Interestingly, something like this was proposed by a group of radical feminists in the 1970s [0]. You'd have to pay a lot of individuals to have babies and the

Interestingly, something like this was proposed by a group of radical feminists in the 1970s [0]. You'd have to pay a lot of individuals to have babies and then become full-time parents. Not only is that expensive, it seems inefficient. Our society structures childrearing like that only because women used to have a lower status and had to perform unpaid labor and bear children whether they wanted to or not (edit: and then later, it was still unthinkable not to have children; only now has that sentiment been becoming less common). It reminds me of how the American South had an economy that was inefficient because they relied on slavery. They wouldn't have been able to pay all those slaves the full value of their labor anyway, so after slavery ended, they had to find some other ways to get that labor (e.g. sharecropping) and also restructure their whole economy over the course of a hundred years to become more industrialized. I predict that either we'll find some way to make people want to have babies and raise kids intrinsically again, or we'll restructure the whole economy to pay people for the labor of childrearing and bearing children, integrating it into the market-based economy somehow. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wages_for_housework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wages_for_housework