4 ms·

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/inexp

• 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).