Why paying women to have more babies won't work | Hacker News Reader

Why paying women to have more babies won't work

economist.com

6 pointstoomuchtodo13 comments

The bottom line, it's too expensive to have kids in most industrialized countries. We've gotten used to the 2 income lifestyle which makes it hard to have kids and have 2 parents working at the same time. A couple may be able to deal with 2 while having both parents work but not more kids than that. We can also add that it's very expensive to buy a house now so apartments and such are becoming the norm in large cities which adds to the difficulties of having multiple children. Additionally, birth control has to have an impact on the population growth. There are way fewer accidental pregnancies than ever before. It's now easier than ever to plan for the number of kids a couple wants. So it's 1, 2 maybe 3 but it is less likely to be 5,6,7. Lastly, society as a whole puts shade on the idea of having a large family. I've seen it often. A couple with a large number of kids is often ridiculed or shamed for being irresponsible for having too many kids. If we want to get to a 2+ replacement average, large families are a must but large families are a thing of the past. Society as a whole will need to radically change to bring them back.

If "it's too expensive" were the reason why people are having fewer children, then paying women to have babies would work. But the article's title claims that it doesn't work.

A fundamental reason why fertility is below replacement is that when people have choices about what to do, they take them. A significant minority don't have kids, another minority (or majority) delays having kids so long that they can only have one or two. Part of the cause of this is the change of marriage from being a cornerstone of adult life, something to build your life on and around, to the capstone, something that marks success. So it is delayed by a decade or two. Yes, culture does play a role in shaping choices.

Women have been persuaded to adopt male values and standards of success as goals for themselves to achieve: high status career, high status goods like a large house in a good neighborhood, and so on. At the same time they have been persuaded to devalue traditionally female things like relationships and community wellbeing. Indeed: society, culture, will have to radically change to bring fertility above replacement.

I don't think it took a lot of persuasion to make women want things like money, and the things that can be bought with money. Those aren't really "male values". They're just things that women were forbidden from.

Things like relationships and community wellbeing should be human values, not female values. Men relied on women to perform them, as part of keeping them out of other occupations.

The human race won't go extinct as long as the replacement rate is above zero. Society and culture will indeed have to adapt to the altered age demographics, but that doesn't strike me as a bad thing. Certainly better than placing the onus on all women to maintain an arbitrary population size.

> Men relied on women to perform them, as part of keeping them out of other occupations.

This sounds rather blank-slatist, the idea that there are no psychological differences between men and women.

No one believes that any more. There are solid evolutionary reasons for the differences, and plenty of evidence from places like Sweden, where despite heavy pressure and highly smoothed paths into high-paying technical fields, women overwhelmingly choose people-oriented work.

It's not a lot of money they get, it's probably just to survive. Without kids and a career women have a much better life. Women with kids really have to work hard, women knows this by now.

The reason that it doesn't work is because governments don't pay enough. You can even pay enough to cover the entire cost of having the child (food, childcare) and it still won't be worth it for the parents, economically speaking, because of the opportunity cost associated with maternity. Of course, if governments start paying one hundred, or two hundred thousand dollars per child (or less if combining child payments with a childlessness tax) then it starts becoming an economic incentive - if you aren't having children by X age then you start getting left behind by your peers.

A lot of the money will go to women who would have had children anyway.

Why are we so confident that women are the reason there are fewer children? In my circle nearly every woman has frozen or is freezing her eggs, surely that shows a desire to have children?

I’ve heard this.

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/11/why-a-...

Basically they want kids, but don’t want the available people to have them with.

They want the option to have kids, at some yet-to-be-determined later time. It's St. Augustine: "please, God, make me good, but not just yet". I want kids, but not now.

They have also been sold the idea that having children by this method has a high success rate, when in reality it's of the order of one-third.

If I'm not mistaken, there have been 60+ million aborted preganancies in the US since the mid-70s. Pretty strong data supports the claim you are questioning, it's also probably the reason for recent successful attacks on abortion rights.

https://archive.today/jWsuE

In Canada once income goes up to certain levels you stop receive those payments. And even in full the amount is laughable comparing to what my wife loses.

It's a lot easier for the government to just pay people who really want kids IMO. Now how to define that...

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