Quick synoposis: The writer compares the unfortunate ramifications of the one-child policy in China to the current trend in the US towards small families (2 children). In short, not only are individuals being robbed of the joy of siblings, but also aunts and uncles and other supportive relatives who could help provide resources and assistance during times of need. Take those things away, and it’s no wonder that individuals will turn to the state for help. Smaller families = bigger government. And this, of course, is bad.
So the writer thinks we should be having larger families.
I’m guessing this cat is politically conservative. I know not all conservatives are fiscally conservative, but most of them still talk a good game about reigning in financial excesses. The high costs to the taxpayer is the main reason why conservatives freak out over “big government”.
So I’m trying to figure out how encouraging people to have more children, when they’re already struggling to take care of the 2.5 kids they’re already having, makes sense from a conservative stand-point.
The “private safety net” angle is interesting and not one I disagree with on its face. But I don’t think it is financially responsible for a person to use family as an insurance policy. High geographic mobility has served Americans well. Individuals benefit from mobility by being able to capitalize on more competitive job opportunities, and employers benefit because they can capitalize on more competitive workers. Seems to me that once you use the support of extended family to maximize the size of your brood, you create a major trade-off to moving. You start putting where you live (and who lives near you) above improving your financial situation and getting out of a bad situation.
Even with family help, a couple with a large family is likely going to have one parent staying at home. Plenty of parents caring for small families struggle to pay the bills, and that’s with TWO paychecks. The median household income is approximately $54,000. Sure, a family of six can live on $54,000. But if most families began to double in size and tried to live off of $54K, there would be some economic consequences, no? More consumer spending on diapers and children’s aspirin, less on iPads and dining out. More people living on the edge of poverty. More people living in poverty when bad decisions + bad luck push them over.
Some other questions I have:
Do conservatives like this writer really want everyone to have large families? Even the poor? Seems to me they should, right? Who needs a safety net more than the poor? But methinks the writer is addressing middle-class and upper middle-class people who share his cultural values. Not poor people.
Is it fair to lay the “blame” of small families on current economic realities? After all, realities can be changed if that’s what people want to happen. Like, if everyone starts to demand higher wages because they’ve suddenly got extra mouths to feed, wouldn’t employers be forced to bend to their whims? (I don’t think this would happen, but maybe I’m wrong).
Is the private safety net better than the publicly-funded one for an individual? I think it can be, but I can also think of how it could be inferior. For instance, my siblings aren’t obligated to help me with anything, no matter how much they love me. Neither are my parents or my other relatives. But the government is. And personally, I would have less of a problem with beseeching my government for help than I would be going to family members. I know my family members are dealing with their own struggles. My love for them would make me loathe to burden them any further. I don’t have such emotional intanglements with the government.
Is the private safety net better than the publicly-funded one for society? Let’s say that Medicaid funding is one day slashed based on the expectation that adult children will typically care for their elderly parents instead of putting them in nursing homes. Would this be a boon to society?
This argument is on a level with Bastiat’s “Fallacy of the Broken Window”, and fails for essentially the same reason – counting visible benefits while ignoring hidden costs.
The “broken window” fallacy “proves” that hooligans who go around breaking windows are performing a public service, because they generate business for the glassmakers. The problem is that this is at the expense of whoever else would have sold goods and services to the people who had to squeeze something out of the budget to pay for window repairs.
The fallacy of the linked article is that it “proves” that large families are beneficial because they give each member more potential sources of support. The problem is that large families also give each member more potential obligation to provide that support.
The only country I can think of in which big government has a direct impact on size of family is China, where there is or was the One Child Policy.
Otherwise, it seems like a case of “correlation is not causation.”
No. The average support per person would remain the same, but the distribution would be smoothed out and become more predictable and easier to manage. Instead of doubling your burden once every ten years, it might increase your burden by 20% every two years, for example.
This obviously won’t always help - if a recession hits the entire family at once the larger pool won’t make any difference - but it won’t make things worse.
This also assumes that each new human, on average, has a marginal utility greater than its marginal cost.
With technological advancement being what it is, I believe there will come a day when this is no longer true. It may even no longer be true in certain advanced countries, where many workers are working “make work” jobs and are otherwise subsidised by the other workers who are manifold times more productive.
China is the only country that limits family size by law, and the only one using forced abortions for population control. But other governments have stepped in in less forceful ways.
Starting in the 70s and 80s, countries such as Singapore and Japan tried to damp down birth rates by rigging tax codes, welfare policies, and other laws to discriminate against large families. They even ran advertising campaigns urging people to have only one child. It worked; fertility rates plunged.
Then around 1995-2000, government officials in those countries started to get the impression that they might have done something really, really stupid. Now they are trying to move fertility rates up.
I’m guessing this cat is politically conservative. I know not all conservatives are fiscally conservative, but most of them still talk a good game about reigning in financial excesses. The high costs to the taxpayer is the main reason why conservatives freak out over “big government”.
So I’m trying to figure out how encouraging people to have more children, when they’re already struggling to take care of the 2.5 kids they’re already having, makes sense from a conservative stand-point.
The “private safety net” angle is interesting and not one I disagree with on its face. But I don’t think it is financially responsible for a person to use family as an insurance policy. High geographic mobility has served Americans well. Individuals benefit from mobility by being able to capitalize on more competitive job opportunities, and employers benefit because they can capitalize on more competitive workers. Seems to me that once you use the support of extended family to maximize the size of your brood, you create a major trade-off to moving. You start putting where you live (and who lives near you) above improving your financial situation and getting out of a bad situation.
Even with family help, a couple with a large family is likely going to have one parent staying at home. Plenty of parents caring for small families struggle to pay the bills, and that’s with TWO paychecks. The median household income is approximately $54,000. Sure, a family of six can live on $54,000. But if most families began to double in size and tried to live off of $54K, there would be some economic consequences, no? More consumer spending on diapers and children’s aspirin, less on iPads and dining out. More people living on the edge of poverty. More people living in poverty when bad decisions + bad luck push them over.
Some other questions I have:
Do conservatives like this writer really want everyone to have large families? Even the poor? Seems to me they should, right? Who needs a safety net more than the poor? But methinks the writer is addressing middle-class and upper middle-class people who share his cultural values. Not poor people.
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For starters, The Federalist is definitely conservative. They also recently published this article by Rebekah Curtis: How this Mother of Seven Does It. It addresses some of your questions. As far as finances, Curtis says she cuts back on needless luxuries for both herself and the kids.
I’m sure Yuengert is under no illusions about how many people will take his advice. Plainly most Americans won’t shift back to huge families anytime soon. His point is simply to get readers to think about the emotional connections, support, and fun that come from having large families.
At least a government run system provides a chance at a fair shake. What you propose is privilege by virtue of nepotism. So what if my parents could only have one child, do I just get less help and resources?
Taking the burden off of the individual and putting it on to the state is by design. It’s supposed to level the playing field.
Anyway, FWIW, my three children have two cousinly-triples living within a couple of hours’ drive and you know what? it’s absolutely great. But none of those children were born for social policy, or for economic reasons, they were born because we, their parents, wanted them. End of.
Fairly or unfairly, whenever I see elderly conservative white dudes bemoaning the declining birth rate and linking it to the ‘decline of the family’ and ‘big government’, I hear dog-whistles whistling. Blame Pat Buchanan - he was the first popular writer of this generation to really push the ‘we white Christian folks have to reproduce or we’ll be OVERRUN’ barrow, and I’m frankly suspicious of anyone banging on the same drum ever since.
On a personal note, though, three is a lovely size for a family, and I’d never dissuade anyone.
Yeah, and a bag of rocks and a good right aim will keep the glassblower off welfare. Same fallacy, different phrasing.
If increased group size is considered beneficial because of increased statistical predictability, that petty much blows the thesis (big families are better than big government) right out of the water – the nation about a half-dozen orders of magnitude larger than even a big extended family.
I’d agree with this if he didn’t make the argument that the size of families is correlated with the size and influence of government.
Sure, there are emotional trade-offs to having a small family. But there are emotional trade-offs to having a large family as well. Not all families are the Brady’s. Some are millstones that hold the individual back. One way that poor people are disadvantaged over middle-class people are the enormous familial obligations they often have. You can’t go to chess club after school because you have to watch your little brothers and sisters. You can’t get go to science camp because you’ve got to get a summer job and bring in a paycheck for the household. You can’t go to college because Mama is sick and Daddy’s laid off, and your uncle needs someone to help him run the store. You can’t move away from your hometown because your family is depending on you to be the man in the family now that Daddy’s dead and Mama can’t raise five kids all by herself.
A person can look at this family and be impressed that everyone’s pulling together and making things work. But the hypothetical “you” in this situation is no longer functioning as a rugged individualist who can call the world his oyster. You likely won’t starve or go homeless or be starving for company, so I guess there’s that. But I think most Americans would rather pay a little extra in taxes to receive these benefits in a less encumbering way.
In my limited experience, people with smaller families can give their children more. Is this universal? I’m sure not, but even a poor family might be able to consider paying at least partially for one child for college. Three? NFW. And a middle class family can take one child on an expensive vacation, or send her abroad, but not when they have three.
Me, I don’t really get why people have multiple children, one after another. sure, they want it, so as long as they can afford it, they are welcome to go ahead - but in my book, every additional child they have reduces the spending potential on the others.
Your post made me think of another trade-off to growing up in a big family. Birth order really starts to play a role in who you are. According to this cite, it can even affect intelligence.
Having aunts and uncles and siblings and cousins is nice, but I don’t think most people would be willing to sacrifice IQ points in their kids or themselves just so they can have a crowded house at Thanksgiving. Especially with both education and employment being so focused on test scores nowadays.
Call me crazy, but I think people should have exactly the number of kids they want. No more and no less. For some folks, big families are great. For others, not so much. One size does not fit all.
If you have fewer kids, you should be able to put aside more money for your “golden years”, so I don’t see a big government/small government angle. I think that has more to with culture than family size.
Call me cynical, but people had larger families in the past mainly because, besides lack of birth control, you were almost certain to lose at least one child due to complications of childbirth, disease, and generally lousy medical care. Having a large brood tends to lessen (though not eliminate) the pain of losing one.
At the end of the cited article, the author’s one-line bio says, “His research and writing explores the boundaries between economics, philosophical ethics, and Catholic social thought.”
He and his wife came from families that averaged seven children per family. He’s trying to justify the Catholic prohibition against birth control with a secular argument.
One of the negatives to a private safety net is that it punishes saving. This came up in discussions about the poor, who ask friends and family for help during a crisis. If you’re doing the smart thing, and save up $25/wk for a big purchase like a new couch, you’re ripe for the picking. If your sister needs $400 to pay for a car repair, and you have $500 saved up for a couch, you’re now weighing your sister’s impending doom against a new couch. If you rent a new couch for $25/wk, your sister may be out of luck, but it’s not because you’re an asshole who would rather have a couch than help her out, it’s because you don’t have the money, and you get to have the couch you wanted.
Unless you have some kind of assurance that everyone in the family is contributing “equally” or “fairly” to the fund, it’s a big disincentive to saving for a rainy day. If you have that assurance, then you can save up and be secure in the idea that those savings won’t be crushed by your stupid Brother in Law, who makes just as much as you but spent it all on a big house and fancy cars.
The publicly funded net provides that assurance, because you pay in based on your income (and a few other factors) just like everyone else. You’re not going to get screwed by saving up for a nice vacation, though it may take a bit longer you at least know where you stand.