Many have argued that as our fertility problem is caused by cultural changes, we must solve it via cultural actions, such as by gossip, religion, praising, shunning, telling stories, making art, and living exemplary lives. Thus simple changes in tax policy, and other money related policies, such as I’ve
There are already some solutions, but they are expensive to individual parents. The simplest solution is school vouchers, because they allow high fertility people to avoid the scalar expense of educating many children without giving up their cultural values (public school). It's marginal cost is $0.
1) Legalize and culturally normalize polygamy. There is a growing lack of eligible bachelors to marry for women with increasing levels of education and income. Women, in general, do not want to marry a man she sees as "below" her, and it is impossible to shame or force her to do so. Allowing, or even encouraging, very successful/high status men to take multiple wives (as long as they can afford it) could help to activate this pool of women. Leading to more children, to less dysgenic family formations (extremely unhelpful that the more intelligent a woman is, the less children she has), and encourage the most successful men to have more children. It will not have any additional corrosive effect on society in the form of left-over men, since these women go from being single. And reconceptualizing polygamy in a modern setting does not have to result in a system that is disadvantageous to women.
2) There is a problem, than children are disenfranchised. Children should be given voting rights from birth, to be administered by the parents until they come of age. With an emphasis on the parents that they should be strongly encouraged to considering the long term implication of the voting record of the candidates they support. Would increase the voting mass of parents and put more political emphasis on their problems and concerns.
3) Parents should be given a percentage of the tax paid by their grown children. It used to be that parents benefitted from the work of the children, now all that goes to the state, and the parents are left with all the cost. Some of this benefit should be paid back to the parents. Will also encourage parents to raise good hardworking members of society. For instance, if a child pays $30,000 in tax/yr. - the parents should be given $3,000 (10%) of this, or 20% or whatever. The economic burden of having children would be lessened, since parents wouldn't have to save up for retirement.
Sorry if you've discussed this elsewhere already, but a straightforward way to throw money at the problem would be to fund the development of improved fertility technology, particularly IVG (in vitro gametogenesis). In most countries, the fertility shortfall below replacement is not all that large, and it's conceivable that revolutionary fertility technology could close most or all of the gap.
I guess a counterargument could be that IVF has not had such an impact, but IVF is bad in so many ways (physically taxing, often ends in failure, only somewhat addresses age issues, etc.). With IVG, you'd get as many embryos as you need, at any age, with negligible physical cost.
I think it's significant that the main limiter on poor peoples' fertility decisions (assuming they would want kids if able) is short- and medium- term availability of cash & the services they need to spend that cash on, so long-term assets that don't feel concrete, easily understandable, and trustworthy aren't likely to sway decision making.
In contrast, the main limiter on richer peoples' fertility decisions is time/opportunity cost (education, career, other life goals). When I was in grad school some (female) professors advised their students that if they want too have kids and also go into academia they should do it before they get their Ph.D., because otherwise they're much less likely to be able to do so at all. It's not much better for many other high-status fields. Money won't help here, so you really do need to either change the structure and culture of these fields or else figure out how to extend lifespan and fertile years so the choice isn't so constrained.
Yes, but if you just want to defuse the objection that it's just about funding poor people having babies (which is emotionally loaded with racial and class stereotypes) I think this does it.
But yes, long term I think the idea that your doing something wrong if you give up a career or a partial career for kids needs to change. And I think as more highly educated women do that there will be more opportunities to be part time academics etc and once it's clear that your only giving up money not all ability to participate intellectually that will accelerate the process.
Then again I'm optimistic about the whole fertility issue.
You could easily structure the incentive to scale with income, just as our tax system does today. Some part would be a flat tax credit, and some part would reward higher earners, married parents, 3+ kids, etc.
Agreed. But thinking practically, you wouldn’t want it to scale *fully* with extremely high incomes (giving Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos multi-million dollar tax breaks per child). So merely increasing the child tax credit and especially the dependent deduction for minors (and e.g. having each amount be greater, if not fully double, for MFJ) would give you pretty close to what you wanted, especially with some tweaks to the eligibility rules, elimination of phaseouts, etc.
It seems to me this is neither as radical, nor as new, an idea as Robin seems to be suggesting it is.
It would be great if someone did the math on how to change these numbers to generate the total dollar effect Robin is suggesting.
Obviously, I want people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk having like 1,000 kids each, would improve the genetics of the next generation.
If you an Effective Altruist I would suggest donating all your money to raising their IVF babies.
I also hate all income based phase outs, which save almost no money but send the message we don't want successful people breeding.
I'd implement the current expanded child tax credit with no income cap. I would make each dependent for married filing jointly a scalar increase in the Standard Deduction. I would give tax breaks to people married filing jointly where the wife is a SAHM, kind of like a salary but only if the man earns. I would raise SS/Medicare tax on the childless, keep it the same for people with two kids, and lower it for people with 3+. A few other things.
You want married people with more income to get the most incentive, because they will have the most productive kids.
We are agreeing far more than disagreeing (well, other than raising taxes on the childless). You did neglect to mention eliminating the marriage penalty, period.
Practically speaking, a proposal that gives Bezos multi-millions is less likely to pass.
Separately, I don’t actually think an approach that gives him more than, say, 5x the dollar benefit of a median income (or 75%ile income, if you prefer) couple for raising more children would be good public policy. In fact, about 5x the median and 3x the 75%ile seem like about the right limits to me.
I am completely with you that the deduction (vs credit) portion should scale linearly with the number of children.
P.S. FWIW I am *not* an Effective Altruist, though I’m about a 75% EA sympathizer.
Why can't you just reduce income tax by a % for each child you have, or something? Or you pay 50% of the standard income tax you would pay in a year where you have a child, (excluding e.g. selling assets that massively increase any given year's tax burden.
I think he's generally right that your scheme is a bit too complicated, but making the benefit scale with income isn't that hard. It's a matter of political will, the details aren't hard.
You could, but see my other comment as to why that's not likely to be very effective as it moves most of the benefits well out into the future as opposed to immediate payments. Also because utility tends to be logarithmic in money you are much less concerned about having more money during those periods you have lots of income than about having more money during periods you have less money.
As such this would be extremely inefficient in terms of cost to the government to induce an extra child.
Indeed, it would be hard to structure this incentive not to actually work out to disfavor having more children in many cases
For instance, if you drop tax rate for having one child that benefit becomes much less valuable to you if having a second child reduces the amount you earn (eg parent stays home longer).
By decreasing taxes on the earnings you might give up you make it more expensive to give them up and it is hard to make sure that is always made up by even further tax cuts.
My understanding is that there is actual evidence on this and that countries have gotten some significant changes for merely offering relatively small amounts of money paid directly on birth.
The problem is mostly political. The most effective solutions are direct payment on birth because most people aren't looking that far out into the future. Unfortunately, as that doesn't reward the people who have already had kids with tax deductions etc (good thing for efficiency) they aren't as likely to support them.
More generally, I suspect there is just going to be reluctance to pay people for having children. Look at the conversation around welfare queens pumping out kids. However, I suspect that anything but immediate payment at birth will be (as I understand the studies suggest) much less effective.
(note I'm assuming for this puposes it's genuinely necessary to intervene to increase fertility even though I'm not yet convinced)
India's experience suggests that measures to reverse the fertility decline will run into serious limits. Those who would like to significantly increase fertility rates should not be optimistic.
Compared to the West, India is far less wealthy, far less gender-equal, much more religious and increasingly less secular, and remains more rural. Women's labor force participation is stagnant (and according to some studies, declining).
Middle- and upper-middle class families employ household help that dramatically reduce parenting effort. They all employ a "staff" of cooks, cleaners, and drivers; many also employ nannies. Grandparents continue to help raise their grandkids and often even live with them. The phenomenon of "helicopter" parenting in the upper-middle class is weaker compared to the US. Overall, parenting effort is significantly lower compared to the West. When many immigrant Indians in the US speak of moving back to India, this is consistently the #1 reason they cite why they'd like to move back.
India also has strong local subcultures (regional, religion or caste-based) which are, appearances to the contrary, not as connected to or influenced by global culture.
While average age for marriage has gone up, most people continue to get married by their late 20s. Arranged marriage rates remain high and parents continue to help kids choose mates.
Despite all this, fertility rates have fallen precipitously to ~2.1 because of a sustained decades-long "we two, ours two" campaign that has transformed the culture around family and children.
Sure, strong financial incentives could reverse the decline but it will not get fertility to anywhere near the levels that pro-natalists would like to.
Interesting suggestions. 1) might indeed help the fertility problem, but has so many other negatives with it that I’d strongly oppose it (as would most people, I daresay)
2) is an excellent idea well worth doing, and not one I’d heard before. Other than the increased potential for fraud, seems like all upside and little downside
3) is intriguing, and I agree would help. The implementation might be harder, and politically it would likely be difficult to get passed, but those are very different issues.
$300,000 is enough to pay an ivy league student for egg extraction, ivf, screening, surrogacy services (outside the US), and there would likely be many eggs left over. What's more, once the healthy baby exists, the people who brought it into existence can charge a pretty hefty adoption fee (~$300,000?) that many fine involuntarily childless couples would gratefully pay. This is such a win win win win win that it deserves to be in the Overton window, if not here then at least in Korea. Scaled up, the costs would go way down.
There's a lot riding here on the premise that Christianity "took over" the Roman Empire by outbreeding the competition, which seems... debatable, to put it mildly.
I agree with the commenter that even as an analogy it's distracting because it's not true, Christianity grew through conversion and later state sponsorship not fertility.
The Roman empire is interesting because they never solved their TFR problem and populations did ultimately simply collapse. Razib Khan has a post about how urban Rome didn't leave a mark on the later gene pool suggesting its genes mostly just disappeared. https://www.razibkhan.com/p/they-came-they-saw-they-left-no-trace
I don't mean to mischaracterize your argument, but isn't it an analogy that serves as a premise?
You need to argue that insular fertile subcultures like the Amish will cause population to rise again, and furthermore that the population will become progressively more Amish in the process.
We are more likely to agree that such a state of affairs will come to pass if something similar has already occurred. You assert that something similar *has* occurred -- Christianity took over the Roman Empire because Christians bred faster than non-Christians, and the population became progressively more Christian as a result of that.
But the analogy fails to give us a reason to believe that something like it will occur, if it isn't something that actually happened.
Based on the historical record and the speed with which the Christian-identifying population increased, it is much more likely that the primary mechanisms by which Christianity spread were proselytization and conversion. In other words, people became Christian faster than they were born Christian.
There are already some solutions, but they are expensive to individual parents. The simplest solution is school vouchers, because they allow high fertility people to avoid the scalar expense of educating many children without giving up their cultural values (public school). It's marginal cost is $0.
I have three suggestions:
1) Legalize and culturally normalize polygamy. There is a growing lack of eligible bachelors to marry for women with increasing levels of education and income. Women, in general, do not want to marry a man she sees as "below" her, and it is impossible to shame or force her to do so. Allowing, or even encouraging, very successful/high status men to take multiple wives (as long as they can afford it) could help to activate this pool of women. Leading to more children, to less dysgenic family formations (extremely unhelpful that the more intelligent a woman is, the less children she has), and encourage the most successful men to have more children. It will not have any additional corrosive effect on society in the form of left-over men, since these women go from being single. And reconceptualizing polygamy in a modern setting does not have to result in a system that is disadvantageous to women.
2) There is a problem, than children are disenfranchised. Children should be given voting rights from birth, to be administered by the parents until they come of age. With an emphasis on the parents that they should be strongly encouraged to considering the long term implication of the voting record of the candidates they support. Would increase the voting mass of parents and put more political emphasis on their problems and concerns.
3) Parents should be given a percentage of the tax paid by their grown children. It used to be that parents benefitted from the work of the children, now all that goes to the state, and the parents are left with all the cost. Some of this benefit should be paid back to the parents. Will also encourage parents to raise good hardworking members of society. For instance, if a child pays $30,000 in tax/yr. - the parents should be given $3,000 (10%) of this, or 20% or whatever. The economic burden of having children would be lessened, since parents wouldn't have to save up for retirement.
Sorry if you've discussed this elsewhere already, but a straightforward way to throw money at the problem would be to fund the development of improved fertility technology, particularly IVG (in vitro gametogenesis). In most countries, the fertility shortfall below replacement is not all that large, and it's conceivable that revolutionary fertility technology could close most or all of the gap.
I guess a counterargument could be that IVF has not had such an impact, but IVF is bad in so many ways (physically taxing, often ends in failure, only somewhat addresses age issues, etc.). With IVG, you'd get as many embryos as you need, at any age, with negligible physical cost.
I don't oppose that, but can't see that being enough by itself.
Also, I suspect that there will be resistance to the subsidy approach because it is far more effective in increasing the fertility of the poor.
Whether admitted or not, I think lots of people only want to increase the fertility of the better off parts of society.
My proposal to pay parents resell-able assets that represent % of kids future taxes addresses that. The better off parents get paid much more then.
I've deleted my objections since your edit to indicate they were resellable assets (unless I just missed it first time) does deal with my concerns.
It's weird which poses its own political difficulties but I think this at least deals with all the policy concerns I had.
To both your and Peter's comments:
I think it's significant that the main limiter on poor peoples' fertility decisions (assuming they would want kids if able) is short- and medium- term availability of cash & the services they need to spend that cash on, so long-term assets that don't feel concrete, easily understandable, and trustworthy aren't likely to sway decision making.
In contrast, the main limiter on richer peoples' fertility decisions is time/opportunity cost (education, career, other life goals). When I was in grad school some (female) professors advised their students that if they want too have kids and also go into academia they should do it before they get their Ph.D., because otherwise they're much less likely to be able to do so at all. It's not much better for many other high-status fields. Money won't help here, so you really do need to either change the structure and culture of these fields or else figure out how to extend lifespan and fertile years so the choice isn't so constrained.
Yes, but if you just want to defuse the objection that it's just about funding poor people having babies (which is emotionally loaded with racial and class stereotypes) I think this does it.
But yes, long term I think the idea that your doing something wrong if you give up a career or a partial career for kids needs to change. And I think as more highly educated women do that there will be more opportunities to be part time academics etc and once it's clear that your only giving up money not all ability to participate intellectually that will accelerate the process.
Then again I'm optimistic about the whole fertility issue.
You could easily structure the incentive to scale with income, just as our tax system does today. Some part would be a flat tax credit, and some part would reward higher earners, married parents, 3+ kids, etc.
Agreed. But thinking practically, you wouldn’t want it to scale *fully* with extremely high incomes (giving Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos multi-million dollar tax breaks per child). So merely increasing the child tax credit and especially the dependent deduction for minors (and e.g. having each amount be greater, if not fully double, for MFJ) would give you pretty close to what you wanted, especially with some tweaks to the eligibility rules, elimination of phaseouts, etc.
It seems to me this is neither as radical, nor as new, an idea as Robin seems to be suggesting it is.
It would be great if someone did the math on how to change these numbers to generate the total dollar effect Robin is suggesting.
Obviously, I want people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk having like 1,000 kids each, would improve the genetics of the next generation.
If you an Effective Altruist I would suggest donating all your money to raising their IVF babies.
I also hate all income based phase outs, which save almost no money but send the message we don't want successful people breeding.
I'd implement the current expanded child tax credit with no income cap. I would make each dependent for married filing jointly a scalar increase in the Standard Deduction. I would give tax breaks to people married filing jointly where the wife is a SAHM, kind of like a salary but only if the man earns. I would raise SS/Medicare tax on the childless, keep it the same for people with two kids, and lower it for people with 3+. A few other things.
You want married people with more income to get the most incentive, because they will have the most productive kids.
We are agreeing far more than disagreeing (well, other than raising taxes on the childless). You did neglect to mention eliminating the marriage penalty, period.
Practically speaking, a proposal that gives Bezos multi-millions is less likely to pass.
Separately, I don’t actually think an approach that gives him more than, say, 5x the dollar benefit of a median income (or 75%ile income, if you prefer) couple for raising more children would be good public policy. In fact, about 5x the median and 3x the 75%ile seem like about the right limits to me.
I am completely with you that the deduction (vs credit) portion should scale linearly with the number of children.
P.S. FWIW I am *not* an Effective Altruist, though I’m about a 75% EA sympathizer.
Why can't you just reduce income tax by a % for each child you have, or something? Or you pay 50% of the standard income tax you would pay in a year where you have a child, (excluding e.g. selling assets that massively increase any given year's tax burden.
You want larger payments, and more concentrated at the peak parenting expense times.
I think he's generally right that your scheme is a bit too complicated, but making the benefit scale with income isn't that hard. It's a matter of political will, the details aren't hard.
You could, but see my other comment as to why that's not likely to be very effective as it moves most of the benefits well out into the future as opposed to immediate payments. Also because utility tends to be logarithmic in money you are much less concerned about having more money during those periods you have lots of income than about having more money during periods you have less money.
As such this would be extremely inefficient in terms of cost to the government to induce an extra child.
Indeed, it would be hard to structure this incentive not to actually work out to disfavor having more children in many cases
For instance, if you drop tax rate for having one child that benefit becomes much less valuable to you if having a second child reduces the amount you earn (eg parent stays home longer).
By decreasing taxes on the earnings you might give up you make it more expensive to give them up and it is hard to make sure that is always made up by even further tax cuts.
My understanding is that there is actual evidence on this and that countries have gotten some significant changes for merely offering relatively small amounts of money paid directly on birth.
The problem is mostly political. The most effective solutions are direct payment on birth because most people aren't looking that far out into the future. Unfortunately, as that doesn't reward the people who have already had kids with tax deductions etc (good thing for efficiency) they aren't as likely to support them.
More generally, I suspect there is just going to be reluctance to pay people for having children. Look at the conversation around welfare queens pumping out kids. However, I suspect that anything but immediate payment at birth will be (as I understand the studies suggest) much less effective.
(note I'm assuming for this puposes it's genuinely necessary to intervene to increase fertility even though I'm not yet convinced)
India's experience suggests that measures to reverse the fertility decline will run into serious limits. Those who would like to significantly increase fertility rates should not be optimistic.
Compared to the West, India is far less wealthy, far less gender-equal, much more religious and increasingly less secular, and remains more rural. Women's labor force participation is stagnant (and according to some studies, declining).
Middle- and upper-middle class families employ household help that dramatically reduce parenting effort. They all employ a "staff" of cooks, cleaners, and drivers; many also employ nannies. Grandparents continue to help raise their grandkids and often even live with them. The phenomenon of "helicopter" parenting in the upper-middle class is weaker compared to the US. Overall, parenting effort is significantly lower compared to the West. When many immigrant Indians in the US speak of moving back to India, this is consistently the #1 reason they cite why they'd like to move back.
India also has strong local subcultures (regional, religion or caste-based) which are, appearances to the contrary, not as connected to or influenced by global culture.
While average age for marriage has gone up, most people continue to get married by their late 20s. Arranged marriage rates remain high and parents continue to help kids choose mates.
Despite all this, fertility rates have fallen precipitously to ~2.1 because of a sustained decades-long "we two, ours two" campaign that has transformed the culture around family and children.
Sure, strong financial incentives could reverse the decline but it will not get fertility to anywhere near the levels that pro-natalists would like to.
Re Rune’s comment of Dec 12:
Interesting suggestions. 1) might indeed help the fertility problem, but has so many other negatives with it that I’d strongly oppose it (as would most people, I daresay)
2) is an excellent idea well worth doing, and not one I’d heard before. Other than the increased potential for fraud, seems like all upside and little downside
3) is intriguing, and I agree would help. The implementation might be harder, and politically it would likely be difficult to get passed, but those are very different issues.
$300,000 is enough to pay an ivy league student for egg extraction, ivf, screening, surrogacy services (outside the US), and there would likely be many eggs left over. What's more, once the healthy baby exists, the people who brought it into existence can charge a pretty hefty adoption fee (~$300,000?) that many fine involuntarily childless couples would gratefully pay. This is such a win win win win win that it deserves to be in the Overton window, if not here then at least in Korea. Scaled up, the costs would go way down.
There's a lot riding here on the premise that Christianity "took over" the Roman Empire by outbreeding the competition, which seems... debatable, to put it mildly.
Its an analogy, not a premise.
I agree with the commenter that even as an analogy it's distracting because it's not true, Christianity grew through conversion and later state sponsorship not fertility.
The Roman empire is interesting because they never solved their TFR problem and populations did ultimately simply collapse. Razib Khan has a post about how urban Rome didn't leave a mark on the later gene pool suggesting its genes mostly just disappeared. https://www.razibkhan.com/p/they-came-they-saw-they-left-no-trace
I don't mean to mischaracterize your argument, but isn't it an analogy that serves as a premise?
You need to argue that insular fertile subcultures like the Amish will cause population to rise again, and furthermore that the population will become progressively more Amish in the process.
We are more likely to agree that such a state of affairs will come to pass if something similar has already occurred. You assert that something similar *has* occurred -- Christianity took over the Roman Empire because Christians bred faster than non-Christians, and the population became progressively more Christian as a result of that.
But the analogy fails to give us a reason to believe that something like it will occur, if it isn't something that actually happened.
Based on the historical record and the speed with which the Christian-identifying population increased, it is much more likely that the primary mechanisms by which Christianity spread were proselytization and conversion. In other words, people became Christian faster than they were born Christian.