I totally get the reasoning behind that, but the majority of women are not stay at home moms, and most families don’t have the resources to make it happen. Society is just not oriented to family creation, and both women and men (to a lesser extent) take a hit when they decide to start a family. The entire world is in a fertility crisis now that could easily endanger the very society we live in, with all the ideals and principles we take for granted, and that calls for solutions that may not end up being absolutely fair to everyone in it. If the tradeoff is between childcare that actually works versus a watered down version because we are also paying people who don’t avail of it, I think the former option will do most to support families.

▲

rpcope1 2 days ago | parent [-]

I agree with you except the part about the policy making a dent. Scandinavian countries have all sorts of "universal childcare" and benefits, and their TFR is still going straight into the shitter. All this talk about expanding the GDP and going towards total workforce participation IMO is why family formation is slowing to a crawl (I mean look at South Korea, where it's all about being a workaholic and they basically will cease to exist in maybe 50-100 years, literally). If we want to continue as a nation or entity of people, I believe the people and the government are going to need to put their thumb on the scale in a way more aggressive way, including both childcare credits for all, paying stay at home parents a salary, major cultural changes (including our own version of the Soviet Mother Heroine/Order of Parental Glory that carry real status with them, perhaps), and economic and cultural pushback on being a DINK or similar. We have no future the way we're going, and these sort of policy interventions have been tried elsewhere and they don't do shit. We really have got to rethink a lot of things, in a way that's probably painful or irritating to the readership here, otherwise we're basically done.

▲

lotsofpulp 2 days ago | parent [-]

You don’t want just kids, you want well raised kids. Badly raised kids are easily a net negative, so just paying people to be parents isn’t going to work.

The only thing that might incentivize people to think about the long term is getting rid of all old age benefits (including continuous bail outs of broad market assets by the federal government by sacrificing the purchasing power of the currency).

Right now, we take productivity from people who sacrifice to raise kids well and give it to those who don’t raise kids well, or not have them at all.

This obviously leads to an arbitrage opportunity (as evidenced by DINK lifestyles).

I do not see any other way other than to remove this arbitrage opportunity. Which probably will not happen in any democracy due to old people’s voting power.

▲

seanmcdirmid 2 days ago | parent [-]

I beg to disagree. In Switzerland, a lot of emphasis is put on assimilation to a Swiss identity via pre-school and school. Now this eventually raises the bar for parents to raise their kids, but it also acts to Swissify immigrant kids quickly as well (and 25% of the residents in Switzerland are not born as swiss, many of those are refugees from African countries that America has problems dealing with). America's DIY hands off parent-focused system consistently has the worse results of all the world's developed countries, and is proving to be worse than even developing country systems.

▲

lotsofpulp 2 days ago | parent [-]

Switzerland has not achieved a replacement rate TFR since 1970.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/che/swi...

Any sustainable policy would obviously result in a TFR of at least the replacement rate.

▲

seanmcdirmid 2 days ago | parent [-]

I have no idea what TFR has to do with anything here. So Swiss people aren't having kids like they were before, that is not relevant to education outcomes, maybe they are just really good in teaching sex education.

▲

lotsofpulp 2 days ago | parent [-]

A sub replacement rate TFR leads to extinction, not to mention wreaks havoc on government policies that have long been dependent on growth.

	▲	seanmcdirmid 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Switzerland has a high immigration rate, so they aren't going to be hit by this in the short term, and in the long term I don't think they are going to sweat some population loss.