3 ms·

I can barely afford to provide for my own long-term survival, let alone a poor little defenseless child. Maybe if cronyism wasn't driving the price of everythi

I can barely afford to provide for my own long-term survival, let alone a poor little defenseless child. Maybe if cronyism wasn't driving the price of everything higher in the USA, then I could afford to properly care for a child. But gone are the days where raising a child meant "another mouth to feed". These days, food is just 1/20th of the overall bill

drb91 8y ago
Ehh, the economic positive to children is sometimes hard to work in. But I can’t look at family businesses with six children “employed” as a straightforward calculation. That was once the norm, and is no longer commonplace in the US. I imagine you’d have to take this into account to do a proper comparison with decently contrasting cultures.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  I get where you are coming from. Children were an easy source of labor back in the day. But now, children are purely a cost center, and not a predictable/inexpensive one either. They get sick, they need schooling. Food + a crib are the least of a parent's worries.
  - mooreds 8y ago
    To be blunt, this is a tragedy of the commons scenario. The costs are primarily on the parents, and then society gets the benefits (in the short term, of the spending by the parents, in the long term by the productivity and spending of the grown child). This is why smart policy makes it easier to have children--because overall some level of population growth causes economic growth which makes everyone's lives better. However, I don't know of any country in the world that has cracked the nut of encouraging people to have children. It seems that personal freedom (of not having kids) is only counterbalanced by either lack of birth control (developing countries) or societal pressure (I'm thinking of various religious groups in the USA which tend to have many children per parenting couple).

drb91 8y ago

Ehh, the economic positive to children is sometimes hard to work in. But I can’t look at family businesses with six children “employed” as a straightforward calculation. That was once the norm, and is no longer commonplace in the US. I imagine you’d have to take this into account to do a proper comparison with decently contrasting cultures.

anoncoward111 8y ago
I get where you are coming from. Children were an easy source of labor back in the day. But now, children are purely a cost center, and not a predictable/inexpensive one either. They get sick, they need schooling. Food + a crib are the least of a parent's worries.
- mooreds 8y ago
  To be blunt, this is a tragedy of the commons scenario. The costs are primarily on the parents, and then society gets the benefits (in the short term, of the spending by the parents, in the long term by the productivity and spending of the grown child). This is why smart policy makes it easier to have children--because overall some level of population growth causes economic growth which makes everyone's lives better. However, I don't know of any country in the world that has cracked the nut of encouraging people to have children. It seems that personal freedom (of not having kids) is only counterbalanced by either lack of birth control (developing countries) or societal pressure (I'm thinking of various religious groups in the USA which tend to have many children per parenting couple).