I’m willing to worry earnestly about the failures of the federalized system to solve the same problem, but not with someone who doesn’t remember how well local control feeds the problem.

Jeez, Chrlie, that describeds the American system. In a lot of places, anyway. Hardly a panacea.

The idea that we all benefit (in the future), for example, from educating children at public cost, has been around a very long time. If we contest the idea we get a lot of economic hypotheses and claims one way and the other about the net contributions.

But let’s assume it’s true. Then government should implement the wishes of the public as a whole in its education policy. Not the just the wishes of parents, and certainly not just of employees (teachers).

The political control of schools is especially appropriate for decentralisation, because such a high proportion of costs are raised through local taxes (Council Tax). We should have elected school boards, to set a local school tax and decide local school policy, in selection of which the votes of the childless would be taken into account – and the views of whom could be expressed regularly to the board.

The losers would be educationalist-bureaucrats and trade unions. They are the ones who currently feed off the semi-public nature of children’s economic needs.

To an economist this is just a consumption tradeoff by people who prefer children to some other consumption item, but they don’t think that way and I don’t think that that analysis is a very powerful one.

They are politically very conservative, as far as I know, and tend to view the cultural things that threaten tham as satanic forces rather than as capitalist consumerism, but they really are not economic animals the way most Americans are.

Bringing in a bunch of immigrants in their 20s would fill in the little dip in the age distribution graph here and certainly help funding retirement plans. It’d help more to be able to kick them out when they retired, but “wouldn’t help as much” is not the same thing as “wouldn’t help at all.”

Japan is trying to do this with robots. The US could probably hedge with a combination of child-care assistance, immigrants, and engineering research.

The joy is, we could get a threefer, as with the undocumented high-school students who not only built a remote underwater robot but built it for a fraction the cost of its swank competitors.

The big advantage that outsourcing/immigration has, it seems to me, is that it doesn’t require an increase in the average tax rate of 10%.

I’d also be overjoyed to live in a world where people didn’t immigrate to the US for economic opportunity because they had just as much opportunity in their home countries. Which is pretty much what it would take, I think.

What you say about the South may be true, but the South has always been resistant to pure market forms (into the Fifties and Sixties, anyway). In any case, the results in the South are mixed. There seems to be a lot of meanness mixed into the community there.

What you say about churches is pretty much true.

I think that you have idealized the past. The reason we had the New Deal is because the old local communitarian forms were failing badly, not necessarily through any fault of their own, but because of the economics of the time.

None the activities you named were market activities. They represent non-market alternative forms of organization.

Well, if economics simply assumes the rationality of economic actors, then the judgment that raising children is irrational must not be an economic judgment. What kind of judgment is it?

Methodologically, if one assumes rationality, then when confronted with a case of someone laying out some expenditure, one will simply assume that the expected value for that person of the consequences of the expenditure is at least as great as the value for that person of what is spent. Irrationality is ruled out a priori.

But, in fact, you are right that sometimes we do judge a person’s actions as irrational – and I think economists do too. That means they cannot simply be assuming the person is rational. They must measure the value for that agent of the goods received in return for the expenditure in some other way than in terms of the amount the person is willing to spend for them.

With the gambler you mention there are a couple of possibilities: (i) The experience the gambler derived from the gambling was no ordinary manic buzz, but an earth-shatteringly valuable experience – the gambler had some life-altering mystical encounter with God that may have been worth the $500,000. In this case, the value the gambler derived from the gambling was much greater than the value that almost anyone else would derive from it, and the behavior might have been rational. Yet this seems a most unlikely hypothesis. (ii) The value the gambler derived from the gambling is pretty similar to the sort of buzz must of us imagine experiencing in that situation, a buzz which eve the gambler himself would reflectively judge not to be worth $500,000. Thus, even by the light of the gambler’s own values, his behavior was grossly irrational. This seems more likely.

That’s fine for one wacky gambler. Yet when we move from one person to billions of people, each engaging in a consistent patterns of behavior like child-raising over many years, it becomes less and less plausible to assume that they are all making mistaken esitmates of the value they receive for their investments of time and money, the same mistakes over and over and over, and more likely that they derive something of great value from these layouts.

Economics has had much of the power it has had because of its insistence on ruling out intangible values of the symbolic, religious, sentimental, traditional type. Family and children are just the last ditch. The childfree ideologues are just mopping up the last resistance to economic thinking.

It was always my understanding that economics is a behavioral science. It’s power comes from its ability to predict human behavior. It can only succeed in predicting human behavior to the extent that the comparative values it places on things roughly corresponds to human dispositions to value them, as revealed in their behavior.

If it rules out “intangible values of the symbolic, religious, sentimental, traditional type” then it will be impotent to explain why people behave the way they do in their relationships to symbols, religious practices, sentimental attachments and traditions. As a matter of empirical fact, people do assign value to these things. To rule such values out is not, it seems to me, to think economically but to think dogmatically.

inheritance
giving of Christmas gifts
giving to private charity or tithe
Kids’ allowance
churchgoing

All show up in “economic” statistics and in “economic” research.

If you get out of upper middle class urban life, you will find “the various customary, religious, traditional, communitarian, and family forms of organization” are still thriving, even when some of them have absorbed the market rather than being destroyed by it. Churches still take care of their congregants, sometimes through traditional means, sometimes through “market” means like St. ‘X’ Hospital, Salvation Army, even Blue Cross & Blue Shield.

Communitarian? I can show you farmers’ coops and markets, electric, water, and gas cooperatives, credit unions, craigslist on the ‘market’ side, and last time I checked, if someone finds a stray dog, and see a sign begging for its return, they generally take the dog back.

Family? Isn’t it the joke that in the South, EVERYONE is cousin john, or joe, or jimmy? It goes the other way, too – there are people who can get chilly toward me when they find out I have (maternal) links to Campbell of Argyle.

It isn’t the market that is killing these institutions. The family was still strong, if hungry, in 1930. People still took care of their parents (until Social Security and Medicare took that problem away), their poor relations (until welfare, public housing, and Medicaid took that responsibility away), their community (until church efforts were partly supplanted by city-run hospitals and food kitchens, public housing and welfare).

I’d say it wasn’t the market which did in the community, it appears it was the government. Is there an institution which is separated by a wall from our government, but is financed and even established by European governments, yet is relatively strong here and dying there? The Church?

Why does America have the highest rate of charitable contributions, and yet among the lowest levels of foreign aid? Maybe because charity is still privately done (by the ‘market’), but government handles foreign aid. I wonder how much private ‘traditional’ help goes overseas? Well, there’s Red Cross and ilk, there’s church missions (which feed along with the evangelizing in many cases – think Salvation Army), there’s private remittance by immigrants back to their families at home.

The market doesn’t curdle the milk of human kindness, it just provides new and more efficient ways of delivering it. (Maybe it was churned into cheese and is sitting in a government warehouse somewhere.)

Economics doesn’t deny it, it just points out that, if you like someone, you might gain through feeling pleasure by giving them stuff, and if you let someone starve, you might feel pain through guilt, so ‘altruism’ is, after all, ordinary (rather than ‘enlightened’) self interest.

And yet the couple that choose to have children are assumed to have carefully costed out the consequences, examined all the research on how many kids turn out what ways, and are performing a rational act? No way do they (cf the gambler above) have a completely inaccurate sense of pretty much everything related to the exercise? The fact that most people control their gambling behavior does not change this; that tells us something about the interaction of most people with leisure gambling, and nothing about the interaction of most people with decision making under uncertainly, specifically when the decision involves children.

Face it, John is right with respect to this particular point.

The dual economies I’ve seen analyzed were all colonial third-world countries, and the non-market part ended up being subjugated, or even subsidizing the market part.

If children are emancipated at 18 or 16, raising kids would be irrational with or without the welfare state. But if emancipation is a good thing, then the welfare state helps make it possible.

Outsourcing childraising is a possible solution, and I’ve suggested it in a different context (albeit rather jokingly). I don’t see why it should be the preferred ideal, especially because eventually highly-talented immigrants might stop coming.

Nicholas Weininger, the libertarians I know mostly seem to be market-worshippers. That party is a motley lot, no? The ones I know seem acutely aware of the negative effects of statism, but oblivious to the negative effects of the market, visavis the intermediate institutions.

All of those things make raising chilrden much more expensive – after all it’s pretty damn clear that Sub-Saharan Africans aren’t paying the $100K to raise their kids that it costs in a Western society, and they’ve got plenty of them. But doesn’t the creation of the welfare state intentionally and inevitably create a tragedy of the commons?

And given the huge number of people who want to immigrate into said wealthy countries, why not let that fix the problem? Sure, it’s “outsourcing childrearing”, but what’s wrong with it?

I’d also question your claim that “the modern age has strengthened the market against all other forms of organization”. At the very least, if you take a view much longer than the last 20 years, modernity has not strengthened the market against the state; just the reverse.

One thing that certainly has happened in the modern age is that the state has been strengthened at the expense of non-market AND non-state forms of organization: mutual aid, social norms, the so-called “intermediate institutions”. This is, indeed, a major element of the libertarian critique of the state, so it really is a gross oversimplification to characterize libertarians as “market-worshippers”.