I am a little surprised that Huemer doesn't make the connection between increased education level (time spent in school) and delayed marriage and child bearing. How many college kids get married while they are in college? How many graduate students are married before their finishing their degree? Getting married seems like a big lift when you don't know where you will be living and working, so if you are not planning to stay in the same city or your spouse has no preference on where you go it can be hard to make work. People don't like to get married and have kids before they feel settled, and you can't be settled until after you are both done getting the job situation started. Not that it ever becomes fully settled, but the amount of volatility before the first few years of your career is immense.
And that is on the parent's side; when thinking about how many kids to have how much education they are going to have to pay for comes into play as well. If parents think they are going to have to support their kids for 25 odd years just so the kids will be able to reach the same career opportunities as their parents that will severely limit how many kids the parents will be inclined to have when they are young and relatively poor compared to if the kids are ready to support themselves at say 18. How many college educated people are going to like the idea of telling some of their kids "Sorry, you don't get to go to college" while the others go?
We see this all over nature: the longer the duration of a species' dependency on the parents, and the more intense that dependency, the fewer off-spring parents of that species will produce. As education (and I use the term loosely... "time spent in school" is probably more accurate) increases, and thus time when the children are largely dependent on the parents, we should expect to see lower numbers of children. Tied in with the resultant delay in those kids settling down and having kids of their own as responsible adults (and the fact that by the time most people are out of college they have ~18 years left to have kids without complications becoming more prevalent) it should be no surprise that excessive time spent in school drives down fertility in a way not associated with income.
Something about this whole thing smells. Yes, it's reasonable to be interested in the effects of fertility changes but the degree of certainty expressed about the desierability of greater reproduction seems to be hugely out of proportion to the degree of evidence of the extent to which all the possible effects have been considered.
I'll explain just a few ways you might worry this conclusion is mistaken below but the very fact that the confidence seems to so outstrip the argument makes me suspect potential biasing motives (sure it's true for everyone all the time but without knowing what they are it's harder to evaluate).
I think you're being too quick to assume that if the goal is something like maximizing overall utility that occurs by increasing the population. First, it now becomes a critical question as to whether it's overall or average utility.
For instance, given the vast distances of interstellar space, it's not necessarily unreasonable to think that almost all the utility you can affect will occur on earth and if that's true it really matters what your principle constraint is...if it's simply life-years before the planet becomes uninhabitable then yes. OTOH if it's resource constraints you may want to do the opposite.
Not to mention the huge consideration of whether or not increased fertility makes people less adverse to war (if you have few children do you treat risks to them as greater costs?)
You write: "I just meant that women don’t have to remain barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. It’s totally cool for women to want a career. It’s also cool if they don’t. Individuals should decide what’s best for themselves. Conservatives of previous generations didn’t agree with that."
The thing is, women also shouldn't have to be "breadwinners" and lose half their savings and most of their future earnings to a ex-husbands - even if the women have the higher incomes. As we all know, incomes reflect all sorts of tradeoffs and choices. It's totally cool for women to financially support the men in their lives. It should also be cool if they don't. Individuals should decide what's best for themselves. But conservatives AND "liberals" of our current generation don't agree with that - because they worry that, if they do agree with it, men will "get away with" not financially supporting the women in their lives. Women - who are increasingly often the higher earners - instinctively hesitate to "marry down" and our society is making it even more unattractive for them to do so by sticking to antiquated, unjust and utterly inappropriate family laws. Family law isn't the only problem, but it's full of perverse incentives, and incentives matter.
No, the worry is that a party (man or woman) who has made sacrifices of their earning ability based on an understanding that their spouse would take care of them in turn will get screwed if the spouse breaks the contract. It's just a weird form of paying compensation for breaking a contract.
The existence of alimony and other divorce court ordered payments is just the default liquadated damages clause in the marriage contract. Parties wishing to have a different clause are free to sign pre-nuptial agreements.
What utter drivel. You don’t know shit. You may think you can redifine history, but reality of life in the Middle Ages doesn’t give a fig for your childish imaginings about existence in that period. Read Hobbes.
> am highly skeptical of the ability of social pressure to make people actually gay or trans, but Shrier shows evidence that it can make people say and even believe that they are trans.
What does it mean to "actually be trans" as opposed to "believing that you're trans?" Does Huemer think that there are male souls and female souls, and "actually trans" people have the wrong soul, while "believe that you're trans" have the correct soul, but think they have the wrong soul, or something?
Sometimes, young people are confused about their gender. This can happen partly due to social contagion and partly due to misleading content on the internet (e.g., content that lists very broad, normal psychological phenomena as symptoms of "gender dysphoria"). There are many cases of "desistance", in which people who previously identified as trans later come to accept their natal sex. However, trans activists go insane whenever someone mentions this.
Thanks for this response in particular, and your engagement here more broadly. You seem to be describing what it would mean for someone to mistakenly believe they are trans. The question was about how it differs from "actually trans." What is the coherent definition of the latter? Are you just using the latter to just refer to people whose dysphoria is more severe? If so, why would it be "fine to be (genuinely) trans" any more than it would be fine to be genuinely schizophrenic or delusional?
A belief more common among liberals is that "trans women are women." That is, that "trans women" share so many characteristics with biological women, as to be meaningfully members of the category 'women.'
Conservatives, on the other hand, largely view "trans women" as mentally ill men, just as they wouldn't consider a man who identifies as a dog, a dog. (You wrote that the Conservative view is "Transgenderism is bad." I think that that's more accurate in the sense that they view cancer as bad, than that they view crime as bad.)
The liberal view could accommodate the possibility that some biological males who lack these characteristics that would render them meaningfully female nevertheless mistakenly believe to have these characteristics, due to social contagion or otherwise, but would still accept the basic notion of a category of "trans women" who are "meaningfully women."
Is that similarly your perspective, and if so, what are these characteristics conceptually? I'm guessing you're a materialist and wouldn't accept the notion of a person being born in the wrong body, 'female souls,' etc. What then is the coherent conceptual category of "actually trans?"
There are systematic differences between males and females in the brain, just as there are differences in other systems in the body. Some of these differences affect psychology and behavior. A gender is a set of biologically-based psychological traits that are adaptations designed by evolution for a particular biological sex. A genuine transgender person is a person who has the gender designed by evolution for the sex opposite to the actual sex of their body.
However, some people believe themselves to be transgender while not actually having the gender of the opposite sex; they are mistaken about their own psychology and/or the psychological traits of the opposite sex.
Thanks again for the replies. Is there evidence that people, particularly trans identifying ones, exist with the psychological traits adapted for the opposite sex?
In this thread: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1748811302007366061, Cremieux Recueil finds that some of the supposed similarities between the brains of biological females and of trans MtFs disappear after controlling for sexuality. Instead, heterosexual MtFs' brains do not differ significantly from those of biological males.
I suppose that could be consistent with your model, though, if a sufficiently large percentage of self-identifying trans people are not "actually trans," then the average brains of MtFs wouldn't differ to a statistically significant degree from the brains of biological males.
In explaining the need to control for sexuality, Cremieux links to this study: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0801566105 which finds that in a number of respects (hemispheric volume asymmetry, functional connectivity), the brains of homosexual males are more similar to those of heterosexual females and the brains of homosexual females are more similar to those of heterosexual males.
If in this model it's possible for trans identifying people to be mistaken about truly being trans, is it similarly possible for people not suffering gender dysphoria, like typical homosexuals, to genuinely be trans? Would this model, then, interpret the aforementioned results as indicating that non-dysphoric homosexuals are "actually trans," while trans identifying people who are heterosexual (that is, attracted to members of the opposite biological sex) aren't actually trans?
Mallard, this will be discussed more in my next book, _Progressive Myths_. The last edition of the DSM in ~2013 gives the prevalence of gender dysphoria around 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000. Since then, the prevalence has exploded by perhaps 2 orders of magnitude. This makes it plausible that a large portion of recent cases are a different phenomenon from the original phenomenon.
The DSM discusses early-onset cases, in which children show the first symptoms starting around the age of 3, the first time that children show gender-differentiated behavior at all. These children are also likely to develop into "homosexual trans people" (but that's a confusing term. What they mean is sexually attracted to men if they're transwomen, and sexually attracted to women if they are transmen), i.e., they have the sexual attraction typical of the gender that they identify with, not their natal sex.
However, there are also late-onset cases, occurring at or after puberty. These are more likely to be sexually attracted to the opposite sex from their natal sex, and they are more likely to be auto-gynephiles if they are transwomen. It is likely that these individuals are of masculine gender, even though they wish to identify as women.
Lastly, in recent years, there has been an explosion of trans identificaion among adolescent females. These are a different phenomenon, likely due largely to social contagion.
Whether any of this counts as a "mental illness" or not I don't know. Pace forumposter123, however, I don't call any of these people "perverts", because I think that is a term of abuse. People who suffer gender dysphoria or gender confusion for whatever reason deserve our compassion.
Thanks again for all your responses. I certainly agree with your final paragraph. I've also checked out some very intellectually stimulating material on your Substack, and I look forward to the publication of your book.
Regarding sexuality: Sexual attraction to males is, in my view, *part* of what constitutes feminine gender, while sexual attraction to females is part of what constitutes masculine gender. Thus, some gay men may in fact be more feminine than masculine overall. This is also why I view gynephilia (attraction to women) as evidence against someone's being genuinely of feminine gender.
Trans: People whose long run life fulfillment would be improved by gender re-assingment surgery.
I would posit that the # of such people is very very very very very low. That it is far lower than the number of people who describe themselves as "trans" and probably only a small fraction of those that actually get surgeries (i.e. the surgeries often make things worse, not better).
A lot of MtF transfers aren't "women stuck in mens bodies" but mentally ill perverts that are physically attracted to the idea of themselves as a woman (a mixture of narcissism and lust).
People who don't have a sufficient amount of symptoms but still believe that they are trans. It could be due to social pressure. Much like people can claim to be gay but aren't actually attracted to the same sex.
So far, I'm surprised neither of you have discussed what seems like the obvious libertarian incentive policy (or possibly just my quackish hobby horse) - fully alienable tax allowances (including thresholds). In the case of children, they would have the same allowances as adults, but their parents would have custody of them.
(If you are worried about this leading to poor people having children to sell their tax allowances to high earners, N.B. - within family arrangements avoid having to split the surplus with a stranger so would likely be more popular (and have lower transaction costs) + more people are still more people).
The obvious mechanism for more education leading to less fertility is that more education means spending a significantly larger chunk of your fertile years as a student, and having a kid while still a student is both culturally disfavored and poorly logistically/institutionally supported compared to having a kid after you graduate and start a "regular" job. If this is the main cause, we should for example expect much lower TFR among people whose professions require postgraduate education-- doctors, lawyers etc-- compared to demographically and financially similar controls.
As a pedantic policy-design note, the optimal tax incentive for having a kid probably looks like:
(a) a minimum child allowance for all parents, if only to reap the disproportionate benefits of reducing child poverty;
(b) a percentage-based addition to that allowance for higher-income parents for the reasons you and Huemer state;
(c) a cap on that at some high income level, to avoid both the fairness and efficiency problems with subsidizing the sort of parents who can already afford to hire a team of full-time live-in nannies for their kids (and who already have relatively high TFR because they can afford this)
Strawman numbers: $3K/year/child allowance as a lump sum credit for anyone with household income under $60K; then a 5 percentage point reduction in taxes on further income between $60K and $400K; then the cap kicks in, so the max tax benefit to rich parents is $20K.
This... might actually be politically plausible? Extremely expensive if you make it linear per dependent child, but you could and should reduce the expense by having the amounts ramp down with additional kids and with age of kids, since in fact the costs of childraising are front-loaded and sublinear in number of kids.
The original child tax credit caps at $400k for married filing jointly, which two successful professional parents will run into in a lot of cases.
And yet the new expanded child tax credit caps at $150k married filing jointly. An amount even a single successful professional is likely to blow past.
Many of the new "school choice" legislation have relatively low income caps as well.
If there any real benefit to these income caps? Do we really save any serious money? Don't we want the most successful amongst us having like 12+ kids?
If you asked yourself in a vacuum "how much would I pay to bring another well adjusted high IQ person into the world" wouldn't the number be HUGE.
$150K is too low, for sure. And you may be right that the savings from higher caps are minimal. But
-- the fertility impact of having no cap at all is also likely to be minimal; $1M+ households are already (relatively) high TFR and if they wanted to have more kids money would not be their constraint.
-- having no cap makes the political economy of the proposal much worse by letting it be framed as "a tax cut for millionaires and billionaires".
Then make the cap $1M. I don't much like the optics (we don't want rich successful people having kids), but at least that's an actual number almost nobody reaches and way beyond where a cap could matter.
What I find though is that once you decide "the rich shouldn't get this" that "the rich" keeps getting defined down. Give an inch, they will take a mile. Not worth surrendering to their toxic moral frame.
I don't really buy the political economy either. Nobody is calling to lower the 400k cap to 150k, it's just some random status quo bullshit that if it was never included nobody would care about. I don't think FL or AZ having no income cap made it any harder to pass school choice then OH or NC adding one. It sounds like the kind of thing legislators throw in without thinking and if they didn't bother to nobody would push them on it.
Most people in the making low six figures, especially if it takes two incomes, are income constrained. They would definitely make different choices if they had more money (most especially, around that second income).
You men have gone a long way towards outlining the discussion over this thorny and complex matter. You’ve given us a lot to ponder here. Until now, I have not attempted to flesh out (in MY mind) the phenomena. Thanks and keep up the good work.
Dear SSP; “Slave Hours”? You must have a quite broad view of slave hours. 40 to 60 hours a week are a world’s breadth from slavery. Yours is a socialist-tinged view. Quite red.
I am a little surprised that Huemer doesn't make the connection between increased education level (time spent in school) and delayed marriage and child bearing. How many college kids get married while they are in college? How many graduate students are married before their finishing their degree? Getting married seems like a big lift when you don't know where you will be living and working, so if you are not planning to stay in the same city or your spouse has no preference on where you go it can be hard to make work. People don't like to get married and have kids before they feel settled, and you can't be settled until after you are both done getting the job situation started. Not that it ever becomes fully settled, but the amount of volatility before the first few years of your career is immense.
And that is on the parent's side; when thinking about how many kids to have how much education they are going to have to pay for comes into play as well. If parents think they are going to have to support their kids for 25 odd years just so the kids will be able to reach the same career opportunities as their parents that will severely limit how many kids the parents will be inclined to have when they are young and relatively poor compared to if the kids are ready to support themselves at say 18. How many college educated people are going to like the idea of telling some of their kids "Sorry, you don't get to go to college" while the others go?
We see this all over nature: the longer the duration of a species' dependency on the parents, and the more intense that dependency, the fewer off-spring parents of that species will produce. As education (and I use the term loosely... "time spent in school" is probably more accurate) increases, and thus time when the children are largely dependent on the parents, we should expect to see lower numbers of children. Tied in with the resultant delay in those kids settling down and having kids of their own as responsible adults (and the fact that by the time most people are out of college they have ~18 years left to have kids without complications becoming more prevalent) it should be no surprise that excessive time spent in school drives down fertility in a way not associated with income.
All good points.
This is correct. I was surprised that Huemer didn't notice the connection as well.
Something about this whole thing smells. Yes, it's reasonable to be interested in the effects of fertility changes but the degree of certainty expressed about the desierability of greater reproduction seems to be hugely out of proportion to the degree of evidence of the extent to which all the possible effects have been considered.
I'll explain just a few ways you might worry this conclusion is mistaken below but the very fact that the confidence seems to so outstrip the argument makes me suspect potential biasing motives (sure it's true for everyone all the time but without knowing what they are it's harder to evaluate).
I think you're being too quick to assume that if the goal is something like maximizing overall utility that occurs by increasing the population. First, it now becomes a critical question as to whether it's overall or average utility.
For instance, given the vast distances of interstellar space, it's not necessarily unreasonable to think that almost all the utility you can affect will occur on earth and if that's true it really matters what your principle constraint is...if it's simply life-years before the planet becomes uninhabitable then yes. OTOH if it's resource constraints you may want to do the opposite.
Not to mention the huge consideration of whether or not increased fertility makes people less adverse to war (if you have few children do you treat risks to them as greater costs?)
You write: "I just meant that women don’t have to remain barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. It’s totally cool for women to want a career. It’s also cool if they don’t. Individuals should decide what’s best for themselves. Conservatives of previous generations didn’t agree with that."
The thing is, women also shouldn't have to be "breadwinners" and lose half their savings and most of their future earnings to a ex-husbands - even if the women have the higher incomes. As we all know, incomes reflect all sorts of tradeoffs and choices. It's totally cool for women to financially support the men in their lives. It should also be cool if they don't. Individuals should decide what's best for themselves. But conservatives AND "liberals" of our current generation don't agree with that - because they worry that, if they do agree with it, men will "get away with" not financially supporting the women in their lives. Women - who are increasingly often the higher earners - instinctively hesitate to "marry down" and our society is making it even more unattractive for them to do so by sticking to antiquated, unjust and utterly inappropriate family laws. Family law isn't the only problem, but it's full of perverse incentives, and incentives matter.
No, the worry is that a party (man or woman) who has made sacrifices of their earning ability based on an understanding that their spouse would take care of them in turn will get screwed if the spouse breaks the contract. It's just a weird form of paying compensation for breaking a contract.
The existence of alimony and other divorce court ordered payments is just the default liquadated damages clause in the marriage contract. Parties wishing to have a different clause are free to sign pre-nuptial agreements.
What utter drivel. You don’t know shit. You may think you can redifine history, but reality of life in the Middle Ages doesn’t give a fig for your childish imaginings about existence in that period. Read Hobbes.
I just watched "Idiocracy." The yuppie woman explains over and over, throughout her life, that "the time just isn't right" to have kids.
I think all the people opining about birth rates without any data should, um, look at the data. It's there for Hungary, and it's mixed:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/hungarys-birth-rate-highest-in-nearly-three-decades-thanks-to-viktor-orbans-pro-family-policies/
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/HUN/hungary/birth-rate
so it appears that encouragement by the government works. A little. For a while.
> am highly skeptical of the ability of social pressure to make people actually gay or trans, but Shrier shows evidence that it can make people say and even believe that they are trans.
What does it mean to "actually be trans" as opposed to "believing that you're trans?" Does Huemer think that there are male souls and female souls, and "actually trans" people have the wrong soul, while "believe that you're trans" have the correct soul, but think they have the wrong soul, or something?
Sometimes, young people are confused about their gender. This can happen partly due to social contagion and partly due to misleading content on the internet (e.g., content that lists very broad, normal psychological phenomena as symptoms of "gender dysphoria"). There are many cases of "desistance", in which people who previously identified as trans later come to accept their natal sex. However, trans activists go insane whenever someone mentions this.
Thanks for this response in particular, and your engagement here more broadly. You seem to be describing what it would mean for someone to mistakenly believe they are trans. The question was about how it differs from "actually trans." What is the coherent definition of the latter? Are you just using the latter to just refer to people whose dysphoria is more severe? If so, why would it be "fine to be (genuinely) trans" any more than it would be fine to be genuinely schizophrenic or delusional?
A belief more common among liberals is that "trans women are women." That is, that "trans women" share so many characteristics with biological women, as to be meaningfully members of the category 'women.'
Conservatives, on the other hand, largely view "trans women" as mentally ill men, just as they wouldn't consider a man who identifies as a dog, a dog. (You wrote that the Conservative view is "Transgenderism is bad." I think that that's more accurate in the sense that they view cancer as bad, than that they view crime as bad.)
The liberal view could accommodate the possibility that some biological males who lack these characteristics that would render them meaningfully female nevertheless mistakenly believe to have these characteristics, due to social contagion or otherwise, but would still accept the basic notion of a category of "trans women" who are "meaningfully women."
Is that similarly your perspective, and if so, what are these characteristics conceptually? I'm guessing you're a materialist and wouldn't accept the notion of a person being born in the wrong body, 'female souls,' etc. What then is the coherent conceptual category of "actually trans?"
Thanks.
There are systematic differences between males and females in the brain, just as there are differences in other systems in the body. Some of these differences affect psychology and behavior. A gender is a set of biologically-based psychological traits that are adaptations designed by evolution for a particular biological sex. A genuine transgender person is a person who has the gender designed by evolution for the sex opposite to the actual sex of their body.
However, some people believe themselves to be transgender while not actually having the gender of the opposite sex; they are mistaken about their own psychology and/or the psychological traits of the opposite sex.
Thanks again for the replies. Is there evidence that people, particularly trans identifying ones, exist with the psychological traits adapted for the opposite sex?
In this thread: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1748811302007366061, Cremieux Recueil finds that some of the supposed similarities between the brains of biological females and of trans MtFs disappear after controlling for sexuality. Instead, heterosexual MtFs' brains do not differ significantly from those of biological males.
I suppose that could be consistent with your model, though, if a sufficiently large percentage of self-identifying trans people are not "actually trans," then the average brains of MtFs wouldn't differ to a statistically significant degree from the brains of biological males.
In explaining the need to control for sexuality, Cremieux links to this study: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0801566105 which finds that in a number of respects (hemispheric volume asymmetry, functional connectivity), the brains of homosexual males are more similar to those of heterosexual females and the brains of homosexual females are more similar to those of heterosexual males.
If in this model it's possible for trans identifying people to be mistaken about truly being trans, is it similarly possible for people not suffering gender dysphoria, like typical homosexuals, to genuinely be trans? Would this model, then, interpret the aforementioned results as indicating that non-dysphoric homosexuals are "actually trans," while trans identifying people who are heterosexual (that is, attracted to members of the opposite biological sex) aren't actually trans?
Mallard, this will be discussed more in my next book, _Progressive Myths_. The last edition of the DSM in ~2013 gives the prevalence of gender dysphoria around 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000. Since then, the prevalence has exploded by perhaps 2 orders of magnitude. This makes it plausible that a large portion of recent cases are a different phenomenon from the original phenomenon.
The DSM discusses early-onset cases, in which children show the first symptoms starting around the age of 3, the first time that children show gender-differentiated behavior at all. These children are also likely to develop into "homosexual trans people" (but that's a confusing term. What they mean is sexually attracted to men if they're transwomen, and sexually attracted to women if they are transmen), i.e., they have the sexual attraction typical of the gender that they identify with, not their natal sex.
However, there are also late-onset cases, occurring at or after puberty. These are more likely to be sexually attracted to the opposite sex from their natal sex, and they are more likely to be auto-gynephiles if they are transwomen. It is likely that these individuals are of masculine gender, even though they wish to identify as women.
Lastly, in recent years, there has been an explosion of trans identificaion among adolescent females. These are a different phenomenon, likely due largely to social contagion.
Whether any of this counts as a "mental illness" or not I don't know. Pace forumposter123, however, I don't call any of these people "perverts", because I think that is a term of abuse. People who suffer gender dysphoria or gender confusion for whatever reason deserve our compassion.
Thanks again for all your responses. I certainly agree with your final paragraph. I've also checked out some very intellectually stimulating material on your Substack, and I look forward to the publication of your book.
Regarding sexuality: Sexual attraction to males is, in my view, *part* of what constitutes feminine gender, while sexual attraction to females is part of what constitutes masculine gender. Thus, some gay men may in fact be more feminine than masculine overall. This is also why I view gynephilia (attraction to women) as evidence against someone's being genuinely of feminine gender.
Trans: People whose long run life fulfillment would be improved by gender re-assingment surgery.
I would posit that the # of such people is very very very very very low. That it is far lower than the number of people who describe themselves as "trans" and probably only a small fraction of those that actually get surgeries (i.e. the surgeries often make things worse, not better).
A lot of MtF transfers aren't "women stuck in mens bodies" but mentally ill perverts that are physically attracted to the idea of themselves as a woman (a mixture of narcissism and lust).
People who don't have a sufficient amount of symptoms but still believe that they are trans. It could be due to social pressure. Much like people can claim to be gay but aren't actually attracted to the same sex.
I'll be following this with interest.
So far, I'm surprised neither of you have discussed what seems like the obvious libertarian incentive policy (or possibly just my quackish hobby horse) - fully alienable tax allowances (including thresholds). In the case of children, they would have the same allowances as adults, but their parents would have custody of them.
(If you are worried about this leading to poor people having children to sell their tax allowances to high earners, N.B. - within family arrangements avoid having to split the surplus with a stranger so would likely be more popular (and have lower transaction costs) + more people are still more people).
The obvious mechanism for more education leading to less fertility is that more education means spending a significantly larger chunk of your fertile years as a student, and having a kid while still a student is both culturally disfavored and poorly logistically/institutionally supported compared to having a kid after you graduate and start a "regular" job. If this is the main cause, we should for example expect much lower TFR among people whose professions require postgraduate education-- doctors, lawyers etc-- compared to demographically and financially similar controls.
As a pedantic policy-design note, the optimal tax incentive for having a kid probably looks like:
(a) a minimum child allowance for all parents, if only to reap the disproportionate benefits of reducing child poverty;
(b) a percentage-based addition to that allowance for higher-income parents for the reasons you and Huemer state;
(c) a cap on that at some high income level, to avoid both the fairness and efficiency problems with subsidizing the sort of parents who can already afford to hire a team of full-time live-in nannies for their kids (and who already have relatively high TFR because they can afford this)
Strawman numbers: $3K/year/child allowance as a lump sum credit for anyone with household income under $60K; then a 5 percentage point reduction in taxes on further income between $60K and $400K; then the cap kicks in, so the max tax benefit to rich parents is $20K.
This... might actually be politically plausible? Extremely expensive if you make it linear per dependent child, but you could and should reduce the expense by having the amounts ramp down with additional kids and with age of kids, since in fact the costs of childraising are front-loaded and sublinear in number of kids.
The original child tax credit caps at $400k for married filing jointly, which two successful professional parents will run into in a lot of cases.
And yet the new expanded child tax credit caps at $150k married filing jointly. An amount even a single successful professional is likely to blow past.
Many of the new "school choice" legislation have relatively low income caps as well.
If there any real benefit to these income caps? Do we really save any serious money? Don't we want the most successful amongst us having like 12+ kids?
If you asked yourself in a vacuum "how much would I pay to bring another well adjusted high IQ person into the world" wouldn't the number be HUGE.
$150K is too low, for sure. And you may be right that the savings from higher caps are minimal. But
-- the fertility impact of having no cap at all is also likely to be minimal; $1M+ households are already (relatively) high TFR and if they wanted to have more kids money would not be their constraint.
-- having no cap makes the political economy of the proposal much worse by letting it be framed as "a tax cut for millionaires and billionaires".
Then make the cap $1M. I don't much like the optics (we don't want rich successful people having kids), but at least that's an actual number almost nobody reaches and way beyond where a cap could matter.
What I find though is that once you decide "the rich shouldn't get this" that "the rich" keeps getting defined down. Give an inch, they will take a mile. Not worth surrendering to their toxic moral frame.
I don't really buy the political economy either. Nobody is calling to lower the 400k cap to 150k, it's just some random status quo bullshit that if it was never included nobody would care about. I don't think FL or AZ having no income cap made it any harder to pass school choice then OH or NC adding one. It sounds like the kind of thing legislators throw in without thinking and if they didn't bother to nobody would push them on it.
Most people in the making low six figures, especially if it takes two incomes, are income constrained. They would definitely make different choices if they had more money (most especially, around that second income).
You men have gone a long way towards outlining the discussion over this thorny and complex matter. You’ve given us a lot to ponder here. Until now, I have not attempted to flesh out (in MY mind) the phenomena. Thanks and keep up the good work.
Dear SSP; “Slave Hours”? You must have a quite broad view of slave hours. 40 to 60 hours a week are a world’s breadth from slavery. Yours is a socialist-tinged view. Quite red.
And lived in grinding poverty and died young