How do we know money wouldn’t work? Surely most of the reasons people don’t have more children could be solved with more resources (eg surrogacy, childcare, private school fees, a larger house).
I think it’s more a matter of Not Enough Dakka plus making it illegal to do those things in what should be reasonable ways. I agree there are economic (and regulatory) interventions that could make an enormous difference, but for various reasons I don’t think any government is currently willing and able to implement them at scale. A crisis needs to be a lot more acute to motivate that scale of change.
The specifics of what I’m thinking of vary a lot between jurisdictions, and some of them aren’t necessarily strictly illegal so much as “Relevant authorities might cause you a lot of problems even if you haven’t broken any laws.” But roughly speaking, I’m thinking about the umbrella of everything that kids are no longer allowed to do that increase demands on parents compared to past generations, plus all the rules and policies that collectively make childcare very expensive, and make you need to live in an expensive town to have good public schools. Those are the first categories that come to mind for me.
How do we know money wouldn’t work? Surely most of the reasons people don’t have more children could be solved with more resources (eg surrogacy, childcare, private school fees, a larger house).
I think it’s more a matter of Not Enough Dakka plus making it illegal to do those things in what should be reasonable ways. I agree there are economic (and regulatory) interventions that could make an enormous difference, but for various reasons I don’t think any government is currently willing and able to implement them at scale. A crisis needs to be a lot more acute to motivate that scale of change.
What are the illegal things that would be needed?
The specifics of what I’m thinking of vary a lot between jurisdictions, and some of them aren’t necessarily strictly illegal so much as “Relevant authorities might cause you a lot of problems even if you haven’t broken any laws.” But roughly speaking, I’m thinking about the umbrella of everything that kids are no longer allowed to do that increase demands on parents compared to past generations, plus all the rules and policies that collectively make childcare very expensive, and make you need to live in an expensive town to have good public schools. Those are the first categories that come to mind for me.