as iâm sure many of you know, âfertilityâ rates are my, uh, one too many drinks cause, bc the following things (inter alia) piss me off:
calling it fertility rate
saying women arenât having kids bc lack of good parental leave and health policies in the U.S.
saying women arenât having kids bc scary future and bad present
saying women want more kids but arenât bc, see above
hereâs some fun graphs and excerpts from an article in the economist that i know iâve posted before but you can never see them too often
govts have tried just giving new parents straight cash: âThe thinking behind [financial incentive policies of giving new parents straight cash] dates back to the entrance of women into the workforce en masse, which happened at around the same time as birth rates started their long decline. â but these policies âhave a relatively small impact [and are] fabulously expensive, as lots of cash goes to parents who would have had children regardless of the financial incentives available. Each child that resulted from Family 500+, in the years from the Polish financial-bonus schemeâs introduction in 2016 to 2019, cost $1m. In France each extra child over the past decade has cost twice that.â soâŠit ainât money
male economists remain incapable of understanding parenthood: âGary Becker, a Nobel-prizewinning economist, suggested in the 1960s that the best way to consider children is as goods that parents purchase according to how many they can afford, both in terms of time and money. Easing the burden of a career and expanding household budgets should therefore boost childbearing, he concluded.â đ
drop of fertility is bc we functionally fixed teenage pregnancy (for now): âMore than half the drop in Americaâs total fertility rate is explained by women under the age of 19 now having next to no children. Around a third of the missing births would have been unplanned, and the majority of them would have been to women on low incomes. . . . âSimilarly, in Britain women born in 2000 had half as many children before they were 20 as those born in 1990. Unlike their rich counterparts, these women will probably not compensate by having more children later in life.â
maybe women just donât want kids!: âMeanwhile, there is little evidence that middle-class women wish they had many more children, which would at least suggest they might be open to official persuasion. Today, at the age of 24, college-educated American women want on average 2.2 childrenâroughly as many as previous generations. They will now have these children a little later than before, with the first arriving at the age of 30, compared with 28 in 2000. Although trends suggest that they will fall short of their ideal family size, the gap may be the same as for women in previous generations, who missed the target by an average of 0.25 children.â
â[S]ome programmes are now beginning to explicitly target [low income and/or younger women]. Zhejiang, a province on Chinaâs eastern border, is offering newly married couples a lump sum, but only if the bride is below the age of 25. In Russia women who have a child before they turn 25 will soon be exempt from income tax. Hungary offers a similar benefit to mothers who have their first child before 30âone of only two policies in Viktor Orbanâs pro-natal push that economists at the Central European University think has created additional births. Although small families are becoming more common almost everywhere, women who start young still tend to have more children over their lifetime, which is why Messrs Orban, Putin and Xi are focusing on them.â nightmare blunt rotation
âyoung mothers laugh when asked if $7,500 would be enough of an incentive to encourage them to have another child; after all, low-income American households typically spend $20,000 in a babyâs first year of life. But such money may well have an impact at the margin. As one mother puts it, extra cash âmight make me keep one I wasnât sure I was going to haveâ. In America poor women are much more likely than middle-class women to cite financial hardship as a reason for an abortion.â cool society we live in
can we please built a society that doesnât depend on women having children they donât want: âextra children produced by targeted policies will probably not turn into the productivity-boosting professionals that governments most desire. Only 8% of the children of American-born non-college-educated parents are themselves expected to obtain a bachelorâs degree, and during his or her adult life the average high-school graduate boosts the public finances by less than a tenth of the net contribution of a college graduate. Therefore the financial benefits of pro-natal policies aimed at working-class women would probably be overwhelmed by their costs, given the expense associated with even well-targeted programmes.â
see also: âA first-time American mother in her mid-30s will earn more than twice what she would have earned had she had her first child aged 22. Women who give birth aged 15 to 19 are more likely to develop health problems; their first child is more likely to drop out of high school and to grow up without having both parents at home. In Flint many mothers express regret that they did not manage to âget things sortedâ before they started to have children. âHang on,â says one outside a community centre. âThe idea is that I get paid just enough to make me have another kid? But thatâs all that changes? Where doing it [raising a kid] right, later on, itâs all me? That doesnât seem right.â The 26-year-old mother of three leans back, and laughs.â
