Comments on: No Exit — What Parents Owe Their Children and What Society Owes Parents

By: derrida derider

derrida derider — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 15:35:23 +0000

There’s far too much moralizing in this discussion. Using loaded terms such as ‘free riders’, ‘selfish’, etc is obscuring the issues. To quote Clint Eastwood just before he blew Gene Hackman away, ‘deserves got nuthin to do with it’. I want society to share some of the costs of child rearing on economic efficiency, not moral, grounds. The total benefits provided by children (economic and otherwise) are not all captured by the parents, so absent some transfers the number of children being born will be less than optimal. The mechanism by which the sharing is done is then a second order issue. And, yes, absent sufficiently large cohorts of workers the economy will tend to a deflationary spiral with chronically negative returns on investment (this BTW is a feature of any economic system, not just capitalism). Either massive immigration, massive foreign investment or old-fashioned colonial exploitation (all ways of making claims on other country’s children) can defer but not destroy this effect (because the foreign countries will themselves have little incentive to maintain high birth rates). So at a global level having everyone save for their retirement is not a substitute for ensuring sufficient breeding.

By: mc

mc — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 15:13:36 +0000

Harry – “So in a proper accounting you shouldn’t think of publci education, or for that matter, public health, etc, as benefits to parents (thought they do, also, benefit parents) but as benefits to children and others.” Of course, that’s what I meant too. I’m sorry if I didn’t sound too clear… I’m also bit confused here because this whole discussion assumes a different context to the one I’m used to. What I meant is simply that those public services are what I consider the primary way of supporting anyone, parents and children alike. That doesn’t mean I see the necessity of another separate system for rewarding parents. Like Lance Boyle, I also don’t particularly like that children take second place in this calculation, or that the child-rearing effort itself can be precisely quantified in financial terms. I wasn’t really defending means-testing either, I’m not even familiar with the concept. I’m only used to the most basic verification of income requirements for getting subsidies and even family allowances (also for caring for elderly members of the family, not just for kids). I’m ok with reasonable allowances limited in time and where you got to be below a certain income to qualify. But they’re not a substitute for services to which all taxpayers already contribute. In other words, the way I see it, it’s no good to have an allowance if you don’t have easy access to good state-supported daycare and schools and medical care. So I really don’t see the fairness or practical advantage of high and prolonged allowances as opposed to improving public services, especially in the long run.

By: liberal

liberal — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 12:40:10 +0000

laura wrote, Our expenses from last year from having two kids: $40,000 - lost income (full time position) for me Cry me a river. First, is that pre-tax income? If so, it's not the relevant number. Second, I assume you're writing from the US. The US income tax code is heavily biased in favor of married couples whose incomes are not roughly equal. That is, the so-called "marriage penalty" is (a) on average, a marriage benefit; (b) a penalty for working couples whose incomes are roughly equal; (c ) a benefit for working couples whose incomes are extremely unequal. Quit your whining...

By: Lance Boyle

Lance Boyle — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 00:07:07 +0000

Another moral question. Moral systems are goal-driven. The goals in this and most other publicly-debated moral-system arguments are assumed but unstated. The consumer-bias is prominent though; consumer satisfaction, fairness, approval, being paramount. Even in the fix-hunger proposals. This is why we’re stagnating. The idea of everyone suffering miserably for twenty years so that the human race generally could enjoy uncounted millennia of prosperity and stable comfort is laughably absurd, and yet its obverse is the status quo in all our lives. There’s a very common attitude toward children now, that makes them artifacts whose value comes somewhere between a brand-new car and a brand-new house. Children are not objects, they’re what we’re doing, they’re why we have all these amazing talents and abilities. “Children” in a most abstract sense, but it gets dumbed down, and filtered through the greed of current economic reality, and becomes something cloying and dull. The point I’m throwing all this at is that the system within which the discussion is considering the award of financial parental assistance is itself anti-child. Giving parents money and leaving the essential system in place is neurotic displacement. It won’t work, no matter how good the intentions behind it. Not if the goal is the elevation of the race. And that’s the crux of it – status quo versus ad astra per aspera.

By: joe

joe — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 23:27:46 +0000

“Maybe in blue states kids just abandon their parents to the wolves when they retire, but not where I’m from.” Gloss for those outside the U.S.: “Blue states” went to Mr. Gore in the last presidential election and are dominated by godless urbanites; “Red states” are those whose electoral votes went to Mr. Bush because the people there know all about responsibility. Strangely, “Blue states” all (or almost all) pay more taxes to the federal budget than they receive in benefits/entitlements; “Red states” conversely all (or almost all) receive more benefits/entitlements than their citizens are paying for.

By: joe

joe — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 23:25:59 +0000

“Furthermore, parents get something that non-parents don’t get – a loving intimate relationship of a certain kind which makes a distinctive contribution to their flourishing for which nothing else could substitute.” Good parents get this. Bad parents don’t. Moral elements of the arguments that have been floated depend upon the assumption that good parents are normative. This cannot be assumed. One of the presuppositions of the original discussion is that there is a difference between “productive” and “non-productive” members of society, and then the classification of parents, who do not directly make money, is problematic, and indeed forms the basis of the argument. But this takes for granted that participation in the money economy is the definition of contributory citizenship. Such a definition is useless. Good parents make a much greater contribution than, say, highly successful real-estate agents. Bad parents on the other hand are the most destructive element in society. Not only do they produce petty criminals, but they also produce highly successful real-estate agents.

By: rvman

rvman — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 19:04:19 +0000

If “parents also have no-one to look after them” those parents are doing a lousy job of raising their kids. Maybe in blue states kids just abandon their parents to the wolves when they retire, but not where I’m from. Where I’m from, the care of children and elders is the responsibility of the parents and and the individual and the family, not of society, and not of the state. An elder’s responsibility was to either raise kids with the moral responsibility to take care of their parents, or accumulate assets such that he can take care of himself by purchasing from other’s kids in his old age. I’m choosing the latter route. I submit that those parents who’s kids do fail to care for them, made their bed, or rather raised their kids. If the kids are irresponsible, they are what their parents created. Parents sometimes don’t get the kids they “deserve”. That is rare, though. Just because you see a parent you think doesn’t “deserve” their kid doesn’t mean you have full knowledge of that kid’s situation growing up, what he was taught, either explicitly or by example, by those parents. Children impose costs on parents, yes. These costs are internalized to the family unit. They also impose costs on society. Education costs – education benefits internalize as higher pay for the child when he is an adult, but the costs are imposed on the society through government. Medical costs – parents who need this subsidy also disproportionately need medicaid, free clinics, free emergency rooms, etc. Leave for new parents costs them income, it also costs the coworkers they left behind in increased workloads, employers in search costs for new employees, esp. with FMLA where the parent has to get a substantively equal job on return. Social costs, environmental costs (larger populations impose larger agricultural and urban footprints and pollute more), personal costs(the screeching tike at the next table, the brat down the street who tosses his coke can in the yeard, the teen with his talentless garage band next door). These balance the externalized benefits those kids will provide society as they grow up. Frankly, I see no efficiency argument for these subsidies. Is the idea that larger populations have greater social welfare per capita? I see no obvious evidence that, ceteris paribus, a US population of 300 million would be any happier, or unhappier, or more or less productive, than one of 200 million with the same per capita GDP. The argument “what if no one had kids” is fallacious. There is no shortage of people having kids in the US. If there are, people are clamoring to join us from other nations, on the current taxation terms. Let them in. I see no rights argument either – having kids is a free choice of the parents, not something that is imposed on them. The right to state finance of children does not number among the moral, enumerated, or unenumerated rights. Neither is the right to be free of responsibility for one’s family in their dotage. Selfish and uncaring is the best description of thinking of future generations as tax-generation units for one’s own cohort’s retirement.

By: Not Me

Not Me — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 17:26:24 +0000

I have to say first that I’ve enjoyed conversation immensely. :-) Thanks everyone. Next, I want to clarify that I’m not tax averse, but I am a person who has lived a good part of her adult life as a single, childless, and quite poor woman. Doing much better these days, and I whole-heartedly believe in taxes and social welfare (can’t tell you the disgust I feel when I hear wingnuts like Grover Norquist speak on the evils of taxation). I just still can’t wrap my head around the idea that having children being an unqualified benefit to society, though. It’s just a personal choice to do or not do, no more than that. Yes, women do bear a disproportionate amount of the cost of child rearing in our society. There are better ways to address this than yearly cash payments direct to primary care givers, in my unqualified opinion. As mentioned above, in the US, step one would be nationalized health care. And before we even got to considering these hypothetical $5K payments, we’d need to address wage equality in the work place for women and living wages for everyone. Having worked in a clinic in Appalachia I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen that are at the clinics because, even though they work full time, they have no health care and still live below the poverty level. They were so poor that having kids actually bettered their situation because at least then the government would supply milk, bread, and cheese through healthy-start programs. (Working full time for around $12K a year is no fun. And if you have no kids, you’re even more screwed because no one cares.) So, basically—yeah, I have a gut reaction to this proposal in that it just doesn’t smell right. There are much bigger fish to fry in North America (though I can’t speak for other nations).

By: harry

harry — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 14:12:51 +0000

Sorry to be late with promised defence of anti-means testing. Here it is, some of it Alstott’s, some of it just standard fare. First note that we are really talking about income-testing, since most of the intended recipients will not have much wealth to speak of. 1) Means-testing is expensive, because the monitoring and implementation infrastructure is complex. A Universal benefit is cheap. 2) Means-testing introduces very high effective marginal tax rates for low income workers (frequently 100% or more), yielding a strong disincentive to work more. This is bad both because, especially at the low end of the income spectrum, future prospects are significantly enhanced by some degree of participation in the labour market, as well as because it is inefficient. A similar problem arises for means-testing state retirement benefits (as the UK effectively started to do in the early 00’s): it creates a big disincentive for low earners to save. 3) Alstott says, rightly, that the poit of money available for such programs is not fixefd. It varies politically, depending on the level of support for the program. Universal benefits enjoy higher levels of political support, even when they are effectviely more redistributive, than means-tested benefits. They are less vulnerable to the creation of hostile political coalitions, and levels of funding are less likely to erode suddenly. 4. Because of 3) they can be, effectively, more progressive, contrary to what ucblockhead conjectured at the beginning of all this. (I went to your site, ucblockhead and am eternally grateful for the Epson printer tips. Thanks!) Basically, in a system that is designed around universal benefits it is easier to maintain high marginal tax rates on high earners (and low marginal tax rates on low earners). SO, my conjecture is that in an overall system of universal-style benefits, we’d get more net redistribution from ucblockhead to poor parents, even though ucblockhead is gettign the universal benefit. Read Esping-Anderson on this, who is excellent and persuasive. This last point, I acknowledge, applies when we are thinking about owhole systems, not individual benefits. Note also that my point 2 can be eviscerated somewhat by having very opaque rules. For example, in the US financial aid decisions are means tested, but when you have a kid (18 years before it goes to college) you have very little information about what the aid rules will be when they go to college. Me, I’m saving. But I know families who earn more than we do who are spending and not saving, on the bet that this behaviour will be rewarded by generous financial aid packages—they won’t have much money, so their kids will get aid. There’s a good chance they are right, but I’m not betting on it. If we KNEW FOR SURE what the rules were/would be then we’d know for sure how to act strategically. Convinced? q says bq. Childless couples have no-one to look after them when they get old. :) Yes, but parents also have no-one to look after them. Esp, apparently, if they are cursed with boy-children (girls, I believe, in Western cultures, do more for their parents, and deploy the resources of the males they marry to that end. But males are pathetic). But, of course, the rich truth in your comment is the point that, despite being a net economic drain on parents, children are an all-things-considered benefit to parents (because they’re fun, its rewarding raising them, etc, except for those devil-children you sometimes meet, yuck). I just don’t think any of these analyses, socilogical, political, or philosophical, knows how to deal with that fact, as I said. I hope, in my philosophical work with Adam Swift, to get a much better handle on it. But I’ve learned in this discussion from you, q, Ophelia, mc, etc how difficult a fact it is to handle in the policy-guidance context. Thanks. mc, I think my case against means-testing handles your last para. Your first para seems to me to press the ‘how interesting is this outside the US point’ and, again, I’m puzzling about that too. But on public schooling. Yes, it saves parents a bit of money on daycare/foregone earnings. But only for a coule of years—most kids could be safely left in very inexpesnive supervision after they reach 8 or so. Parents have no financial incentive to invest in their children’s human capital, though a lot would do so anyway out of love, affection. But lots wouldn’t. I think there’s a strong public goods case for some sort of state funded public school system—and it’s just true that other people than parents yeild the economic benefit of an individual child’s education. So, even if there weren’t issues of justice to children supporting state-funded education (and there are, as I insist in my book on this—not that I’m plugging it or anything) there are powerful public goods justifications. So in a proper accounting you shouldn’t think of publci education, or for that matter, public health, etc, as benefits to parents (thought they do, also, benefit parents) but as benefits to children and others. Sorry, I have to stop or I’ll go on forever…

By: mc

mc — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 07:50:26 +0000

I shared some of Ophelia’s reaction too, I don’t see where people with no children contribute less. If you live in a country which has a strong welfare system, and hence higher taxes than the US, you’re contributing to it no matter if you got kids or not. Also, I don’t see why the emphasis on public schools and other services instead of allowances is not beneficial to parents as well as children. Not just for the way schools act as daycare, as if kids were burders to unload somewhere, but for the whole purpose of education. Reasonable allowance schemes can be useful but only as temporary limited extras, and only for people under a certain income – but you can’t do without a good welfare system and good state services, from health to schooling to anything else that benefits an entire society. It’s the fairest to everyone. Just because there’s a stubborn, obtuse hostility to the concept from people who are allergic to the mere mention of taxes, doesn’t mean it should be devalued in favour of something less sensible.

By: q

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 05:53:26 +0000

laura- thanks for the “Chez Miscarriage” tip – it is very good and quite topical for some members in my family. JellyBelly and PermanentlyPregnant are good as well. I am so pleased some people had the good idea to blog about this. BTW: Three cheers for the friendly progressives ;)

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 02:32:07 +0000

Nope, not so far off. “Don’t call me on my sloppy definition of socially progressive. You know I just threw that term out to mean any one who I basically agree with.” Chuckling away. (Just to quibble a little more though – I’m not so sure that poor people are overwhelmingly single mothers. I think it’s pretty easy to be poor even without children. Just the discrepancy between housing costs and the minimum wage would tell us that before we stirred from our armchairs. And Nickle and Dimed would confirm it.) (Which is not to say that it’s not worse for single mothers, because of course it is.)

By: Laura

Laura — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 02:06:57 +0000

Ack, q. Don’t call me on my sloppy definition of socially progressive. You know I just threw that term out to mean any one who I basically agree with. re: the infertile payment plan. Just a side note, there’s a whole blog sub-community, like the ones that Holbo recently described, just devoted to those trying to get pregnant. I’ve heard that Chez Miscarriage is very good.

By: q

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 01:38:24 +0000

Laura, Childless couples have no-one to look after them when they get old. :) What is socially progressive? – fight hunger, – fight cold damp living conditions, – fight crime and fear, – fight depression and loneliness, – fight women’s dependence on men, – fight children’s dependence on adults? How about a one-off 100,000 dollar payment for anyone (man or woman) who can’t have a child in recognition of the emotional dislocation they feel in comparison to people who can: I wonder how long it will be before we see this argument presented seriously!

By: Laura

Laura — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 01:33:58 +0000

okay, so we’re not so far off. The problem is that economic and social inequality is tied very closely to having children. The poor are overwhelmingly single mothers. And even middle class mothers face enormous discrimination and obstacles in the workplace. yes, Alstott does think that these benefits should be across the board. But I don’t. Harry was going to defend her on this part. Harry? The kids in bed yet?