[caesil]

The problem with this theory is that studies that have looked across countries with different levels of social/economic support find it does very little.

When countries get richer, people start having fewer kids, and giving parents money does not offset this (even if that's what people say they want).

[joegibbs]

Maybe they’re just not giving them enough money - I’m sure for $5m most people would have a child and for $5000 most people wouldn’t, because that doesn’t cover even close to the amount it would cost. It would have to be in between, maybe 100-250k.

When a couple has a child they have to consider both the cost of the child (food, education, childcare) and also the potential lost earnings that they’re suffering from by taking time off work to look after it.

[medvezhenok]

Indeed. One of the things neglected in the cost discussion is opportunity cost of kids.

As society gets richer, opportunity cost of kids goes up.

1. Wages not made. If you're making $100K/year and you take a year off for the kids, that's 100K.

2. Career progression. Harder to put a number on this, but easily worth 6 figures + in certain careers in opportunity cost.

3. Alternative: daycare (runs $2-4K a month or more in HCOL cities).

I hypothesize that a ~100K incentive for having a kid would definitely move the needle for a lot of people and account for at least some of the opportunity costs for middle-high wage earners (I know because the paternity leave at my company was roughly in that range in terms of economic incentive, and it certainly affected my choices). All of the cash programs to date have been a fraction of that at best.

[everforward]

At $100k per child, it would effectively open up "babymaker" as a career. US median household income is ~$75k, so a family doing nothing but having a baby every 16 months would average out to median household income.

I assume that's not great, but it might be better than working the late shift at Taco Bell for the rest of someone's life.

I'm conflicted on this. On one hand, it could be a solution to low birth rates.

On the other hand, it toes a very fine line on sexism.

It's a pretty bad image for women that we're willing to pay them more to reproduce than most other things. A woman having a baby every 12 months makes 30% more than the median household income. There are economic justifications, but it's a bad look.

While it's nominally a voluntary process, it can be viewed through a lens where we as a society make being poor awful (or fail to make being poor bearable) and the only reliable escape we offer is reproducing, casting doubts on how voluntary participation really is. If a woman is going to get evicted and the only means she can find to get out of that is having a baby, is her participation really voluntary?

I also don't know whether we should financialize having children. That may lead to a very different and less optimal kind of parenting.

The last I've found is disparate impact on genders. I generally get that the benefits are for the child, but $100k is enough that I think it could create dramatically disparate outcomes. We'd practically be offering a down payment on a house, or a way to avoid bankruptcy, or seed funding for a startup, but only to women. Straight men would need to couple with a woman to qualify, gay men wouldn't be able to qualify at all.

That may not apply if this program applies to adoptions too, as it probably should.

[snapplebobapple]

Alternatively, maybe they just aren't taking away enough money. Lets bump all tax brackets up 20 percentage points and take 5 off for each of the first two kids and ten off for the third kid had within a marriage and leave that in place while the kids are under 18 and see what happens.

[sidiensidnen]

Do those studies understand why they’re observing that? I don’t think they’re very strong evidence otherwise.