Every child should be wanted

“The extra earnings of more educated workers are shared with society as a whole through the tax system and are sufficient to cover the costs of schooling with a surplus left over.”

It might be better to talk about extra productivity of more educated workers rather than their earnings. Harder to measure perhaps, since productivity is more difficult to measure. However, our billionaire class gets much of the value of the extra productivity, which may be why they tolerate public education. The extra productivity has to be greater than the extra earnings.

To me it seems likely that the monetary costs of providing supplementary child care, education and even health care would fall over time as the investment in physical infrastructure is amortized (if you can speak of amortization of a non-profit system, maybe there’s a better term?) Increasing productivity of services is more difficult but it is also a possibility, in the long run. In any event, the cost of individual wages should decrease as much of what counts now as necessary parental wages to pay for children is covered by the social wage (again, there may be a better term?)

The small surplus of the tax earnings of an educated population over the costs of public education hints of a perspective in which government services should be limited to those which are profitable. I confess mine is not so much the population must reproduce for the economy, but the economy should be arranged for the population.

As to the footnote, every failed conception or miscarriage is also a loss of a potential child. It does seem imossible to put potential children in a untilitarian calculus.

OP: “Many of these, such as a reduction in the time demands of paid work, would not be welcome to some of the advocates of higher birth rates.”

OTOH, maybe we could start campaigning on the 25h workweek for everyone on the basis of the idea that without that people are excessively disincentivized from having kids (which is true) and maybe we gain a few conservatives for the cause.

steven t johnson @3 notes that it’s very difficult to put “potential children” in a utilitarian calculus. true, and so much the worse for utilitarian calculus in my view. i think it is critical to observe that, empirically, there certainly are people who aren’t having children who would, if they were more financially secure, and people who are having children who would have a larger family, if they were more financially secure. we can dramatically reduce failed conceptions and miscarriages through the provision of completely free health care to all, to reduce the risks of such outcomes, both to the benefit of “the economy” (ugh! may god keep the economy…far away from us!) and to the benefit of parents and children. after all, it is the mother who rolls the dice with her health in a pregnancy, and there’s plenty who can’t afford the necessary buy-in to even sit down at the table.

It was Plato’s fantasy in the Republic.

“Those obstacles include infertility, the lack of a suitable partner and economic insecurity”…

On the latter point, people throughout time have had children in situations of economic insecurity – most people I would suggest. The time on ones youth tends to be a time of economic insecurity simply because you haven’t had time to build up reserves yet, but that’s when most people are in their child-having window, physically speaking.

One big issue not mentioned is that we (as in society, or at least certain parts of it) have spent a huge amount of time and ink railing against people having children when they can’t afford it (or can’t afford it yet). The message has sunk in.

Chetan Murthy@6, John Q@8 There was a one season AMC scifi series called Moonhaven which had that as one of its premises.

The main point here is the role of women.

Up to some decades ago, dad want to job while mommy did housework and cared for the kids. Later, women entered in the workforce too[fn1], which is a necessity unless we want to have women totally dependent economically on their spouse and limited in their role to that of wife/mother.
This however means that the number of hours worked by adults outside the house more or less doubled (I think the amount of hours worked by dad increased too).

Ideally the fact that more women work should lead to a decrease in the hours worked by males, but this didn’t happen, enven in terms of competition mostly we are speaking of added jobs, not of women taking away males’ jobs.

This increase in total hour worked, though, did it really increase total production, or is this really a cause of bullshit jobs? Mostly I think is zero-sum jobs, like jobs in marketing or sales, where each company has to hire people for marketing or for selling stuff instead of others, but not a really increase in production.
Also there is a matter of “keeping up with the jones” that largely pushes people into “needing” more fluff stuff, but also in perceiving a “career” where one perceives his/her self-value in the career level one reaches, that pushes people into doing overtime and sacrificing non-job life to the job.

This is a real problem, and it is due to a form of iper-competitivity that IMHO should be considered a problem by “the left”.
However because this looks like it could justify a traditionalist view of the role of women, the left takes a reflexive antinatalist stance, and leaves open the field to the right.
Even if natalists are exaggerating the dangers of denatality, it still should be considered a bad symptom.

PS @TM and Katherine: cultural factors are economic factors: they are the cultural effect of increased economic competiton.
People had kids in situation that for us would be extreme economic insecurity, but for them were the normal expected situation, what we would now call “lower middle class”. For example in a family maybe only the firstborn male married and had kids (because he inherited the fields), and the second had to suck it up; or in some situations males married very late because they had to wait for economi security; but what they considered “economic security” would be extremely poor for our current standards, mostly in real terms due to technology but also in a “keeping up with the Jones” sense of perceived position in the social pyramid.

I find it weird that lefties cannot conceive that people in a capitalist country after 40+ years of dismantling the welfare state might find themselves in economic distress so that they feel that they can afford kids.

[fn1] of course a lot of women did paid work before too, but it wasn’t considered the norm and it was common to stop working after marriage if possible.

Oops I think I missed the point that you’re only redistributing babies among parents. Even so I think on mainstream economic assumptions about human motivations the outcome is less than charming.

If children are outlawed, only outlaws will be children.
And every child will be “Wanted”.

Btw on the status competition aspect MrMr discussed, part of the problems in many PMC careers is a winners-take-all reward system which pretends to be based on merit/dustinction but is really mostly about loyalty and time served: he or she who hesitates—or procreates—has lost.

Suzanne’s objection is rather more important than mine (some of you guys need to rewatch Cathy Come Home, to pick a text almost at random).

To add to the above: it used to be that declining fertility was seen (justifiably) as a sign of economic prosperity and social progress. If you want to now turn that narrative on its head, I think you need to invest a little more explanatory effort than what you are offering.

Btw a more achievable (some might say more fun) version of the progressive sprog veil of ignorance is for people to have more extramarital sex.

Does anybody still remember wht happend 32 years ago? The International Conference on Population and Development, the last UN conference of the sort, was held in Cairo. At that time, the consensus was still that population growth needed to be held in check, and the dominant narrative of the conference was “we need to empower women so they can make their own reproductive choices”, with the understanding that the right choice is to have fewer children. Opposition came mainly from the Pope and Muslim conservatives.

Part of the Left criticized the conference for racist undertones and for the paternalism of generously empowering women to make the “right” choice, both of which are valid criticisms. But it’s also true that many women didn’t have the chance to make their own reproductive decisions – and many still don’t, and making empowerment a goal of official politics to me looks preferable to the current climate of demonizing “childless cat ladies” and blaming single women for the decline of Western civilization.

Let’s pause a moment to check the numbers: in 1994, it’s estimated there were about 5.7 humans and 134 million births per year, now we are 8.3 billion and the number of births has slightly declined from its peak of 143 million (2012). Given these numbers, it’s amazing how the demographic narrative has turned 180 degrees, dominated now by bogus predictions of “depopulation” if not demographic collapse. The benevolent paternalism has given way to a more sinister version, governments are berating women to pop out more babies or else. “Women’s rights are regressing worldwide” (https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/03/1167081). The doom narrative has taken hold even in parts of the Left. The increased reproductive autonomy in much of the world, which a few decades ago was seen as the surest indication of social progress, is now depicted as decline and deficiency.

There are of course and have always been people who would like to have more children but can’t for medical or socioeconomic reasons. But there is no evidence that this group has significantly increased and is driving the fertility decline in (not only) rich countries. Most childless people, far from suffering from a deficiency, have made that choice consciously and are quite happy with it.

Then there are those who justifiably feel that putting children into a world of fascism and environmental collapse is doing them a grave disservice. And many young women realize they live in a society saturated in toxic masculinity and they want no part in its reproduction. Such motivations have little to do with economic calculations, and to subsume these issues under “economic insecurity” is perhaps not entirely wrong – everything is always in some way related to “the economy stupid” – but utterly vacuous. Imputing economic motivations to every complex life choice is one-dimensional and unenlightening, and belittling of the autonomous decisions people make.

Declining fertility rates follow a 60 year trend (see above) but the decline has measurably accelerated in recent years. Maybe we are witnessing what could to some extent be described as a birth strike, a form of resistance against a destructive, patriarchal, increasingly fascist system. This is indeed a “bad symptom” but not because “denatality” is bad – rather because fascism is bad.

[Sorry for posting bad format]

” lefties cannot conceive that people in a capitalist country after 40+ years of dismantling the welfare state might find themselves in economic distress so that they feel that they can afford kids.”

— this is a very weak argument. Birth rates have crashed in all sorts of societies, including a bunch that had / have strong welfare states. High-welfare Finland, Germany and Sweden have higher TFRs than the low-welfare USA. For that matter, within the USA low-welfare states like the Dakotas, Iowa and Texas have much higher TFRs than high-welfare states like Massachusetts, New York or Vermont.

Note that some of the very first states to undergo the demographic transition were the late Communist states of Eastern Europe. Russia under the USSR had a full welfare system. That didn’t stop them from dropping below replacement, long before the USSR fell.

You can certainly make an argument that in some cases TFRs have crashed particularly hard because of hypercompetitive capitalism. That’s a plausible theory for a lot of places in East Asia. But as a general theory, no.

“Maybe we are witnessing what could to some extent be described as a birth strike, a form of resistance against a destructive, patriarchal, increasingly fascist system.”

— this is a stronger argument, but it falls into the same trap of overgeneralizing from one country’s experience. Lots of countries with nasty patriarchal and authoritarian governments have high TFRs; lots of countries with liberal, progressive governments have low TFRs. Unless you can argue that Denmark and Ireland are more patriarchal than Saudi Arabia, or that Canada and Norway are more fascistic than Nicaragua or Kazakhstan, you don’t have a very strong case.

(That said, I do think there’s a loose correlation between “generally crap government” and low birthrate — though it’s a secondary effect, behind things like pcGDP and girls’ education.)

Doug M.

Dough 31: “High-welfare Finland, Germany and Sweden have higher TFRs than the low-welfare USA.” You mean lower.

“Lots of countries with nasty patriarchal and authoritarian governments have high TFRs; lots of countries with liberal, progressive governments have low TFRs. Unless you can argue that Denmark and Ireland are more patriarchal than Saudi Arabia, … you don’t have a very strong case.”

My thesis is obviously tentative. I don’t know whether it can be statistically supported, but I think there is evidence that some women in some countries are deterred from having children by what they perceive as an increasingly misogynistic political climate.

A few caveats: perception is key. Of course misogyny and sexual violence have been around. What I think has gotten worse is that misogyny is now publicly celebrated by political leaders and social media influencers, that political movements are explicitly based on hating women, that a piece of shit gets elected US president not despite but because he’s known to be a rapist. The situation of women is measurably getting worse in parts of the world, at the same time women today have higher expectations than say in the 1950s.

Another obivous caveat is that women can only choose fewer or no children if they have the choice. In the most patriarchal societies – say Afghanistan – that is not the case. The highest fertility societies still tend to be those that value women least, and they also still tend to be the poorest.

A separate point about the “birth strike” idea: you can’t have it both ways that women don’t have more kids because they have been freed by patriarchal power AND that they are going on a bireth strike because of increased patriarchal power.

I understand that Trump is an ass but he doesn’t really represent a loss of power for women, the changes in society are already too big to revert to the “tradwife” thingie, it is as if people pretended they could go back to traditional farming done by hand with saps.
I’m somehow always surprised by the fact that feminist don’t accept the fact that they are winning ahd they’ve been winning for the past 60 years.

Another factor might be the “middle-aged marital argument” version of politics the USA perfected and exported to much of the English-speaking world and beyond via social media, Hollywood and what’s left of the humanities.

Doug Muir@31 “Birth rates have crashed in all sorts of societies, including a bunch that had / have strong welfare states. High-welfare Finland, Germany and Sweden have higher TFRs than the low-welfare USA. For that matter, within the USA low-welfare states like the Dakotas, Iowa and Texas have much higher TFRs than high-welfare states like Massachusetts, New York or Vermont.”

This does correct any oversimplified explanations that look only at current nominal total income.

But perhaps it still needs amplification? Current income even including the various forms of welfare (which by the way includes the option of public education) must still be weighed against the projected costs of raising children. In the lower wage/employment states like the Dakotas, Iowa and Texas it appears that the projected costs of children are lower than in higher cost of living (showed by the tendency to higher wages compared to local cost of living) in Massachusetts, Vermont and New York.

That leads to asking, how effective is the welfare state in meeting needs? Further, how is are such benefits distributed geographically? Education is only partly subsidized nationally, resulting in dramatic disparities in different places. Social Security and Medicare cover more of the costs of elder care. Health care is also varied according to location. In the United States, so far as I can see, it is, despite Medicare, the extensive role of private enterprises and the wide variation in local cost of living, things like the wages/profits for physicians make the provision of health care a chancy thing. To make it harder to quantify, the money costs that can be more easily counted are not really adequate to account for issues of quality and accessibility.

And standing back, the issue of children as investments by the family arises. The proposition that the decline in childhood mortality reduces the need for more children to ensure survivors is an old one, but still seems relevant. Increased urbanization so that children are not bred to be farm workers is plausible as an cause of demographic transition. (By the way, in some classes having fewer children or sending them to non-breeding institutions like monasteries and nunneries led to smaller numbers in the end?) One can wonder if families in the USSR were less likely to think children might advance in society to become family sources of power and wealth? That it would be the opposite of a pre-revolutionary Chinese family thinking to promote a gifted child for the examinations? More children in some cases would be like buying more lottery tickets…perhaps.

As to temporal changes, other than the nigh universal trend to urbanization, the relative recency of much more effective birth control suggests to me that it is somewhat premature to draw final conclusions?

It seems advisable not to dismiss economic explanations. The best procedure would seem to be to go further into the weeds in search of the ball.

As to cultural factors, the widespread drops in total fertility rate suggest that cultural facts are not promising candidates in the search for causes. Unless you argue there isn’t that much diversity in culture? In any event, if you think of “culture” as the way of life it is natural to think that as life changes—due to such mundane factors as urbanization, effective birth control and economic trends—the way of life must change. The discourse appropriate to the newer conditions will emerge, seemingly spontaneously. The old words in the dictionary remain, but the most common definitions change. People convinced that ideas are independent and causal will disagree naturally.

Another angle (h/t to the ever serious, sharp and vigilant Kath Viner Guardian):
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/mar/20/dinkwads-how-dogs-became-the-new-babies

When he turned two we had party hats and cake’: how dogs became the new babies
One in three UK postcodes now has more dogs than children. Meet the Dinkwads (dual income, no kids, with a dog)… Dogs offer a more affordable way to channel a deeply human instinct towards nurture.