[JumpCrisscross]

> why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career?

This contains the answer: we aren’t paying enough.

Kids used to confer private, excludable benefit through their labour. Without child labour, their economic value is no longer exclusive to their parents. This transforms children, economically, from a private good to a common resource. Our low birth rates are a tragedy of a commons. A known problem with a known solution.

If we want a higher birth rate, we should have a massive child tax credit. One that can rival the rising cost and opportunity cost of childrearing.

[mitthrowaway2]

I would go further and say that the annual payment amount should be set by a feedback loop, so the incentive rises every year that the birth rate remains below whatever target (eg. replacement), and stabilizes as it reaches that target.

At some point, would-be parents at the margin decide they don't need a job to attain economic security.

This is basically a way of doing price discovery on the "market rate" of parenthood. Currently we're under-paying and getting the predictable outcome, and we're all out of ideas.

(In fact, I think this should basically be the solution to all labor shortages, of which parenting is just one example. The wage should increase until the market rate is found, even if that wage is much higher than people say it "should be").

[wat10000]

That is the solution used for most labor shortages. Typically when people talk about "shortages," they actually mean something where the market price is higher than they arbitrarily think it should be.

[mitthrowaway2]

It's the correct solution, but I'm not sure it is put into practice so universally. In some fields, yes, but in others the offered price is quite stubbornly anchored and the people with the authority to increase their offered wage seem to prefer to shrug, complain that nobody wants to work these days, and then go out of business, rather than continue increasing their bid until the market clears.

Just the other day there was a thread about how Zeiss is the production bottleneck for ASML and can't scale because they are running out of glassworkers, because nobody wants the job, because it doesn't pay enough to make up for the lack of job security.

[nostrademons]

I think the issue is that you pretty much can't pay enough.

I was reflecting, since becoming a parent, that there are basically two lenses with which to view the economics of parenting. You can children in terms of their cost and benefits in monetary terms, where money is the end and children are the means to that. Or you can view money as the means to support and provide for children, with raising them as the ultimate end goal. And people with the former worldview will most likely never have children, and if they do probably will not make good parents. Parenting is a 24/7 commitment for at least 18 years. It fundamentally changes the course of your life. And children also need to believe that they are the most important thing in their parents' lives, which is hard to do, by definition, when the most important thing is money.

I sit here trying to get some rest after having 5 days of rotating sick kids. When the baby was sick, he would wake up literally every hour; last night was the first in 5 days where I had any sleep stretch longer than an hour. (This also pales in comparison with the newborn phase, which is like this but lasts for about 4 months.) How much would you have to get paid to go without sleep for months on end? I was at a party a few months ago where someone asked "How many of you have caught vomit in your hands?" Every single parent raised their hand while every single non-parent looked on disgusted. How much would you have to get paid to catch vomit? I've been reliably sick about twice a week every winter for the last 7 years. How much would you pay to let a little germ-factory infect you all the time? (When governments have done medical experiments on this basis, it's been called abusive.)

When you have a realistic picture of what parenting actually entails, it starts to look a lot more like the economics of pricelessness [1]. There is usually no price at which people will be willing to compromise everything you give up by being a parent (usually things like liberty, experiences, security, peace) for parenthood if you don't want it. And conversely, there is usually no price at which people will give up the experience of parenthood for more money, if that's what they really want.

[1] https://ribbonfarm.com/2014/08/12/the-economics-of-priceless...

[programjames]

Why not a child tax? 10% of children's income goes to their parents, or something similar. Also solves the problem of retirement.

[ativzzz]

Why not a childfree tax instead? It's not going to be popular, but for societies with low birth rates - contribute to the next generation either via human bodies or via cash. But I doubt society's ability to put this tax towards the next generation.

[chlorodose]

I believe childfree tax is an really bad idea as there are so many examples shows how cruel parents can become when they have no intention of taking responsibility for their children. Enacting strict laws against abuse can prevent some extreme cases, but do we really want child to grow up in an hostile family?

[programjames]

Sure, that works, but I think the incentives work out better for the children with a child tax than a childfree tax. With a child tax, there is an additional economic incentive to invest in the child (food, education, wellbeing, housing when they're starting their career), while the incentive ends at birth for a childfree tax.

[lotsofpulp]

A better, cleaner solution is to remove old age benefits (Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid). A tax credit sufficient to incentivize attaining TFR would probably blow up the budget, and it would be hard to pin down the exact number, subject to tons of politics.

[Qem]

It's not better, because by the time people reach old age and understand the dangers of old age destitution and how dire is the lack of support from close family, they can't act on it anymore. Things need to be structured in a way people act while they still have opportunity.

One thing that makes me suspect the population crash will be much harder to fix than the previous population explosion, it's that there's no immediate fix. It takes ~20-30 years to raise a human being into a fully functional member of modern society, after the decision to conceive them was made. It's a long term investment. Back when people panicked on population explosion, some of the proposed "fixes" were brutal, like forced sterilization in India[1], or forced abortions in China[2], but they could be implemented and sometimes stopped quickly.

There's fundamental asymmetry. Time to terminate an unborn child is measured in hours to days (counting the recover time for the mother). Time to fully _raise_ a child is measured in decades. By the time people panic over it, it may be too late to avert the crisis.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/6/25/india-forcibly-...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-chil...

[nostrademons]

More to the point, human's reproductive lifetime is usually about 30 years. So by the time you realize that you've fucked up your society, the cohort that could do something about it has now aged out of childbearing years. You're left with a much smaller cohort to fix the problem, but because there are now so many fewer women of childbearing age, increases in fertility rate lead to many fewer births.

This is actually happening with Millennials. Strauss and Howe predicted a "Crisis of 2020" that would lead to civic renewal and presumably a higher birth rate, but it now appears that 2020 was the beginning of the crisis and it won't be resolved for some time, perhaps a generation, and by that time Millennials (globally, the last big generation) will have aged out of childbearing years. Any baby boom will be led by late Zoomers, at best, and that's a small generation that's already affected by the collapse in birth rates.

My takeaway: the globalized, technologically advanced society we have now is doomed to collapse, and we should be working hard to take that advanced technology and identify simplified versions of it that can be run and maintained by a much smaller, localized workforce.

[nathan_compton]

A better, cleaner, solution that literally no civilization on earth would ever vote for or want to deal with. "Support families to raise kids" sells way better than "let old people die if they don't have kids to support them."

[lotsofpulp]

Isn’t that the global problem with democracy? What sells well isn’t what is effective, and often times is just current generations selling out future generations.

People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years.

[JumpCrisscross]

> People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years

Social Security and Medicare are equally about quality of life and survival. And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.

[lotsofpulp]

>And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.

It's better than burdening them with that and FICA taxes and the devaluation of the USD, which are also a financial obligation. The burden can be split amongst children, incentivizing raising more, or parents can opt out of burdening their children by going on a very, very long fishing trip.

The government mandated wealth transfer from young to old is obviously unsustainable, in all countries around the world. It is predicated on the assumption that people will "naturally" opt to raise a minimum of x number of kids (economically productive ones), yet the system is most beneficial to those who raise no kids.

[programjames]

Isn't it unburdening their children? The alternative is the same children paying for everyone's retirement, not just their parents, who presumably have several children to split the cost between.

[nathan_compton]

It isn't so much a problem with democracy as it is with human beings. I think of democracy as averaging out things so the swings related to specific types of evil, shortsightedness, good, bad, aren't as big.

More authoritarian systems have higher variance, even if specific instances might be "better". I use scare quotes around "better" because I would argue giving people democratic power is valuable even if they do dumb shit with it, so you can't just compare democracy to authoritarianism. The latter simply lacks one key thing that democracy gives: some self determination.

This is not a defense of any particular contemporary realization of democracy.

[mschuster91]

> "Support families to raise kids" sells way better than "let old people die if they don't have kids to support them."

Part of the problem is that the decision to not have children isn't a decision for many people. Some never find a partner (and no, I'm not talking about "incel" nutcases here - I'm talking about countries and regions with a severe oversupply of males), some suffer from medical infertility (e.g. due to injuries, cancer, PCOS, endometriosis), some from genetic infertility (e.g. people with genetic disorders, being somewhere on the wide DSD spectrum or where the partners are not genetically compatible), and some have no other choice than not having children for ethical instead of medical reasons (e.g. both partners are carriers of genetically passed diseases or suffer from mental health issues that make them unable to take care of a child).

You can't just go and punish these people for not having had children in their life, that's just as unethical.

[programjames]

You also can't make general policy based on exceptional circumstances. What you do is put exceptions to the general policy for exceptional circumstances.

[stereolambda]

There is no guarantee your kids will want to support you, or, to be morbid but realistic, even survive you.

[lotsofpulp]

Wouldn't that reward raising them in a way that increases the likelihood of them supporting you? And/or raising more of them so that the odds are at least 1 supports you?

The problem societies have is reconciling both individual vs societal interest and short term benefits vs long term benefits. I don't see that being solved with any kind of legislation, especially not by a legislature that has to depend on votes today.

As a side note, some places do try to legislate it with filial responsibility laws:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws