I’m talking about subsidies at the level of 1/2 to 1 million dollars US per baby. That’s the level of expense babies have; that’s the level that needs to be offset.
And no, nobody has tried that.
Do you have an outline of where funds would come from to support this (how the relevant taxes would work, etc)?
I’m a proponent of a universal basic income of about $100 per week per person. For people under 18, that would go to a parent. That comes out to about $100k for raising a child to adulthood.
And nobody will. It would be an interesting experiment. An expensive one but interesting.
I’d suspect there would be some people, not necessarily the people who make good parents, trying to have a kid a year at that level of “support” …
For sure, baby farming would be a problem as soon as we subsidized the full cost of having them. The existing foster systems have that problem and they subsidize a lot less than 100% of the cost of a keeping a kid.
Also, “activities” these days can be much more involved and require “commitment”. There seem to be fewer opportunities for casual involvement. You can’t just play sports - you have to commit to giving up your afternoons to practice everyday and your parents have to commit to transporting you to away games or else you simply can’t join a team, any team, anywhere. Rinse and repeat for most “activities”. God forbid kids sample a wide variety of things over their childhood, they have to track into serious dedication from day one. My spouse used to call it “career childhood”.
Now try doing that with more than one or two kids. With two kids and two parents the adults can split up and drive one kid to one activity and one to the other, but with three or more?
Of course, if someone really wants more than two kids they’ll do so, but it’s yet another example of a societal pressure to not have more than two kids.
Parents weren’t as involved back in the day because they weren’t expected to be that involved. It was expected that kids could play on their own in the neighborhood and didn’t need adults and coaches constantly hovering over them.
Excellent observations there.
Hell, the requirement to have protective child seats in cars is a strong pressure for 2 kids max. Yes, you can buy a bigger van, and bigger vans are made because of that market.
When you reach 3 kids they honestly need to make a whole bench that clips into the back seat and has 3 seat belted spots with protection on the sides.
Although I guess if you’re gonna go past 3 you need a minivan anyways.
Cars aren’t standardized enough for that to be a popular item.
One of the issues with the protective bench idea is by the time you have 3, they’re all different sizes.
I’ve written about this before, but I have a niece who is a professional foster parent. Works for a semi-government semi-charity org. She is a saint.
Anyhow she always has 7 kids ranging from newborns to about age 10. The names and faces keep changing, but the age range and headcount remains the same.
She typically has 4 or 5 that need car seats and 2 or occasionally 3 who don’t. It’s quite the Tetris game to load and unload the three-row family van thingy they issued her.
Actually it’s more like the bit about the farmer ferrying the wolf, the goat, and the lettuce across the river in a canoe. But with 7 items; not just 3, one of which is immobile. The moment you let go of the middle-sized ones to strap in the infants, they’re tearing off across the parking lot in search of a car to be hit by. Getting the whole brood in or out of the car without bloodshed takes easily 10 minutes. And always includes tears.
Which is another reason not to have 7 kids. 
There has been a dramatic and general fall in religiosity in America over the last three decades. We cannot expect this trend to continue indefinitely: the number of religious people is likely to stabilise at some lower rate. In those decades, higher fertility rates among religious people have been more than offset by the societal transition from high religiosity, but we do not know if this will remain true in the future.
This same fall in religious observance and belief happened earlier in Europe, and is likely the reason birth rates fell earlier there than in America.
That’s not what I was talking about. I meant the limitations on free speech in the interest of ‘community relations’, like the de facto new blasphemy laws, and our government’s reluctance to enforce the law generally and to hold every group to the same standards.
How many examples of this are there, really?
If there is one thing we’ve learned in the last few decades, it’s that lessons from America do not necessarily apply in Europe. In America, immigrants boost the economy and commit less crime, in Europe, with lower crime rates and extensive welfare states, it’s the opposite. In America, with libertarian politics and a shared immigrant history, the culture is well set up to integrate new arrivals; in Europe it is not. In 19th century America there was plenty of space and opportunities for both immigrants and people born there. 21st century Europe is very different.
I’m not opposed to immigration in general. I don’t believe that immigrants can never be British, or similar far-right ideas. And I’m not afraid of change. I enjoy learning about other cultures and trying new things. But I don’t want to see change for the worse. And we are seeing change for the worse. That’s why there is a backlash against immigration all over Europe. Being able to integrate new people depends both on how different they are and how high the numbers are, and the numbers arriving currently are too high. Best case scenario is that Europe becomes like a much poorer version of America, and I don’t want that.
Maybe mass immigration really is the only option, but the response from European governments has mostly been “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”. The previous government here in the UK passed objectively antinatalist policies, which are still in place. 
I didn’t intend to imply that either should actually be mandatory. Just that it would likely be good for us if they were. The military must be the only place to mandate either, and they have ‘mandatory fun days’ as well as compulsory physical training.
That’s rather a downer. From the charts it looks like births per woman increased at the never-privatised kibbutzes, and didn’t change at the privatised ones. Is that correct? It seems surprising.
But we already concluded government help with costs was unlikely to do much. That’s why I was suggesting ways to bring forward the point at which couples felt they were ready to start a family, and changes to child-rearing to reduce the effort involved.
This is an exaggeration, but there is some truth to it. Pregnancy is onerous and causes permanent changes, and caring for a newborn is hard work. The changes to lifestyle necessitated by becoming a parent are probably a much bigger factor putting people off having a first child, though.
People get additional root canals voluntarily all the time, in order to keep their teeth. Similarly, women are regularly willing to go through the pain of childbirth again, whether clearly remembered or not. because it’s worth it to have another baby.
Yes, this is a major part of the issue. When you increase the amount of investment required per child, parents reduce the number of children they have. Reversing this is tricky because it’s driven by competition, and not something that can be changed by individual parents. You can’t send your kids out to play in the neighbourhood if there are no other kids doing so.
We had hand-me-downs as kids. My favourite dress as a child came from our neighbours, IIRC. And with two older cousins, my daughter also has plenty of hand-me-downs. I pack her outgrown clothes away to give to her younger cousin; it’s really convenient. 
I was surprised when she was born how generous everyone was giving me baby stuff. Now that she’s a few years older, I understand it: kids grow out of stuff so quickly, their needs are always changing, and you just want to get no longer needed items out of the house. So I think this aspect of tradition is still going strong.
Yeah. Surely there are some changes governments could make to encourage this?
And the below is definitely something governments could influence, by changing what is taught in schools, encouraging Hollywood etc to send a different message, or straight up propaganda:
It’s definitely a big part of the issue - some of the issues don’t apply to me because I live in a city where when my kids were young there were other kids playing in the neighborhood and although there are certainly “practice every day” teams , there are also still “two practices a week and all the games are in the neighborhood” teams.
But I still had only two kids in large part because I wanted to be able to do things my parents couldn’t do for four kids. That’s also why I had my first at 26 - my mother was 21 when I was born. We couldn’t do different activities unless/until we could get there on our own - if one kid bowled, we all bowled. I got no help with college tuition. My first vacation was with my friends and I got my first job at 12. Not just for spending money - also to buy clothes. That wasn’t what I wanted for my kids which meant I had to have them later, when I was more financially set and have only one or two.
Ah. Yeah you and I have a different concept of what is “less liberal” with yours not including the rise of the Far Right but being concerned about limits on hate speech. Mine is more the other way round. YMMV.
Many?
America is not as much a special case as you think. In the negative as well as the positive: every established group became nativists fearing the change that the next new group would bring, and their scary big families. Even after WWII immigration policies were built to keep out Jews. Dirty Irish and Italians had their times as the demon immigrants swarm also.
But to your point across the world there has been many Diasporas where immigrants have added to the cultures economically, creatively, and culturally. Stick with Jews for a second. There was let’s see, the Babylonian Exile, spread and successfully integrated many places after both Greek and Roman conquests, being kicked out of Spain, England, and on, each time being vilified as new arrivals but in a few generations adding both economically and culturally to new places across the globe. Europeans have possibly the largest Diaspora across the globe and not always as colonists. German immigration and integration into Brazil and Argentina was very successful and large especially from 1870 on … and then all the Nazis that fled there very successfully integrated! Canada has absorbed many disparate groups through its history; currently they are having some anti immigrant sentiment mainly as the loads of new arrivals are being blamed for housing shortages. The Indian Diaspora calls America its home more than anywhere else but there are many also living across Asia and the Middle East. Even in the UK. Rishi Sunak considers himself a faithful Hindu and is integrated well.
We know it is possible to have pluralistic countries with common core identities shared by various immigrant members who each add to the whole. It has been done.
Given that China, with its government and leader that has control over its citizens that Trump looks at like a 13 year old finding Pornhub for the first time, is flailing at recreating cultural norms for more than one child once that norm was established, I don’t think so. At least I see no evidence that it is possible. Not proof it isn’t I grant. But again, successful integrating immigrants as part of the engine of a vibrant and growing economy? That we have examples of. Many of them.
Yes. And again; it’s literally the only method that can actually work in the near term. As the line goes you can’t get nine women together and produce a baby in a month; human maturation rates put an inherent limit on how soon you can get more people into the work force by raising the birth rate.
Yes. Having a baby is a huge deal, for both good and ill. Women mostly have babies because they want babies. (Or get accidentally knocked up.) The only woman i know who wanted kids and gave up on trying to get pregnant for fear of the actual pregnancy/delivery had early preeclampsia, had to have an emergency abortion, and was told by a few different doctors that she had about a 50% chance of death if she got pregnant again.
To a point, these changes are a good thing. It gives the kids a higher standard of living, and we don’t want an exponentially rising population, either. The trouble is that we’ve massively overshot on reducing the birth rate, and the longer we ignore this, the harder it is to reverse.
I’ve seen women online saying they decided not to have another baby because of traumatic deliveries. Don’t know if any changed their minds later. I also know another mother from my daughter’s nursery who had an emergency C-section followed by nearly bleeding to death with her second child, and was very nervous about having another, but decided to go ahead in the end (and that delivery went fine).
But I’ve never heard any woman say a normal childbirth is the reason she doesn’t want more kids. It’s a few hours or days, compared to 18 years of raising a child.
Yeah. It’s a very unpleasant day or two, but then it’s done. Rearing a child is life changing.
I guess having babies ages a woman. There are a lot of permanent health changes. (Which vary from woman to women, but can include everything from diabetes to hemorrhoids, incontinence to foot disorders, etc.) But i don’t know anyone who decided not to have kids because of that.
The fact I was not referring to the far-right hardly means I think it’s not a problem. Obviously it is. But it’s a self-inflicted one, almost entirely the result of mainstream politicians refusing to listen to voters on immigration, and would be easy to solve.
As for ‘hate speech’, this is exactly the double standard I am objecting to. We are allowed to criticise fundamentalist Christians, we are allowed to object when they try to enforce their religious beliefs on everyone else. To accept a large increase in the share of the population, we need it to be legal and socially acceptable to do the same for Islam, and for every other religion. If you endorse that double standard, then yes, we disagree.
Canada is a perfect example of my point. For many years, they had a very successful immigration policy; demanding high standards of potential immigrants, and keeping net migration at a relatively-high, but still limited level. Then the government decided to greatly increase numbers and consequently relaxed the standards, and now they have a massive housing shortage, the economy is stagnating, and women are complaining about a dramatic increase in street harassment.
Some immigration is good for a country. But numbers and type of immigrants matter. Canada should have cared more about the gender ratio, for example. Bringing in tens of thousands of ‘extra’ single young men is a recipe for trouble anywhere. (It’s also not going to do much for the birth rate. 
)
That’s why raising birth rates is still helpful, even if you can’t get to 2.1 children per woman. It allows for a more sustainable and beneficial level of immigration.
I’m curious. If a time traveller appeared from 200 or 300 years in the future and told you there were still societies based in shared secular values and mutual respect, but due to dwindling birth rates and eventual assimilation, there were no more Jews, would it bother you at all? Would you prefer to avoid this outcome if you could?
I doubt if the childbirth experience has any material effect on the birth rate. Even if there was a simple and safe way to make it totally risk free and like a relaxing day at the spa, I don’t think it would change the birth rate in any measurable way. There’s a lifetime of expense, responsibility, obligation, and stress that comes with being a parent that can be a major reason not to have kids. That’s why many men don’t want to be a parent. Even though they don’t have any meaningful pain or physical effects from pregnancy or childbirth, they aren’t necessarily clamoring for a gaggle of kids.