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I’m very passionate about birth rates and I think they’re worth improving. Unfortunately, child support programs don’t move the needle, it’s thoroughly research

I’m very passionate about birth rates and I think they’re worth improving. Unfortunately, child support programs don’t move the needle, it’s thoroughly researched. Nordic countries have tried them in various ways, and the birth rate is still extremely low. Ultimately, the benefits of female education AND lowered child mortality AND access to contraception feel inextricably linked to lower birth rates. I wish I had a solution. As an educated woman, why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career? Most research indicates that child support programs tend to just support people that already planned to have children. As someone about to be a first time parent, I would love more support in the US. But it’s hard to imagine a world where you take on a lifelong responsibility for, say, an extra $2k (or even $20k) being handed to you by the government.

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career? This contains the answer: we aren’t paying enough. Kids used to confer private, excludable benefit through their labour. Without child labour, their economic value is no longer exclusive to their parents. This transforms children, economically, from a private good to a common resource. Our low birth rates are a tragedy of a commons. A known problem with a known solution. If we want a higher birth rate, we should have a massive child tax credit. One that can rival the rising cost and opportunity cost of childrearing.
- lotsofpulp 5mo ago
  A better, cleaner solution is to remove old age benefits (Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid). A tax credit sufficient to incentivize attaining TFR would probably blow up the budget, and it would be hard to pin down the exact number, subject to tons of politics.
  - nathan_compton 5mo ago
    A better, cleaner, solution that literally no civilization on earth would ever vote for or want to deal with. "Support families to raise kids" sells way better than "let old people die if they don't have kids to support them."
    - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
      Isn’t that the global problem with democracy? What sells well isn’t what is effective, and often times is just current generations selling out future generations. People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years.
      - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
        > People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years Social Security and Medicare are equally about quality of life and survival. And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.
        lotsofpulp 5mo ago
        >And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates. It's better than burdening them with that and FICA taxes and the devaluation of the USD, which are also a financial obligation. The burden can be split amongst children, incentivizing raising more, or parents can opt out of burdening their children by going on a very, very long fishing trip. The government mandated wealth transfer from young to old is obviously unsustainable, in all countries around the world. It is predicated on the assumption that people will "naturally" opt to raise a minimum of x number of kids (economically productive ones), yet the system is most beneficial to those who raise no kids.
        programjames 5mo ago
        Isn't it unburdening their children? The alternative is the same children paying for everyone's retirement, not just their parents, who presumably have several children to split the cost between.
  - Qem 5mo ago
    It's not better, because by the time people reach old age and understand the dangers of old age destitution and how dire is the lack of support from close family, they can't act on it anymore. Things need to be structured in a way people act while they still have opportunity. One thing that makes me suspect the population crash will be much harder to fix than the previous population explosion, it's that there's no immediate fix. It takes ~20-30 years to raise a human being into a fully functional member of modern society, after the decision to conceive them was made. It's a long term investment. Back when people panicked on population explosion, some of the proposed "fixes" were brutal, like forced sterilization in India[1], or forced abortions in China[2], but they could be implemented and sometimes stopped quickly. There's fundamental asymmetry. Time to terminate an unborn child is measured in hours to days (counting the recover time for the mother). Time to fully _raise_ a child is measured in decades. By the time people panic over it, it may be too late to avert the crisis. [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/6/25/india-forcibly-sterilised-eight-m-men-one-village-remembers-fifty-years-later https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/6/25/india-forcibly-... [2] https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-child-policy-led-to-forced-abortions-30-million-bachelors https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-chil...
    - nostrademons 5mo ago
      More to the point, human's reproductive lifetime is usually about 30 years. So by the time you realize that you've fucked up your society, the cohort that could do something about it has now aged out of childbearing years. You're left with a much smaller cohort to fix the problem, but because there are now so many fewer women of childbearing age, increases in fertility rate lead to many fewer births. This is actually happening with Millennials. Strauss and Howe predicted a "Crisis of 2020" that would lead to civic renewal and presumably a higher birth rate, but it now appears that 2020 was the beginning of the crisis and it won't be resolved for some time, perhaps a generation, and by that time Millennials (globally, the last big generation) will have aged out of childbearing years. Any baby boom will be led by late Zoomers, at best, and that's a small generation that's already affected by the collapse in birth rates. My takeaway: the globalized, technologically advanced society we have now is doomed to collapse, and we should be working hard to take that advanced technology and identify simplified versions of it that can be run and maintained by a much smaller, localized workforce.
  - stereolambda 5mo ago
    There is no guarantee your kids will want to support you, or, to be morbid but realistic, even survive you.
    - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
      Wouldn't that reward raising them in a way that increases the likelihood of them supporting you? And/or raising more of them so that the odds are at least 1 supports you? The problem societies have is reconciling both individual vs societal interest and short term benefits vs long term benefits. I don't see that being solved with any kind of legislation, especially not by a legislature that has to depend on votes today. As a side note, some places do try to legislate it with filial responsibility laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws
- mitthrowaway2 5mo ago
  I would go further and say that the annual payment amount should be set by a feedback loop, so the incentive rises every year that the birth rate remains below whatever target (eg. replacement), and stabilizes as it reaches that target. At some point, would-be parents at the margin decide they don't need a job to attain economic security. This is basically a way of doing price discovery on the "market rate" of parenthood. Currently we're under-paying and getting the predictable outcome, and we're all out of ideas. (In fact, I think this should basically be the solution to all labor shortages, of which parenting is just one example. The wage should increase until the market rate is found, even if that wage is much higher than people say it "should be").
  - wat10000 5mo ago
    That is the solution used for most labor shortages. Typically when people talk about "shortages," they actually mean something where the market price is higher than they arbitrarily think it should be.
    - mitthrowaway2 5mo ago
      It's the correct solution, but I'm not sure it is put into practice so universally. In some fields, yes, but in others the offered price is quite stubbornly anchored and the people with the authority to increase their offered wage seem to prefer to shrug, complain that nobody wants to work these days, and then go out of business, rather than continue increasing their bid until the market clears. Just the other day there was a thread about how Zeiss is the production bottleneck for ASML and can't scale because they are running out of glassworkers, because nobody wants the job, because it doesn't pay enough to make up for the lack of job security.
- nostrademons 5mo ago
  I think the issue is that you pretty much can't pay enough. I was reflecting, since becoming a parent, that there are basically two lenses with which to view the economics of parenting. You can children in terms of their cost and benefits in monetary terms, where money is the end and children are the means to that. Or you can view money as the means to support and provide for children, with raising them as the ultimate end goal. And people with the former worldview will most likely never have children, and if they do probably will not make good parents. Parenting is a 24/7 commitment for at least 18 years. It fundamentally changes the course of your life. And children also need to believe that they are the most important thing in their parents' lives, which is hard to do, by definition, when the most important thing is money. I sit here trying to get some rest after having 5 days of rotating sick kids. When the baby was sick, he would wake up literally every hour; last night was the first in 5 days where I had any sleep stretch longer than an hour. (This also pales in comparison with the newborn phase, which is like this but lasts for about 4 months.) How much would you have to get paid to go without sleep for months on end? I was at a party a few months ago where someone asked "How many of you have caught vomit in your hands?" Every single parent raised their hand while every single non-parent looked on disgusted. How much would you have to get paid to catch vomit? I've been reliably sick about twice a week every winter for the last 7 years. How much would you pay to let a little germ-factory infect you all the time? (When governments have done medical experiments on this basis, it's been called abusive.) When you have a realistic picture of what parenting actually entails, it starts to look a lot more like the economics of pricelessness [1]. There is usually no price at which people will be willing to compromise everything you give up by being a parent (usually things like liberty, experiences, security, peace) for parenthood if you don't want it. And conversely, there is usually no price at which people will give up the experience of parenthood for more money, if that's what they really want. [1] https://ribbonfarm.com/2014/08/12/the-economics-of-pricelessness/ https://ribbonfarm.com/2014/08/12/the-economics-of-priceless...
- programjames 5mo ago
  Why not a child tax? 10% of children's income goes to their parents, or something similar. Also solves the problem of retirement.
  - ativzzz 5mo ago
    Why not a childfree tax instead? It's not going to be popular, but for societies with low birth rates - contribute to the next generation either via human bodies or via cash. But I doubt society's ability to put this tax towards the next generation.
    - programjames 5mo ago
      Sure, that works, but I think the incentives work out better for the children with a child tax than a childfree tax. With a child tax, there is an additional economic incentive to invest in the child (food, education, wellbeing, housing when they're starting their career), while the incentive ends at birth for a childfree tax.
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
    - chlorodose 5mo ago
      I believe childfree tax is an really bad idea as there are so many examples shows how cruel parents can become when they have no intention of taking responsibility for their children. Enacting strict laws against abuse can prevent some extreme cases, but do we really want child to grow up in an hostile family?
zozbot234 5mo ago
I thought there was a broad consensus among social scientists that sub-replacement birthrates in the West are linked to the expense of new household formation, especially wrt. real estate prices. Child support programs can help quite a bit at the margin, but not enough to make a dent in that particular issue. It makes no sense to conflate this situation with Nigeria's, they're polar opposites in many ways.
- vidarh 5mo ago
  Everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East have sub-replacement birthrates at this point. Including India and China. China has started seeing contraction, India will start seeing contradiction in ~20-30 years since the measures lag. It is by no means an issue just in the West. You're right the situation is different with respect to Nigeria, but the birth rates are also falling in all of the remaining countries. Nigeria's is still high but also falling.
  - chlorodose 5mo ago
    That's not an good example. China has even higher real estate prices(due to land grant fees).
- y-curious 5mo ago
  Well, real estate pricing doesn’t help but the reason there used to be high birth rates in India, China and SS Africa is because of child mortality. Even still, the replacement rate in poor countries is >3, not the 2.3 I quoted for the West.
vidarh 5mo ago
I agree with everything you've written. But since you mention the Nordic countries, it's worth driving home just how high the amounts are: In Norway it's 100% of pay for up to 49 weeks or 61 weeks at 80% of pay, capped at ~$111k (based on a your salary, capped to "6G" - 6x the national insurance base rate)[1]. So not even up to $111k is enough to convince enough women to have more children to maintain replacement rates (and I don't blame them). And this is in addition to e.g. legally mandated right to full-time nursery places with the fee cap dropped to a maximum of ~$130/month as of last year. When people think money will be enough, they need to realise just how much money some countries have tried throwing at parents without getting back above replacement... [1] in Norwegian: https://www.nav.no/foreldrepenger https://www.nav.no/foreldrepenger
- forgotaccount3 5mo ago
  People think money is enough because they look at their lives and think 'how could I afford kids? Clearly I need money to do that.' and they don't think 'if I had extra money, would I spend it on someone else or on myself?' and the majority of people choose spending it on themselves instead of that potential child someone else. Those people often don't even consider the time cost either. Which makes sense, if reason A is sufficient to say 'no' then why continue dwelling on other reasons? But even if there was more money and they were willing to not spend it on themselves, they now need to accept giving up roughly 90% of their non sleep/work time to someone else as well. That's not giving away something new you didn't have, that's giving up something you've been using and are accustomed to having.
  - Balgair 5mo ago
    Most of the people in the pro-natalism space have moved over to the idea that you're not going to be able to convince folks to have a first kid. Instead, you might be able to convince folks to have a third kid. That seems to be where the space is moving towards.
- modo_mario 5mo ago
  So basically they probably don't lose their wage for the duration of their absence but it's likely still a net negative to them (financially aside from the physical and time burdens) and in line with societal expectations created over decades? I say crank up the numbers then. Give them a bigger tax credit too. Hold it long enough for societal expectations to slowly adjust.
ghssds 5mo ago
Why does low birth rates need solution? Low birth rates are already the solution to countless issue like ressources depletion, climate changes and real estate high cost.
- alexey-salmin 5mo ago
  What's the point of sustainable resources, stable climate and affordable real estate in a society that fades away? What difference does it make whatsoever?
  - yoyohello13 5mo ago
    You're assuming fertility rates wont rebound once there is less population pressure.
    - traderj0e 5mo ago
      It doesn't even take loosening population pressure. 1.6 birth rate in some country is only an average; some are still having 3+. If children start taking after their parents again, 1.6 birth rate now could mean 2.1 next generation and 2.9 after.
      - yoyohello13 5mo ago
        Also true, and whatever genetic component contributes to 'fecundity' will proliferate as those people have more children. Yet another mechanism that will cause populations to rebound. Fertility rates falling really seems like a short term problem, and we have plenty of those to worry about so it seems like it should be pretty low on the list of concerns.
    - alexey-salmin 5mo ago
      I think think fertility rates will rebound once the current culture of self-destruction gets, well, self-destructed. But incidentally this means that people who value sustainable water sources over having kids won't be there anymore. So it's kind of pointless in my opinion, to maintain a strategy that can't achieve its stated goals because all it can do long-term is to give way to other strategies with other goals.
neofrog 5mo ago
> why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career? Ultimate purpose of any biological entity is to survive and reproduce. I don't see the logic in exempting humans from this reality. People with these luxury beliefs will get culled by nature in couple generations anyway, so at least nature will sort this out over time. People who prioritize continuity will inherit the future.
- chlorodose 5mo ago
  * Gene who prioritize continuity will inherit the future. You as a man will only live for ~70 years(~75 if you are a woman) no matter how you eager for continuity.
- y-curious 5mo ago
  Nature vs nurture though. I don’t think these fertile people choosing to not reproduce/failing to find a mate are genetically predisposed to not reproduce. I think it’s very much society-based. I argue this with the extreme: if they were put in a Handmaids Tale situation, I don’t think they’d have any problem producing enough children. I think in many ways society has failed them by making it appealing not to reproduce.
imtringued 5mo ago
The reason why women stop having children in wealthy nations is that the pension system is based around forced collectivism of parental investment. When you have a working age child in Germany the child's pension payments are added to a common pool that anyone, including the childless can draw from. You might argue that people have contributed their own payments to their pension, but this only works if most people have children of their own. The way the pension system is set up rewards free riders and discourages parental investment from both father and mother including step parents. One of the biggest reasons there is a single mother epidemic is that there is only a biological incentive to reproduce and no economic incentive to raise children. This means as a man you are better off sowing your oats since that maximizes the biological incentives and minimizes economic costs. Due to the defective pension system there is a strong incentive to avoid child support payments since they do not contribute to the pension of the father even though this should be a logical consequence. Hence you see extreme cases e.g. fathers prefer go to prison to avoid paying rather than work and have everything taken. Women have to abandon their careers to take care of children which represent a pure economic loss to them, especiallyin the form of power pension contributios, when in reality the future pension contributions of their childre. are what makes their pension possible in the first place. The pension system considers their essential reproductive labor to be worthless despite it being an existential concern for the functioning of the pension system. No wonder you have women complain about gender pay gaps and the double burden of work and child care and female pensioners living in poverty. Then there is the whole step fathers thing. Being a step father sucks, but men have a choice here, so they obviously decide to avoid single mothers in face of the irrationality of the pension system. If step fathers could gain a higher pension for raising step sons and step daughters, then the economic incentives would reduce single parenthood through more step fathers or through more parental involvement of the biological father who will obviously lose out on his pension due to absenteeism. The ideal pension system allows parents to receive a portion of their children's pension contributions as their own contribution. This means there has to be a free for all pool and a parents only pool. If you are childless you will get a pension, albeit a lower one. If you have many children, your pension will be higher if they are economically successful.
jjk166 5mo ago
> Most research indicates that child support programs tend to just support people that already planned to have children. I mean that's the point. We don't want people who have no interest in being parents to become parents for a paycheck. What we want is for people to have the financial freedom to live as they wish to live. In the US 46% of parents of young children report they have fewer children than they'd like due to financial constraints, and 23% of gen-Z report financial concerns as a primary motivator for not having kids. We don't need to go from 0 to 2.3, we need to go from 1.6 to 2.1. That extra half child is gonna come from tipping the scale for someone who is already on the fence, not paying people to be incubators.
cloudie78 5mo ago
I think it’s a cultural thing - society seems to value careers above all else and I don’t understand why
- y-curious 5mo ago
  Well, because we now need 2 people in a relationship to be working. I do not mean this to be sexist, but women entering the workforce has been a huge culprit to lowering birth rates. Most people don’t see a problem with not reproducing because 1. “It’s not their responsibility to save society” and 2. The effects on the pension system are long-term. It’s like eating burgers and smoking every day, you don’t see the fatality of your decision right away.

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago

> why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career? This contains the answer: we aren’t paying enough. Kids used to confer private, excludable benefit through their labour. Without child labour, their economic value is no longer exclusive to their parents. This transforms children, economically, from a private good to a common resource. Our low birth rates are a tragedy of a commons. A known problem with a known solution. If we want a higher birth rate, we should have a massive child tax credit. One that can rival the rising cost and opportunity cost of childrearing.

lotsofpulp 5mo ago
A better, cleaner solution is to remove old age benefits (Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid). A tax credit sufficient to incentivize attaining TFR would probably blow up the budget, and it would be hard to pin down the exact number, subject to tons of politics.
- nathan_compton 5mo ago
  A better, cleaner, solution that literally no civilization on earth would ever vote for or want to deal with. "Support families to raise kids" sells way better than "let old people die if they don't have kids to support them."
  - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
    Isn’t that the global problem with democracy? What sells well isn’t what is effective, and often times is just current generations selling out future generations. People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years.
    - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
      > People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years Social Security and Medicare are equally about quality of life and survival. And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.
      - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
        >And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates. It's better than burdening them with that and FICA taxes and the devaluation of the USD, which are also a financial obligation. The burden can be split amongst children, incentivizing raising more, or parents can opt out of burdening their children by going on a very, very long fishing trip. The government mandated wealth transfer from young to old is obviously unsustainable, in all countries around the world. It is predicated on the assumption that people will "naturally" opt to raise a minimum of x number of kids (economically productive ones), yet the system is most beneficial to those who raise no kids.
      - programjames 5mo ago
        Isn't it unburdening their children? The alternative is the same children paying for everyone's retirement, not just their parents, who presumably have several children to split the cost between.
- Qem 5mo ago
  It's not better, because by the time people reach old age and understand the dangers of old age destitution and how dire is the lack of support from close family, they can't act on it anymore. Things need to be structured in a way people act while they still have opportunity. One thing that makes me suspect the population crash will be much harder to fix than the previous population explosion, it's that there's no immediate fix. It takes ~20-30 years to raise a human being into a fully functional member of modern society, after the decision to conceive them was made. It's a long term investment. Back when people panicked on population explosion, some of the proposed "fixes" were brutal, like forced sterilization in India[1], or forced abortions in China[2], but they could be implemented and sometimes stopped quickly. There's fundamental asymmetry. Time to terminate an unborn child is measured in hours to days (counting the recover time for the mother). Time to fully _raise_ a child is measured in decades. By the time people panic over it, it may be too late to avert the crisis. [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/6/25/india-forcibly-sterilised-eight-m-men-one-village-remembers-fifty-years-later https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/6/25/india-forcibly-... [2] https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-child-policy-led-to-forced-abortions-30-million-bachelors https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-chil...
  - nostrademons 5mo ago
    More to the point, human's reproductive lifetime is usually about 30 years. So by the time you realize that you've fucked up your society, the cohort that could do something about it has now aged out of childbearing years. You're left with a much smaller cohort to fix the problem, but because there are now so many fewer women of childbearing age, increases in fertility rate lead to many fewer births. This is actually happening with Millennials. Strauss and Howe predicted a "Crisis of 2020" that would lead to civic renewal and presumably a higher birth rate, but it now appears that 2020 was the beginning of the crisis and it won't be resolved for some time, perhaps a generation, and by that time Millennials (globally, the last big generation) will have aged out of childbearing years. Any baby boom will be led by late Zoomers, at best, and that's a small generation that's already affected by the collapse in birth rates. My takeaway: the globalized, technologically advanced society we have now is doomed to collapse, and we should be working hard to take that advanced technology and identify simplified versions of it that can be run and maintained by a much smaller, localized workforce.
- stereolambda 5mo ago
  There is no guarantee your kids will want to support you, or, to be morbid but realistic, even survive you.
  - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
    Wouldn't that reward raising them in a way that increases the likelihood of them supporting you? And/or raising more of them so that the odds are at least 1 supports you? The problem societies have is reconciling both individual vs societal interest and short term benefits vs long term benefits. I don't see that being solved with any kind of legislation, especially not by a legislature that has to depend on votes today. As a side note, some places do try to legislate it with filial responsibility laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws
mitthrowaway2 5mo ago
I would go further and say that the annual payment amount should be set by a feedback loop, so the incentive rises every year that the birth rate remains below whatever target (eg. replacement), and stabilizes as it reaches that target. At some point, would-be parents at the margin decide they don't need a job to attain economic security. This is basically a way of doing price discovery on the "market rate" of parenthood. Currently we're under-paying and getting the predictable outcome, and we're all out of ideas. (In fact, I think this should basically be the solution to all labor shortages, of which parenting is just one example. The wage should increase until the market rate is found, even if that wage is much higher than people say it "should be").
- wat10000 5mo ago
  That is the solution used for most labor shortages. Typically when people talk about "shortages," they actually mean something where the market price is higher than they arbitrarily think it should be.
  - mitthrowaway2 5mo ago
    It's the correct solution, but I'm not sure it is put into practice so universally. In some fields, yes, but in others the offered price is quite stubbornly anchored and the people with the authority to increase their offered wage seem to prefer to shrug, complain that nobody wants to work these days, and then go out of business, rather than continue increasing their bid until the market clears. Just the other day there was a thread about how Zeiss is the production bottleneck for ASML and can't scale because they are running out of glassworkers, because nobody wants the job, because it doesn't pay enough to make up for the lack of job security.
nostrademons 5mo ago
I think the issue is that you pretty much can't pay enough. I was reflecting, since becoming a parent, that there are basically two lenses with which to view the economics of parenting. You can children in terms of their cost and benefits in monetary terms, where money is the end and children are the means to that. Or you can view money as the means to support and provide for children, with raising them as the ultimate end goal. And people with the former worldview will most likely never have children, and if they do probably will not make good parents. Parenting is a 24/7 commitment for at least 18 years. It fundamentally changes the course of your life. And children also need to believe that they are the most important thing in their parents' lives, which is hard to do, by definition, when the most important thing is money. I sit here trying to get some rest after having 5 days of rotating sick kids. When the baby was sick, he would wake up literally every hour; last night was the first in 5 days where I had any sleep stretch longer than an hour. (This also pales in comparison with the newborn phase, which is like this but lasts for about 4 months.) How much would you have to get paid to go without sleep for months on end? I was at a party a few months ago where someone asked "How many of you have caught vomit in your hands?" Every single parent raised their hand while every single non-parent looked on disgusted. How much would you have to get paid to catch vomit? I've been reliably sick about twice a week every winter for the last 7 years. How much would you pay to let a little germ-factory infect you all the time? (When governments have done medical experiments on this basis, it's been called abusive.) When you have a realistic picture of what parenting actually entails, it starts to look a lot more like the economics of pricelessness [1]. There is usually no price at which people will be willing to compromise everything you give up by being a parent (usually things like liberty, experiences, security, peace) for parenthood if you don't want it. And conversely, there is usually no price at which people will give up the experience of parenthood for more money, if that's what they really want. [1] https://ribbonfarm.com/2014/08/12/the-economics-of-pricelessness/ https://ribbonfarm.com/2014/08/12/the-economics-of-priceless...
programjames 5mo ago
Why not a child tax? 10% of children's income goes to their parents, or something similar. Also solves the problem of retirement.
- ativzzz 5mo ago
  Why not a childfree tax instead? It's not going to be popular, but for societies with low birth rates - contribute to the next generation either via human bodies or via cash. But I doubt society's ability to put this tax towards the next generation.
  - programjames 5mo ago
    Sure, that works, but I think the incentives work out better for the children with a child tax than a childfree tax. With a child tax, there is an additional economic incentive to invest in the child (food, education, wellbeing, housing when they're starting their career), while the incentive ends at birth for a childfree tax.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - chlorodose 5mo ago
    I believe childfree tax is an really bad idea as there are so many examples shows how cruel parents can become when they have no intention of taking responsibility for their children. Enacting strict laws against abuse can prevent some extreme cases, but do we really want child to grow up in an hostile family?

zozbot234 5mo ago

I thought there was a broad consensus among social scientists that sub-replacement birthrates in the West are linked to the expense of new household formation, especially wrt. real estate prices. Child support programs can help quite a bit at the margin, but not enough to make a dent in that particular issue. It makes no sense to conflate this situation with Nigeria's, they're polar opposites in many ways.

vidarh 5mo ago
Everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East have sub-replacement birthrates at this point. Including India and China. China has started seeing contraction, India will start seeing contradiction in ~20-30 years since the measures lag. It is by no means an issue just in the West. You're right the situation is different with respect to Nigeria, but the birth rates are also falling in all of the remaining countries. Nigeria's is still high but also falling.
- chlorodose 5mo ago
  That's not an good example. China has even higher real estate prices(due to land grant fees).
y-curious 5mo ago
Well, real estate pricing doesn’t help but the reason there used to be high birth rates in India, China and SS Africa is because of child mortality. Even still, the replacement rate in poor countries is >3, not the 2.3 I quoted for the West.

vidarh 5mo ago

I agree with everything you've written. But since you mention the Nordic countries, it's worth driving home just how high the amounts are: In Norway it's 100% of pay for up to 49 weeks or 61 weeks at 80% of pay, capped at ~$111k (based on a your salary, capped to "6G" - 6x the national insurance base rate)[1]. So not even up to $111k is enough to convince enough women to have more children to maintain replacement rates (and I don't blame them). And this is in addition to e.g. legally mandated right to full-time nursery places with the fee cap dropped to a maximum of ~$130/month as of last year. When people think money will be enough, they need to realise just how much money some countries have tried throwing at parents without getting back above replacement... [1] in Norwegian: https://www.nav.no/foreldrepenger https://www.nav.no/foreldrepenger

forgotaccount3 5mo ago
People think money is enough because they look at their lives and think 'how could I afford kids? Clearly I need money to do that.' and they don't think 'if I had extra money, would I spend it on someone else or on myself?' and the majority of people choose spending it on themselves instead of that potential child someone else. Those people often don't even consider the time cost either. Which makes sense, if reason A is sufficient to say 'no' then why continue dwelling on other reasons? But even if there was more money and they were willing to not spend it on themselves, they now need to accept giving up roughly 90% of their non sleep/work time to someone else as well. That's not giving away something new you didn't have, that's giving up something you've been using and are accustomed to having.
- Balgair 5mo ago
  Most of the people in the pro-natalism space have moved over to the idea that you're not going to be able to convince folks to have a first kid. Instead, you might be able to convince folks to have a third kid. That seems to be where the space is moving towards.
modo_mario 5mo ago
So basically they probably don't lose their wage for the duration of their absence but it's likely still a net negative to them (financially aside from the physical and time burdens) and in line with societal expectations created over decades? I say crank up the numbers then. Give them a bigger tax credit too. Hold it long enough for societal expectations to slowly adjust.

ghssds 5mo ago

Why does low birth rates need solution? Low birth rates are already the solution to countless issue like ressources depletion, climate changes and real estate high cost.

alexey-salmin 5mo ago
What's the point of sustainable resources, stable climate and affordable real estate in a society that fades away? What difference does it make whatsoever?
- yoyohello13 5mo ago
  You're assuming fertility rates wont rebound once there is less population pressure.
  - traderj0e 5mo ago
    It doesn't even take loosening population pressure. 1.6 birth rate in some country is only an average; some are still having 3+. If children start taking after their parents again, 1.6 birth rate now could mean 2.1 next generation and 2.9 after.
    - yoyohello13 5mo ago
      Also true, and whatever genetic component contributes to 'fecundity' will proliferate as those people have more children. Yet another mechanism that will cause populations to rebound. Fertility rates falling really seems like a short term problem, and we have plenty of those to worry about so it seems like it should be pretty low on the list of concerns.
  - alexey-salmin 5mo ago
    I think think fertility rates will rebound once the current culture of self-destruction gets, well, self-destructed. But incidentally this means that people who value sustainable water sources over having kids won't be there anymore. So it's kind of pointless in my opinion, to maintain a strategy that can't achieve its stated goals because all it can do long-term is to give way to other strategies with other goals.

neofrog 5mo ago

> why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career? Ultimate purpose of any biological entity is to survive and reproduce. I don't see the logic in exempting humans from this reality. People with these luxury beliefs will get culled by nature in couple generations anyway, so at least nature will sort this out over time. People who prioritize continuity will inherit the future.

chlorodose 5mo ago
* Gene who prioritize continuity will inherit the future. You as a man will only live for ~70 years(~75 if you are a woman) no matter how you eager for continuity.
y-curious 5mo ago
Nature vs nurture though. I don’t think these fertile people choosing to not reproduce/failing to find a mate are genetically predisposed to not reproduce. I think it’s very much society-based. I argue this with the extreme: if they were put in a Handmaids Tale situation, I don’t think they’d have any problem producing enough children. I think in many ways society has failed them by making it appealing not to reproduce.

imtringued 5mo ago

The reason why women stop having children in wealthy nations is that the pension system is based around forced collectivism of parental investment. When you have a working age child in Germany the child's pension payments are added to a common pool that anyone, including the childless can draw from. You might argue that people have contributed their own payments to their pension, but this only works if most people have children of their own. The way the pension system is set up rewards free riders and discourages parental investment from both father and mother including step parents. One of the biggest reasons there is a single mother epidemic is that there is only a biological incentive to reproduce and no economic incentive to raise children. This means as a man you are better off sowing your oats since that maximizes the biological incentives and minimizes economic costs. Due to the defective pension system there is a strong incentive to avoid child support payments since they do not contribute to the pension of the father even though this should be a logical consequence. Hence you see extreme cases e.g. fathers prefer go to prison to avoid paying rather than work and have everything taken. Women have to abandon their careers to take care of children which represent a pure economic loss to them, especiallyin the form of power pension contributios, when in reality the future pension contributions of their childre. are what makes their pension possible in the first place. The pension system considers their essential reproductive labor to be worthless despite it being an existential concern for the functioning of the pension system. No wonder you have women complain about gender pay gaps and the double burden of work and child care and female pensioners living in poverty. Then there is the whole step fathers thing. Being a step father sucks, but men have a choice here, so they obviously decide to avoid single mothers in face of the irrationality of the pension system. If step fathers could gain a higher pension for raising step sons and step daughters, then the economic incentives would reduce single parenthood through more step fathers or through more parental involvement of the biological father who will obviously lose out on his pension due to absenteeism. The ideal pension system allows parents to receive a portion of their children's pension contributions as their own contribution. This means there has to be a free for all pool and a parents only pool. If you are childless you will get a pension, albeit a lower one. If you have many children, your pension will be higher if they are economically successful.

jjk166 5mo ago

> Most research indicates that child support programs tend to just support people that already planned to have children. I mean that's the point. We don't want people who have no interest in being parents to become parents for a paycheck. What we want is for people to have the financial freedom to live as they wish to live. In the US 46% of parents of young children report they have fewer children than they'd like due to financial constraints, and 23% of gen-Z report financial concerns as a primary motivator for not having kids. We don't need to go from 0 to 2.3, we need to go from 1.6 to 2.1. That extra half child is gonna come from tipping the scale for someone who is already on the fence, not paying people to be incubators.

cloudie78 5mo ago

I think it’s a cultural thing - society seems to value careers above all else and I don’t understand why

y-curious 5mo ago
Well, because we now need 2 people in a relationship to be working. I do not mean this to be sexist, but women entering the workforce has been a huge culprit to lowering birth rates. Most people don’t see a problem with not reproducing because 1. “It’s not their responsibility to save society” and 2. The effects on the pension system are long-term. It’s like eating burgers and smoking every day, you don’t see the fatality of your decision right away.