Malcolm from the article here: Thanks for writing this! This is actually a pretty good policy suggestion. (One of the best we have seen.)
That said, I don't see how it could get through congress before the situation is too critical for it to matter. Keep in mind that the 22K Korean policy only just now passed and they are at fertility def con 1 (a sub 0.8 TFR, falling 11.5% last year, and with a pop 60% over 40). If Korea can't pass something even close to what you are describing in terms of cost and fertility is a big political issue there that most people agree on how could we realistically get anything done in the US?
As you pointed out, even a mostly sane altruistic community like EA can not be convinced this is an important issue. How are we going to convince Joe Schmo? This is why we got the religion/culture rout. Not because there are not awesome ideas like the one you propose here but I don't see how we realistically change the political Overton window. (That said, we are trying our hardest and do seem to have made some headway.)
Thanks, Malcolm! I agree that there’s a very low chance of actually getting something like this passed, but I still think putting numbers on how much children are worth to us is a good idea. Some see children as a societal positive but the actual value they’d say they provide is vague, and others actually see having kids as a selfish way for parents to feed their egos. Spelling out the massive value that we should actually place on them might cause some people to rethink this. And I think pushing for policy solutions is a secular-friendly way to raise awareness of the issue and build political support which is another avenue for cultural change. Like when Andrew Yang was campaigning on UBI, I doubt he or anyone else thought it would happen, but I think it was helpful for bringing discussions of AI and automation into the mainstream.
-I'm unconvinced by your exclusion of subsidising first babies, since those who do have babies tend to go on to have at least one more again. So the down-the-line payback from incentivising that first birth could well end up being two births on average. Further, the most targetted policy would most incentivise pushing the first birth earlier (to increase the likelihood of success of going on to having the full 2 or 3 children most people ideally desire) and most incentivise having children within stable relationships (since this has a much higher chance of going on to have the other children mothers typically desire).
-I'm more optimistic about the effects of your policy than your back of envelope calculations suggest. German maternity benefits policies tying benefit to income in the previous year (which in a US context would probably be best implemented as a tax relief plan) had a much bigger effect on raising the fertility of university educated women than others (Raute 2018). This suggests to me it yields better expected fiscal returns since the children of university educated women are probably less likely to commit highly damaging crimes and more likely to be net contributors to the state than average.
-Further to the above, I wonder if similar targetting policies could be used to ensure that policies addressing TFR to actually help to address the fiscal problem. Also seems likely the more explicitly one justified policy along this line, the more people would feel uneasy about it, so I'm unsure whether it could end up counterproductive.
Thanks Ryan! These are very interesting points I’ll have to digest, thanks for sharing. I hadn’t thought as much about the first baby issue but you could be right that it’s more cost effective than I suggest. And I agree that explicitly justifying policy based on fiscal responsibility could end up being counterproductive.
France pro baby policy is actually historically focused on the 3rd kid (in the 1970s, you didn't get benefits for 1 kid, you got some benefits for 2 kids, and you got more than double your 2 kid benefits for 3 kids; since then it's reduced and the gap between 2kid and 3kid benefit shrank as well) and has historically had higher fertility rates than European neighbors (and in particular 3rd born rates). So that's a decent/plausible policy solution to me!
I continue to think that two key facts that should drive solution-space analysis are:
1. US TFR was ~2 from 1989-2008, and the US of that time was not a radically different or less WEIRD country than the 2024 US. If the TFR of that time had persisted for the past 16 years, and a fortiori if other rich countries had converged toward US TFR, we would not be having this discussion.
2. If I understand Lyman Stone's research correctly, the post-2008 TFR drop was not associated with a drop in *desired* fertility, but rather a widening gap between fertility desired and fertility achieved, and reversing that gap-widening would suffice to get us back to TFR ~2. Which is great, because it means nobody should feel compelled to have kids they don't sincerely want for the sake of the species or tribe or whatever; enabling people to do what they already sincerely want to do is enough.
If that's right, then optimizing for highest-ROI solutions would start with breaking down the reasons why women fall short of achieving their desired fertility, then figuring out likely impact based on prevalence of those reasons and tractability of addressing them. So:
-- If it's inability to afford more kids, that's where financial incentives would do most of their work; and focusing those on 3rd kids would make sense *if* that's where the affordability constraint mostly kicks in. Though as Jake Seliger says, supply constraints on affordability of the big material prerequisites for family-raising may be at least as important as financial constraints on demand.
-- If it's inability to find a suitable partner, that calls for very different remedies, perhaps focused on countering social media toxicity or helping rudderless young men become more marriageable.
-- If it's physical fertility issues, technological improvements that address those could go a long way. As a somewhat ambitious example, we know some women remain able to healthily have kids through their mid-to-late 40s; what if that were an option available to nearly all women through technological improvements?
And so on. I find it odd that people are proposing to emulate outlier cultures or radically restructure society when recent history provides at least one existence proof that that's not necessary.
Yes, I talked about the growing gap in desired vs. actual children in another post, Young Mom Old Mom. I don't know of good survey data explaining the gap off hand, but among women I know in their early 30s a big reason not to have large families is housing costs (can't afford another bedroom) and expectations of how much time and care each child needs (guilt that with 3 or more they wouldn't be able to provide "enough" attention). I think increasing the ability to have kids late, by subsidizing egg freezing for example, would be cost effective but wouldn't likely have a big impact on TFR, my estimate was that it would at most solve 10% of our shortfall. The housing costs issue could be ameliorated by tax breaks as discussed above or by YIMBY success. Perhaps we could do more to raise awareness that kids don't need as much time or as many activities as parents think they have to provide but it's not clear how to shift that expectation significantly. Helping people find partners seems like a good thing, but it's indirect and difficult to do and I feel that many are already trying to improve or redesign dating apps etc.
Yeah, time/activity expectations seem like a big issue in super low TFR places too, e.g. the anecdata out of South Korea about parents there feeling they have to have their kids in cram school all the time. Bryan Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" tries to take this on directly but hasn't gotten much cultural traction.
I also think there's probably still potential for improved technology to make young kids actually need less parental labor to raise healthily and safely. As any parent can attest, the preschool years especially do involve a lot of hard and often unpleasant work, even if you're not trying to meet inflated social expectations for parenting intensivness.
My guess is that because that work is so often non-market work, and so disproportionately burdens low-status people, we've underinvested in automating it and otherwise technologically reducing the difficulty and unpleasantness. This in turn worsens the opportunity cost problem, because we *have* invested heavily and successfully in technological complements that make almost everything else we do in life more pleasant.
1. It took the Catholic church almost a millenia to fully get the changes you dedcribe.
2. Sub-populations within counties have very different birthrates. Over time, this would lead to higher average birth rates. Welcome to Amish America... :)
Haha, yes, perhaps it’s time to, as Robin Hanson suggests, “recalibrate our respect for the Amish-like folks who will inherit the Earth from our declining civilization, and try to see from their view what of our civ they might want to retain”
I am skeptical of much efficacy from any external intervetion. The crux of the matter is that women have a very short window to have children with a high chance of success. Most young women don't see children as a net positive, but rather as an impediment to their main goal of career "success." By the time they realize that they've been sold a lie, it's already very late for them.
It seems pretty clear to me that overpopulation *is* a major global problem. Half the people means half the climate change, and impacts on other major environmental issues. Falling fertility creates a lot of short-term problems, but the long-term impact is much more sustainable. It seems to me that the former set of problems is best addressed by adaptation: how do we plan for a short-term bulge at the top of the population pyramid?
- The economic cost of larger families is vastly overstate for most things with the exception of air travel which is prohibitive when you're buying for 7 or 8 people. Most things have economies of scale. There are some lifestyle things that you manage: kids didn't get their own rooms, mini vans, types of places you eat out etc.
- If You're having 4 or 5 kids that's over a decade of pregnancy, breastfeeding and toddlers and realistically you need to be economically stable on a single income. While income support helps, stable relatively high income for men in there early career is essential. You also need to welcome women back into the workforce after a decade absence.
- Parents are going to have less means for things like private schools or high cost club sports if they have more kids. Leveling up your 1 or 2 kids as much as possible doesn't scale for most budgets.
- Encouraging vaginal births is important as it is easier to have several children via C-section. While c-sections are sometimes necessary, the idea that they are the easy option limits family size (and has it's own set of risks).
Basically large family size is at odds with the feminist project as it forces differentiated roles and experience for years. Optional situation for large families is heavily trad coded.
Building political consensus means as big a tent as possible. Only giving benefits to families with 3+ kids will make the political calculus impossible.
Meanwhile, a per kid benefit will give a family with three kids three times and benefit of a family with one kid. Close enough.
I would go further. I would do a one time payment to grandparents to try to buy off old people votes.
Changing the status quo is hard, but once changed it will become an unassailable benefit people feel entitled to.
I get your point about the political calculus, but I don’t think we can pay for *every* kid in a way that’s both cost effective and large enough of a benefit to induce people to have extra babies. But I think this is a reasonable argument for starting with the second baby even though it raises the cost per marginal baby - most people have at least 2 kids. That said, the % of people who would benefit from such a policy in the near term will be small no matter when it kicks in since it only benefits young and early-middle aged adults.
Interesting post as always. I understand the use of the “evolutionary duty” metaphor in the quote below but I wonder about using evolution as the guide here?
“It’s not just that people are selfishly ignoring their evolutionary duty, most of them don’t even know they have one!”
While what our evolutionary duty is, is a point of debate it would primarily be on the lines of reproduce as much as you can. We often think about this from an organism lens (naturally since we are distinct organisms) but as Dawkins famously argued it is really about our genes and DNA. If we could replicate more of our DNA outside our organism “package” than in it then is that our evolutionary duty? Since my DNA is my duty if I could eliminate everyone else’s DNA to allow for more of mine is that my duty? That does happen in nature such as in the spread of cancer, which often ends up destroying its host and therefore its own replication.Now I am being a bit tongue in cheek here but I am trying to make the point that what evolution may measure as success may lead to a world that may not lead to human flourishing. Evolution developed naturally and is a powerful force in the world but not one that should necessarily inform our moral, philosophical or even utilitarian stances.With regard to endless human growth being a biological imperative I can see that as one potential paradigm but looking to nature I can see lots of examples where there is fluctuation around a mean rather than endless growth. Now the argument there could be that if those organisms had our tools, ingenuity etc. they would be growing endlessly too but is that necessarily good? I can imagine a paradigm where we instead ensure there is enough humans to not worry about extinction and then we use that vast ingenuity to design a stable steady state so that there is room on the planet for other species. I understand that growth right now is needed to fund things like social security, pensions etc. but given that to allow for never ending human growth relies on techo-optimism that we will figure out how to support all those people why can't we instead have a techno-optimism that allows for flourishing people at a steady state?
Did you know that the word 'marginal' comes from the German (Grenznutzen was coined in 1884 by the Austrian economist Friedrich von Wieser - the word 'grenze' means 'border'), the meaning being the study of the effects of operators at 'the margin' or border of the problem. I only learned this recently. It has the same meaning as 'boundary' in the boundary value type problems in partial differential calculus.
Instead of trying to get every woman to produce the 2.x children we may be better off trying to have the people who are best at raising children raise substantially more.
Malcolm from the article here: Thanks for writing this! This is actually a pretty good policy suggestion. (One of the best we have seen.)
That said, I don't see how it could get through congress before the situation is too critical for it to matter. Keep in mind that the 22K Korean policy only just now passed and they are at fertility def con 1 (a sub 0.8 TFR, falling 11.5% last year, and with a pop 60% over 40). If Korea can't pass something even close to what you are describing in terms of cost and fertility is a big political issue there that most people agree on how could we realistically get anything done in the US?
As you pointed out, even a mostly sane altruistic community like EA can not be convinced this is an important issue. How are we going to convince Joe Schmo? This is why we got the religion/culture rout. Not because there are not awesome ideas like the one you propose here but I don't see how we realistically change the political Overton window. (That said, we are trying our hardest and do seem to have made some headway.)
Thanks, Malcolm! I agree that there’s a very low chance of actually getting something like this passed, but I still think putting numbers on how much children are worth to us is a good idea. Some see children as a societal positive but the actual value they’d say they provide is vague, and others actually see having kids as a selfish way for parents to feed their egos. Spelling out the massive value that we should actually place on them might cause some people to rethink this. And I think pushing for policy solutions is a secular-friendly way to raise awareness of the issue and build political support which is another avenue for cultural change. Like when Andrew Yang was campaigning on UBI, I doubt he or anyone else thought it would happen, but I think it was helpful for bringing discussions of AI and automation into the mainstream.
The worse the situation gets, the harder it is to pass.
"Free money if you have kids" has a bigger constituency when lots of people have kids versus when few have kids.
Good point.
"how are we to create this cultural change?"
Given that housing is the biggest part of almost household budgets, and we can easily increase through legal changes: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21154/w21154.pdf, that would be a good place to start.
It's been a problem for decades: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Rent-Is-Too-Damn-High/Matthew-Yglesias/9781451663297 but we can and should solve it. Before we stimulate demand by giving people money, we should really increase supply.
Your argument being create the economic conditions to facilitate a different culture/attitude to family formation?
Fascinating read. I've a couple of suggestions:
-I'm unconvinced by your exclusion of subsidising first babies, since those who do have babies tend to go on to have at least one more again. So the down-the-line payback from incentivising that first birth could well end up being two births on average. Further, the most targetted policy would most incentivise pushing the first birth earlier (to increase the likelihood of success of going on to having the full 2 or 3 children most people ideally desire) and most incentivise having children within stable relationships (since this has a much higher chance of going on to have the other children mothers typically desire).
-I'm more optimistic about the effects of your policy than your back of envelope calculations suggest. German maternity benefits policies tying benefit to income in the previous year (which in a US context would probably be best implemented as a tax relief plan) had a much bigger effect on raising the fertility of university educated women than others (Raute 2018). This suggests to me it yields better expected fiscal returns since the children of university educated women are probably less likely to commit highly damaging crimes and more likely to be net contributors to the state than average.
-Further to the above, I wonder if similar targetting policies could be used to ensure that policies addressing TFR to actually help to address the fiscal problem. Also seems likely the more explicitly one justified policy along this line, the more people would feel uneasy about it, so I'm unsure whether it could end up counterproductive.
Thanks Ryan! These are very interesting points I’ll have to digest, thanks for sharing. I hadn’t thought as much about the first baby issue but you could be right that it’s more cost effective than I suggest. And I agree that explicitly justifying policy based on fiscal responsibility could end up being counterproductive.
I agree about first babies, as well as encouraging _early_ first babies.
France pro baby policy is actually historically focused on the 3rd kid (in the 1970s, you didn't get benefits for 1 kid, you got some benefits for 2 kids, and you got more than double your 2 kid benefits for 3 kids; since then it's reduced and the gap between 2kid and 3kid benefit shrank as well) and has historically had higher fertility rates than European neighbors (and in particular 3rd born rates). So that's a decent/plausible policy solution to me!
I continue to think that two key facts that should drive solution-space analysis are:
1. US TFR was ~2 from 1989-2008, and the US of that time was not a radically different or less WEIRD country than the 2024 US. If the TFR of that time had persisted for the past 16 years, and a fortiori if other rich countries had converged toward US TFR, we would not be having this discussion.
2. If I understand Lyman Stone's research correctly, the post-2008 TFR drop was not associated with a drop in *desired* fertility, but rather a widening gap between fertility desired and fertility achieved, and reversing that gap-widening would suffice to get us back to TFR ~2. Which is great, because it means nobody should feel compelled to have kids they don't sincerely want for the sake of the species or tribe or whatever; enabling people to do what they already sincerely want to do is enough.
If that's right, then optimizing for highest-ROI solutions would start with breaking down the reasons why women fall short of achieving their desired fertility, then figuring out likely impact based on prevalence of those reasons and tractability of addressing them. So:
-- If it's inability to afford more kids, that's where financial incentives would do most of their work; and focusing those on 3rd kids would make sense *if* that's where the affordability constraint mostly kicks in. Though as Jake Seliger says, supply constraints on affordability of the big material prerequisites for family-raising may be at least as important as financial constraints on demand.
-- If it's inability to find a suitable partner, that calls for very different remedies, perhaps focused on countering social media toxicity or helping rudderless young men become more marriageable.
-- If it's physical fertility issues, technological improvements that address those could go a long way. As a somewhat ambitious example, we know some women remain able to healthily have kids through their mid-to-late 40s; what if that were an option available to nearly all women through technological improvements?
And so on. I find it odd that people are proposing to emulate outlier cultures or radically restructure society when recent history provides at least one existence proof that that's not necessary.
Thanks for your comment!
Yes, I talked about the growing gap in desired vs. actual children in another post, Young Mom Old Mom. I don't know of good survey data explaining the gap off hand, but among women I know in their early 30s a big reason not to have large families is housing costs (can't afford another bedroom) and expectations of how much time and care each child needs (guilt that with 3 or more they wouldn't be able to provide "enough" attention). I think increasing the ability to have kids late, by subsidizing egg freezing for example, would be cost effective but wouldn't likely have a big impact on TFR, my estimate was that it would at most solve 10% of our shortfall. The housing costs issue could be ameliorated by tax breaks as discussed above or by YIMBY success. Perhaps we could do more to raise awareness that kids don't need as much time or as many activities as parents think they have to provide but it's not clear how to shift that expectation significantly. Helping people find partners seems like a good thing, but it's indirect and difficult to do and I feel that many are already trying to improve or redesign dating apps etc.
Yeah, time/activity expectations seem like a big issue in super low TFR places too, e.g. the anecdata out of South Korea about parents there feeling they have to have their kids in cram school all the time. Bryan Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" tries to take this on directly but hasn't gotten much cultural traction.
I also think there's probably still potential for improved technology to make young kids actually need less parental labor to raise healthily and safely. As any parent can attest, the preschool years especially do involve a lot of hard and often unpleasant work, even if you're not trying to meet inflated social expectations for parenting intensivness.
My guess is that because that work is so often non-market work, and so disproportionately burdens low-status people, we've underinvested in automating it and otherwise technologically reducing the difficulty and unpleasantness. This in turn worsens the opportunity cost problem, because we *have* invested heavily and successfully in technological complements that make almost everything else we do in life more pleasant.
Two points:
1. It took the Catholic church almost a millenia to fully get the changes you dedcribe.
2. Sub-populations within counties have very different birthrates. Over time, this would lead to higher average birth rates. Welcome to Amish America... :)
Haha, yes, perhaps it’s time to, as Robin Hanson suggests, “recalibrate our respect for the Amish-like folks who will inherit the Earth from our declining civilization, and try to see from their view what of our civ they might want to retain”
Why would you buy a marginal baby, when you can buy an exceptional baby for not that much more?
For social justice
I am skeptical of much efficacy from any external intervetion. The crux of the matter is that women have a very short window to have children with a high chance of success. Most young women don't see children as a net positive, but rather as an impediment to their main goal of career "success." By the time they realize that they've been sold a lie, it's already very late for them.
It seems pretty clear to me that overpopulation *is* a major global problem. Half the people means half the climate change, and impacts on other major environmental issues. Falling fertility creates a lot of short-term problems, but the long-term impact is much more sustainable. It seems to me that the former set of problems is best addressed by adaptation: how do we plan for a short-term bulge at the top of the population pyramid?
It may seem clear to you but you are wrong; see for example Caplan's book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.
Degrowth is bad: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/degrowth-we-cant-let-it-happen-here
A few things:
- The economic cost of larger families is vastly overstate for most things with the exception of air travel which is prohibitive when you're buying for 7 or 8 people. Most things have economies of scale. There are some lifestyle things that you manage: kids didn't get their own rooms, mini vans, types of places you eat out etc.
- If You're having 4 or 5 kids that's over a decade of pregnancy, breastfeeding and toddlers and realistically you need to be economically stable on a single income. While income support helps, stable relatively high income for men in there early career is essential. You also need to welcome women back into the workforce after a decade absence.
- Parents are going to have less means for things like private schools or high cost club sports if they have more kids. Leveling up your 1 or 2 kids as much as possible doesn't scale for most budgets.
- Encouraging vaginal births is important as it is easier to have several children via C-section. While c-sections are sometimes necessary, the idea that they are the easy option limits family size (and has it's own set of risks).
Basically large family size is at odds with the feminist project as it forces differentiated roles and experience for years. Optional situation for large families is heavily trad coded.
Building political consensus means as big a tent as possible. Only giving benefits to families with 3+ kids will make the political calculus impossible.
Meanwhile, a per kid benefit will give a family with three kids three times and benefit of a family with one kid. Close enough.
I would go further. I would do a one time payment to grandparents to try to buy off old people votes.
Changing the status quo is hard, but once changed it will become an unassailable benefit people feel entitled to.
I get your point about the political calculus, but I don’t think we can pay for *every* kid in a way that’s both cost effective and large enough of a benefit to induce people to have extra babies. But I think this is a reasonable argument for starting with the second baby even though it raises the cost per marginal baby - most people have at least 2 kids. That said, the % of people who would benefit from such a policy in the near term will be small no matter when it kicks in since it only benefits young and early-middle aged adults.
I don't think it costs that much. $15k/year/kid should be enough.
My school district pays $24k/kid/year.
Medicare is $16k/person.
Social Security is $22k/person.
Medicaid is a lot of nursing home too.
If we can pay this kind of money for the old, we can pay that kind of money for kids.
Heck just giving parents some of their K-12 money back costs nothing but would make a big difference.
The money is easily there, the problem is that parents can't vote on behalf of their children.
I’m talking about what the minimum amount is to induce a couple to have an *extra* kid, not the amount needed to make their life easier.
Yes but they are linked! For example Zvi Moshowitz's piece on car seat rules as contraception is pretty persuasive: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception
Interesting post as always. I understand the use of the “evolutionary duty” metaphor in the quote below but I wonder about using evolution as the guide here?
“It’s not just that people are selfishly ignoring their evolutionary duty, most of them don’t even know they have one!”
While what our evolutionary duty is, is a point of debate it would primarily be on the lines of reproduce as much as you can. We often think about this from an organism lens (naturally since we are distinct organisms) but as Dawkins famously argued it is really about our genes and DNA. If we could replicate more of our DNA outside our organism “package” than in it then is that our evolutionary duty? Since my DNA is my duty if I could eliminate everyone else’s DNA to allow for more of mine is that my duty? That does happen in nature such as in the spread of cancer, which often ends up destroying its host and therefore its own replication.Now I am being a bit tongue in cheek here but I am trying to make the point that what evolution may measure as success may lead to a world that may not lead to human flourishing. Evolution developed naturally and is a powerful force in the world but not one that should necessarily inform our moral, philosophical or even utilitarian stances.With regard to endless human growth being a biological imperative I can see that as one potential paradigm but looking to nature I can see lots of examples where there is fluctuation around a mean rather than endless growth. Now the argument there could be that if those organisms had our tools, ingenuity etc. they would be growing endlessly too but is that necessarily good? I can imagine a paradigm where we instead ensure there is enough humans to not worry about extinction and then we use that vast ingenuity to design a stable steady state so that there is room on the planet for other species. I understand that growth right now is needed to fund things like social security, pensions etc. but given that to allow for never ending human growth relies on techo-optimism that we will figure out how to support all those people why can't we instead have a techno-optimism that allows for flourishing people at a steady state?
Did you know that the word 'marginal' comes from the German (Grenznutzen was coined in 1884 by the Austrian economist Friedrich von Wieser - the word 'grenze' means 'border'), the meaning being the study of the effects of operators at 'the margin' or border of the problem. I only learned this recently. It has the same meaning as 'boundary' in the boundary value type problems in partial differential calculus.
Instead of trying to get every woman to produce the 2.x children we may be better off trying to have the people who are best at raising children raise substantially more.