[openasocket]

First off, your link explicitly blames teacher's unions, not government involvement, for the lack of increase in education outcomes.

You think there are poor people out there thinking: "hey I can have a bunch of kids and they'll all get free educations, let's do it!" Why would they? So that the kid will grow up and get a great job and support them? That's not so much a get-rich-quick scheme as it is a get-rich-in-twenty-to-thirty-years scheme. Plus you'd still have to raise a bunch of kids, which isn't exactly a walk in the park.

And the evidence is on my side. Increased access to education is associated with lower fertility rates, not higher: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/completingfert...

[Jabanga]

Centralising spending in the hands of a monopoly inevitably leads to rent-seeking behavior, like the rise of teachers unions and legislation like collective bargaining acts.

I think the net level of support people can expect their children to receive from redistributive programs plays a role in their decision to have children when they have low income. It's also important to note that it won't just be schooling if the goal is to provide equality of opportunity. It will have to be food as well, and other resources needed to have an equal opportunity.

As for education and fertility rates, this is not guaranteed to last. Formal education is not something humans were evolved for. But evolution has a way of quickly adapting to maximize its programmed objective: reproduction.

[openasocket]

> As for education and fertility rates, this is not guaranteed to last

That is not a valid retort. You can't just take a bunch of data points and discard all of them because "evolution has a way". I'm not extrapolating based on this data: these studies show that improving access to education in a wide variety of regions and cultures decreases fertility. These are completely valid statistics and research demonstrating that education is correlated with reduced fertility, you can't discard them with idle speculation. If you have evidence demonstrating your position, we can talk.

[Jabanga]

Evolution is a well understood phenomenon. It's reasonable to extrapolate its long term effect, especially when very high levels of government spending on education is such a recent phenomenon.

[openasocket]

You have a hypothesis, but do you have evidence supporting your conclusion? A study suggesting that increased access to education, or welfare in general, increases the birth rate among the poor? Maybe an example of a species which, upon a decrease in difficulty raising offspring (I'd accept a decrease in infant mortality as an example), started to produce more offspring than normal?

[Jabanga]

I certainly have evidence that suggests welfare leads to people having children when they're in poorer financial circumstances:

https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Gl5Xvza-bmsC&oi=f...

The rise of the welfare state over the last 50 years has been associated with a massive rise in out-of-wedlock childbirth:

http://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/~/media/images/r...

>Maybe an example of a species which, upon a decrease in difficulty raising offspring

It's a well known maxim that feeding animals leads to a population explosion.

[openasocket]

1. Welfare doesn't mean access to education. At no point have I mentioned welfare, only access to public education, specifically public primary and secondary education.

2. Just because people are having more out-of-wedlock children doesn't necessarily mean they are having more children over all. It could simply mean people aren't getting married anymore.

3. Your first link has the following quote in the introduction section: "a reasonable reading of the evidence to date is that the welfare system may increase non marital childbearing, but the magnitude of its effect may not be large relative to the effect of other factors in contributing to recent increases in nonmarital child bearing in the US. In fact, the simplest evidence indicates that the welfare system has not been largely responsible for the recent increases in nonmarital child bearing."

4. Feeding animals increases population, but that's not the same as increased fertility. If an animal normally gives birth to a litter of 5, and only 3 normally live to adulthood, but now all five live to adulthood, then population will increase even though each couple is producing offspring at the same rate. And I'd also like something showing that human beings would exhibit the same phenomenon, because human behavior is a complicated thing governed by more than evolution.