Would this encourage more couples to have children?
Would this encourage more couples to have children?
The data is robust that some don’t want children out of economic reasons, and others don’t want them out of lifestyle choices (prioritizing self over a thankless job). Across several national pro natalist policy programs, the evidence shows that even when enormous amounts of benefits are provided, it barely moves the realized fertility outcome.
(40% of pregnancies in the US and internationally, annually, are unintentional, and we have enough humans we don’t take care of already [1], we should be radically empowering as many as people who don’t want to have kids to not have them)
One thing I've never had the datasets to work with to do is to just make a scatterplot of US counties by fertility vs median home square footage, and I think analyzing such a relationship is a missed opportunity.
Consider: the government pays a salary to each married family while they raise children; the salary would be equivalent to a blue-collar job, and it would scale with the number of children up to a point (e.g. 4 kids).
I strongly believe that'd lead to many more marriages and childbirths. Many people not interested in raising kids would prefer it over a "regular" job. Families with adoptive children would also be paid, so it could decrease adoption difficulty and stigma as a side-effect.
However, some people will game this policy, and it would be very expensive to implement.
While this somewhat help lower paid families, we still have a huge number of men that just leave their families once kids appears and leave a single mother to raise the kids -- which have their own issues.
[1] I may be a bit off in the values, but you get the idea.
I believe most of countries have orphanages already -- and what you're suggesting already exists in some countries (I do believe we still have that in Brazil).
While that could increase the number of people, orphanages are not great places to raise a child (with rare exceptions). Imagine you growing up with a large group of other child, and nobody actually take the time to take care of you. What kind of person would you be today?
herbst•4h ago
This sounds just like some people approach pets
ben_w•4h ago
People trying to plan accurately, end up with a list of things to think about containing more than seven items, and human psychology is such that this makes it *feel* infinite despite us being able to see that it isn't.
People who don't worry to much and vibe it, get pregnant/cause pregnancy by accident, often but not always as teens. Despite not planning carefully, and even in pre-industrial societies where a lot more problems were rapidly fatal and the best you could hope for in such cases regarding childcare allowance was a shotgun marriage, vibing it generally works.
With more certainty:
I'm not sure what the distribution is of women hearing about painful births and saying "nope!", but I do know it's more than none.
I know a few deliberately childfree couples who like the higher income and lack of responsibility, and have zero interest in proposals such as this.