3 ms·

Childcare benefits don't work for the same reason steep prison sentences don't work. Nobody does a cost benefit analysis of "years lost"/"benefit of murdering s

• satvikpendem 4y ago
  Maybe not true for criminals, but many people don't have kids precisely because they did a cost benefit analysis on having them and decided it was too expensive to do so.
• lotsofpulp 4y ago
  That correlation is due to people doing the cost benefit analysis. Do I want to deal with the costs of raising a child in an apartment? Do I want my child to bear the costs of having to change schools? Do I want my child and I to bear the costs of losing income while still paying lots of education/auto/home debt? Unfortunately, at some point the benefits to not having a child at the individual level become costs at the societal level once enough opt out, and that becomes costs again at the individual level, on a sufficiently long timeline. Of course, these net costs/benefits can flip from being costs at 10 years to benefits at 30 years and back to costs at 150 years. Maybe excess population leads to excess resource consumption and entropy generation. Maybe some of the excess population figures out how to mitigate excess consumption, and buys a little more time. Who knows?