I agree with the spirit of your suggestion—often “it is known” that something couldn’t possibly work, based only on armchair reasoning, or one half-assed attempt made a few decades ago, in a different country, with N=20.
That said, literally cash for babies feels somewhat dysgenic (though, maybe if we actually did the experiment, the results might surprise us). It seems like it would appeal most to people with short-term thinking, the most poor people (which is probably correlated with various dysfunctions), and psychopaths who only want cash and don’t care about what happens to the baby afterwards. I don’t insist that a good policy needs to appeal to the elites, but it would be nice if it appealed to the average people more than to those at the bottom.
I would prefer financial support in a form of free kindergartens, free school lunches, free health insurance for children (if there are countries that don’t already have that), even free babysitting in the afternoons and weekends. Make it a few thousand dollars a year, but with vouchers instead of cash.
I could also imagine various kinds of non-financial support (on top of the financial support, not as an alternative), such as more libraries specialized for children, cheap tutoring, coordinating second-hand selling and buying things for children, etc.
Also, build more playgrounds, and buildings that can only be used for activities for kids (clubs, etc.).
I agree with the spirit of your suggestion—often “it is known” that something couldn’t possibly work, based only on armchair reasoning, or one half-assed attempt made a few decades ago, in a different country, with N=20.
That said, literally cash for babies feels somewhat dysgenic (though, maybe if we actually did the experiment, the results might surprise us). It seems like it would appeal most to people with short-term thinking, the most poor people (which is probably correlated with various dysfunctions), and psychopaths who only want cash and don’t care about what happens to the baby afterwards. I don’t insist that a good policy needs to appeal to the elites, but it would be nice if it appealed to the average people more than to those at the bottom.
I would prefer financial support in a form of free kindergartens, free school lunches, free health insurance for children (if there are countries that don’t already have that), even free babysitting in the afternoons and weekends. Make it a few thousand dollars a year, but with vouchers instead of cash.
I could also imagine various kinds of non-financial support (on top of the financial support, not as an alternative), such as more libraries specialized for children, cheap tutoring, coordinating second-hand selling and buying things for children, etc.
Also, build more playgrounds, and buildings that can only be used for activities for kids (clubs, etc.).
I agree there’s better ways to do this, but:
a) the point is even the brute force stupid ways are doable and would likely work. Obviously try to the cleverer ways first.
b) the drop in fertility rate is so bad and so destructive that if we can’t get this done the good way, even the dysgenic way is very much worth it.