Bryan neglects to mention a third alternative: education lowers fertility due to the opportunity costs associated with the choice of spending additional years on education.
This couldn't be more wrong. In the West it's educated people who are keeping marriage and the nuclear family alive; it's collapsing among those without a college degree.
You are conflating two things, marriage/nuclear family and having children. Educated people get married, but do not necessarily have kids (or many), while unmarried people have many children.
We have seven university degrees between us and had six kids so we did our bit to raise the IQ level of the population. Tax systems of course are biased against children - labour's cost of replacing itself is not deductible.
Bryan, are you encouraging your children not to pursue education beyond middle or high school and instead to begin having kids as teenagers so as not to delay childbearing? If not, why not?
As I pointed out in my critique of Trump's support for IVF subsidies ( https://mises.org/mises-wire/trump-campaign-tries-buy-votes-subsidizing-ivf ) there is a fundamental difference of partisan interests on a number of contentious "culture war" issues (notably including immigration, "wokeness" in the education sector, and abortion) arising from the fact that childless voters are more likely to be Democrats and that Republican parents have far more children and have them sooner than Democrat parents do. My article has links to the data sources.
Once you understand the demographic differences between each party's electorate, one can begin to grasp why each party is so strongly wedded to their respective "culture war" platforms, however much moderates are offended by culture warriors of both parties. Democrats absolutely must capture educational and cultural institutions and systematically use them to subvert parental influence, specifically to convert the children of Republican parents into young Democrats, and absolutely must import Democrat-leaning foreigners to "replace" the native-born. The long-run alternative is gradual extinction as older "progressives" die off and succeeding cohorts are smaller and smaller.
at this point, i am much more afraid of having kids. somehow falling tfr doesn' t seem to be a problem to me as ai agents/robots will take over in most jobs and i am seriously afraid of my kids' future, and even my future. am i missing something?
I'm assuming neither but religion itself, I.e. sex is there to make babies and you have a duty to make them hence why God made it enjoyable so get to making them often. I'm betting many non-Abrahamic religions have some variant of that as well.
Society is not advanced enough to be below replacement fertility. Also the ideal caregivers and overseers of the elderly are their kids even if it’s making sure they are being treated well if a child can’t handle it on their own. It’s a difficult job to do for one person let alone two by yourself
The advent of birth control which I’m certainly not against is responsible more than anything for the plummeting of birth rates. What happened after that is downstream of that.
Society elevates working more than parenting even though someone has to raise children. Outsourcing it as a collective job seems to be culturally preferable at this time. Also schools are not set up and were not set up for two working parents so the options are after school before school program, nanny or sitter, latchkey for older kids, or a very flexible schedule which isn’t always possible.
The flip side, happily, is that governments can apparently make babies with budget cuts, arresting their demographic troubles for less than nothing.
I am not sure what this sentense means, but governments have spent money to fix fertility and it was less successful than expected, if I understood correctly.
I'm pretty sure that Bryan means that if governments cut subsidies to higher-level schooling, the amount of it demanded and provided will fall and, therefore, based on his data, fertility will rise. A twofer: less government spending and more children.
It would have other consequences, but most of them would be intended, at least by Bryan. I do highly recommend reading his book or, at least, the first half.
Bryan neglects to mention a third alternative: education lowers fertility due to the opportunity costs associated with the choice of spending additional years on education.
This couldn't be more wrong. In the West it's educated people who are keeping marriage and the nuclear family alive; it's collapsing among those without a college degree.
You are conflating two things, marriage/nuclear family and having children. Educated people get married, but do not necessarily have kids (or many), while unmarried people have many children.
We have seven university degrees between us and had six kids so we did our bit to raise the IQ level of the population. Tax systems of course are biased against children - labour's cost of replacing itself is not deductible.
Bryan, are you encouraging your children not to pursue education beyond middle or high school and instead to begin having kids as teenagers so as not to delay childbearing? If not, why not?
As I pointed out in my critique of Trump's support for IVF subsidies ( https://mises.org/mises-wire/trump-campaign-tries-buy-votes-subsidizing-ivf ) there is a fundamental difference of partisan interests on a number of contentious "culture war" issues (notably including immigration, "wokeness" in the education sector, and abortion) arising from the fact that childless voters are more likely to be Democrats and that Republican parents have far more children and have them sooner than Democrat parents do. My article has links to the data sources.
Once you understand the demographic differences between each party's electorate, one can begin to grasp why each party is so strongly wedded to their respective "culture war" platforms, however much moderates are offended by culture warriors of both parties. Democrats absolutely must capture educational and cultural institutions and systematically use them to subvert parental influence, specifically to convert the children of Republican parents into young Democrats, and absolutely must import Democrat-leaning foreigners to "replace" the native-born. The long-run alternative is gradual extinction as older "progressives" die off and succeeding cohorts are smaller and smaller.
at this point, i am much more afraid of having kids. somehow falling tfr doesn' t seem to be a problem to me as ai agents/robots will take over in most jobs and i am seriously afraid of my kids' future, and even my future. am i missing something?
No. Given your priors, you probably shouldn't reproduce.
Maybe we should lean into religion again?
You mean religious education or religiosity alone?
I'm assuming neither but religion itself, I.e. sex is there to make babies and you have a duty to make them hence why God made it enjoyable so get to making them often. I'm betting many non-Abrahamic religions have some variant of that as well.
Good article. Apparently, the movie Idiocracy was spot on.
Society is not advanced enough to be below replacement fertility. Also the ideal caregivers and overseers of the elderly are their kids even if it’s making sure they are being treated well if a child can’t handle it on their own. It’s a difficult job to do for one person let alone two by yourself
The advent of birth control which I’m certainly not against is responsible more than anything for the plummeting of birth rates. What happened after that is downstream of that.
Society elevates working more than parenting even though someone has to raise children. Outsourcing it as a collective job seems to be culturally preferable at this time. Also schools are not set up and were not set up for two working parents so the options are after school before school program, nanny or sitter, latchkey for older kids, or a very flexible schedule which isn’t always possible.
It's not a waste of time and money to the people conquering the U.S. populace. They're getting exactly what they paid for.
The flip side, happily, is that governments can apparently make babies with budget cuts, arresting their demographic troubles for less than nothing.
I am not sure what this sentense means, but governments have spent money to fix fertility and it was less successful than expected, if I understood correctly.
I'm pretty sure that Bryan means that if governments cut subsidies to higher-level schooling, the amount of it demanded and provided will fall and, therefore, based on his data, fertility will rise. A twofer: less government spending and more children.
So, the solution to declining fertility rates is to cut higher education funding? Seems like that would have other unintended consequences.
It would have other consequences, but most of them would be intended, at least by Bryan. I do highly recommend reading his book or, at least, the first half.
I tried clicking the reference roman numeral but it seems broken like always.