you believe that being on the left politically makes people less fertile...

I was commenting on

> A fairer, more effective strategy would be subsidizing the first year or so of the child's care- diapers, food, clothes, cribs, vaccines and such.

And not anything political. United States is so fucked beyond repair when even commenting on birth rates turns into “being on the left politically”

Well, you proposed fertility treatments in a discussion on an article entitled "Falling fertility on the left as a key driver of US birth decline" so I had wrongly assumed you were engaging with that conversation.

We're taking two different approaches to the same problem. I suggested something that will change attitudes (though I will concede it would be only a first step, not sufficient on its own) whereas you suggested making medical intervention for fertility cheaper for patients.

Hence, my final line was a bit of a tongue in cheek remark on which of the two approaches was more likely to have an impact on the article's thesis.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks like the paper just has a misleading title, and this is about having children, not fertility.

> Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks like the paper just has a misleading title, and this is about having children, not fertility.

I think the confusion is that “fertility” means different things in medicine vs demography

In medicine, fertility is about your ability to have biological offspring, not about whether you personally choose to make use of that ability

In demography, fertility is about how many children people actually have. The completed TFR (total fertility rate) of a population is the lifetime average number of children per a woman.

From a demographic perspective, the vast majority of differences in fertility are due to socioeconomic and cultural factors, medical infertility and the availability of treatments for it makes only a very small difference to overall birth rates

Far less need for fertility treatment for those trying in their more fertile years (late teens to early 30s); that's when for the most part things "just work".

don’t non-US countries already do this?

Yes, and it's not working, birthrates are still declining. The one factor that more than anything triggers declining birthrates are the level of education among women.

We're going to have to adjust to smaller populations, unless we wish to devolve as a society.

The economics is a sizeable part of the issue. Fix - or preferably replace - the economy so that it's super affordable+rewarding to have and raise children. And make it more acceptable socially to start a family from late teen years (when fertility is just about already at peak).

…or stop educating women!

I’m joking. But some religious types say it unironically.

That is sadly also true, hence my "or devolve as a society". Educating girls, and young women, results in fewer children, but it also yield richer and honestly better societies. You'd struggle to find a rich, first world country, where women don't receive proper education, but it's almost universally true for poor and dysfunctional countries.

Because it encourages society to delay childbirth further. If two groups have kids at 20 and another society has them at 30, over those two generations the first would be twice as large as the second.

We know how to raise the birth rates: give money to men, discourage parental co-habitation.

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