Dramatically increasing taxes for childless people.
Too-low fertility concerns me deeply. My current preferred strategy had been something financial along the lines of this proposal, but on reflection, I think I need to update.
The main reasons that I see driving the people around me to defer/eschew children are, in rough decreasing order of prevalence:
Lack of a suitable partner.
Lack of fertility.
Expectation of being an incompetent parent.
Severe untreated mental health ailments.
Other career priorities, not compatible with child raising.
The third point above is, in my social circle, usually downstream of needing to spend too much time working, not being able to afford childcare services, not being able to afford college, etc.
These issues could be lessened by financial interventions with the net effect of offsetting the burdens of child raising (obviously, implementation details matter a great deal.)
...I had previously assumed that “expectation of incompetence” was the primary issue because it’s my primary issue (in the sense of looming large in my mind). …but having taken an inventory of the childless adults in my social network, I now see that “inability to find a suitable partner” and “infertility” are much bigger issues.
“Inability to find a suitable partner” seems risky to fix, because it looks easy to create horrible side-effects. Many in my social network are in relationships but aren’t having children because they’re abusive relationships. Others have successfully escaped abusive relationships and subsequently given up on finding a partner; being alone is less painful, and they expect to find another abuser with nontrivial probability if they go looking for another partner. Still others lost a suitable partner to a treatable disease, due primarily to insurance companies ending up de facto in charge of healthcare decisions, and rendering decisions without the patient’s health as the priority.
I don’t see a good solution. (Well, except for “don’t allow insurers to drive healthcare decisions”.) All attempts to “solve” this issue I see being promoted in real life seem on-net harmful. My home state of Texas thinks the best solution is to ban divorce, and we expect that to be implemented within the next year. I don’t see that as being a net good, even if it may compel additional births in the short term on net. Trapping people in abusive relationships seems incredibly dystopian. I also foresee this making young women even more afraid of getting into the wrong relationship than they already are, which runs the risk of making the “finding suitable partners” problem worse in the long run.
“Lack of fertility” seems challenging to fix, but far less fraught. I was born without a uterus, and wish to bear a child if the medical technology were developed to allow me to grow a uterus. I have a sibling on life-saving medication, a side-effect of which is extremely low sperm count—a better drug to treat the condition (or an actual cure) could resolve this issue. Multiple of my sisters-in-law have simply failed to conceive for years, due to unknown-to-me causes, and I suspect the issues are similarly fixable via continued medical innovation.
I think that some of these cases can only be solved by having more than 2 kids on average. I mean, depending on circumstances, there can be more of fewer mental illnesses, more of fewer people who decide to be childless, et cetera, but it is definitely not realistic that the number will be literally zero. So if everyone assumes that having more than 2 kids is somehow weird, then in long term the society dies out, it’s just a question of sooner or later. (And I am saying this as a person who has 2 kids. Spent too much time finding the right partner.) On the other hand, if people had 3 or more kids on average, we could have 1⁄3 of people remain childless, for whatever reason, and the population would go on. People probably don’t realize, if they only have 1 child, how much pressure they put on it: if the child won’t have kids for any reason, their genetic line just went extinct.
I find it ironic how both carelessness (“carpe diem, there will always be more time to have kids”) and carefulness (“it would be irresponsible to have children before I have my own house, a reliable partner, and plenty of savings”) can in practice lead to the same result.
People also don’t realize, until it is too late, how the dating market changes over time. The attractive partners who are interested in having a family are taken out of the dating market first, because if you want to start a big family and you are attractive, nothing prevents you from doing it right after university. So when you are approaching 40, people who are unattractive, problematic, don’t want to have children, or are already divorced with children are over-represented at the dating market.
Too-low fertility concerns me deeply. My current preferred strategy had been something financial along the lines of this proposal, but on reflection, I think I need to update.
The main reasons that I see driving the people around me to defer/eschew children are, in rough decreasing order of prevalence:
Lack of a suitable partner.
Lack of fertility.
Expectation of being an incompetent parent.
Severe untreated mental health ailments.
Other career priorities, not compatible with child raising.
The third point above is, in my social circle, usually downstream of needing to spend too much time working, not being able to afford childcare services, not being able to afford college, etc.
These issues could be lessened by financial interventions with the net effect of offsetting the burdens of child raising (obviously, implementation details matter a great deal.)
...I had previously assumed that “expectation of incompetence” was the primary issue because it’s my primary issue (in the sense of looming large in my mind). …but having taken an inventory of the childless adults in my social network, I now see that “inability to find a suitable partner” and “infertility” are much bigger issues.
“Inability to find a suitable partner” seems risky to fix, because it looks easy to create horrible side-effects. Many in my social network are in relationships but aren’t having children because they’re abusive relationships. Others have successfully escaped abusive relationships and subsequently given up on finding a partner; being alone is less painful, and they expect to find another abuser with nontrivial probability if they go looking for another partner. Still others lost a suitable partner to a treatable disease, due primarily to insurance companies ending up de facto in charge of healthcare decisions, and rendering decisions without the patient’s health as the priority.
I don’t see a good solution. (Well, except for “don’t allow insurers to drive healthcare decisions”.) All attempts to “solve” this issue I see being promoted in real life seem on-net harmful. My home state of Texas thinks the best solution is to ban divorce, and we expect that to be implemented within the next year. I don’t see that as being a net good, even if it may compel additional births in the short term on net. Trapping people in abusive relationships seems incredibly dystopian. I also foresee this making young women even more afraid of getting into the wrong relationship than they already are, which runs the risk of making the “finding suitable partners” problem worse in the long run.
“Lack of fertility” seems challenging to fix, but far less fraught. I was born without a uterus, and wish to bear a child if the medical technology were developed to allow me to grow a uterus. I have a sibling on life-saving medication, a side-effect of which is extremely low sperm count—a better drug to treat the condition (or an actual cure) could resolve this issue. Multiple of my sisters-in-law have simply failed to conceive for years, due to unknown-to-me causes, and I suspect the issues are similarly fixable via continued medical innovation.
I think that some of these cases can only be solved by having more than 2 kids on average. I mean, depending on circumstances, there can be more of fewer mental illnesses, more of fewer people who decide to be childless, et cetera, but it is definitely not realistic that the number will be literally zero. So if everyone assumes that having more than 2 kids is somehow weird, then in long term the society dies out, it’s just a question of sooner or later. (And I am saying this as a person who has 2 kids. Spent too much time finding the right partner.) On the other hand, if people had 3 or more kids on average, we could have 1⁄3 of people remain childless, for whatever reason, and the population would go on. People probably don’t realize, if they only have 1 child, how much pressure they put on it: if the child won’t have kids for any reason, their genetic line just went extinct.
I find it ironic how both carelessness (“carpe diem, there will always be more time to have kids”) and carefulness (“it would be irresponsible to have children before I have my own house, a reliable partner, and plenty of savings”) can in practice lead to the same result.
People also don’t realize, until it is too late, how the dating market changes over time. The attractive partners who are interested in having a family are taken out of the dating market first, because if you want to start a big family and you are attractive, nothing prevents you from doing it right after university. So when you are approaching 40, people who are unattractive, problematic, don’t want to have children, or are already divorced with children are over-represented at the dating market.