"High rise apartment towers (as they are usually built these days) are catastrophic for birth rates, and the causes are clear: there is no yard for kids to play in; kids bother the neighbours; and most apartments are too small for families.
I keep making the case for cul de sacs."
Two points:
Tenement housing was pretty dense. Didn't seem to stop the immigrants. Same goes for people in public housing high-rises. Also, I don't think we're all that far from all-time high home ownership, though I suppose the share of homes that are condos has increased. Still, I'd bet the share of child-bearing age adults in high-rises is way down from its peak however many decades ago that was.
Actually there is an option that is probably better than cul de sacs. In a grid of residential streets, block off each street at one or more points to make impossible to drive straight through the neighborhood. Besides being something easily done to old neighborhoods, it has the advantage of allowing pedestrians and bicycles to pass through the closures.
The commies in Slovakia made large squares with limited pass thru possibilities next to larger connecting roads that often included tram lines. With dense apartment/now condos that protected common courtyards where kids could play safely. Often only a few minutes walk from undeveloped hilly forest.
Walking to school, & shops.
Pretty child friendly, except only one bathroom and a tiny kitchen in the 500-900 sf 2-4 room places.
I agree. 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn', aside from a wonderful novel in itself about a young woman growing up in a pre-WWI Brooklyn tenement, helps to understand how tenement housing produces greater than replacement rate levels of children. The urban community around the tenement is complex, interesting and safe for kids who are almost feral for hours a day. The numerous adults at street level working in the shops, small businesses, deliveries etc keep watch over the kids in a Jane Jacobs style urban ballet.
Not picking on David Friedman here but I found "There is one more explanation that someone offered in an online discussion, one that had not occurred to me but probably has to many others." amusing and appreciate he was honest about the bubble.
On the flip side, I've never NOT heard that as the primary reason to have kids until I left the Midwest. Hell I've told my kids the same and my childless siblings are in panic mode over it now as they enter middle age. It's not just about whether SS, MC, and long term care insurance will cover your bills, it's also just about having someone care. No one wants to end their days in a state nursing home surrounded by apathetic former addicts who wish you'd die already while doped up in a soiled diaper. I've seen that way too often and it's sad.
Why should we care about the total population? Only the ruling elites want more followers and people to order around or die invading other territories. As an individual human on a finite planet that has 3 billion more people on the way and not nearly enough energy to even think about leaving the planet, I don't see any relevant people "shortage". I see the expanding human population as a potential problem on this finite planet, where our survival is totally dependent upon energy and our technological creativity providing the required food and supplies.
Likewise, not an Alice Evans subscriber so don’t know what all is in the article, but it does seem noteworthy that Egypt’s fertility rate is still over 3. I am also curious why Egypt apparently had a baby boom from 2009 through 2013. Algeria also had an fertility increase in roughly the same period (https://database.earth/population/algeria/fertility-rate ) as did Tunisia (https://database.earth/population/tunisia/fertility-rate ) but Turkey did not (https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/tur/turkey/fertility-rate ). Could the Arab Spring while it lasted have had an upward influence on fertility? Doing a google scholar search using “Arab Spring fertility” turns up several articles that appear to document such an influence. Perhaps the convergence in the nature of Arab and EU governance practices explains some of the convergence in their respective fertility trends?
Daniel Hess certainly provides good evidence in support of more cul-de-sacs. I think in the past Dr. Kling has commented on how postponing life for the acquisition of education credentials contributes to lower fertility. Part of this phenomenon might involve people in their 20s and 30s wanting to live in cheap, lousy apartments because their student loan debt precludes purchase of desirable housing
. And Grok3 suggests “Women with significant student loan debt, especially those with advanced degrees, often delay family formation. The financial burden of debt can push back milestones like marriage and childbearing, as women prioritize financial stability or career advancement to manage repayment. Data suggests that households with graduate degrees—where student debt is typically highest—tend to have higher debt loads and lower fertility compared to those with less education. For instance, among U.S. women with bachelor’s degrees or higher, those with substantial debt are less likely to have children in a given year than those without. However, this isn’t universal—some studies find that for women with moderate debt or lower educational levels, the link between debt and fertility is less clear-cut, suggesting other factors like cultural norms or partner income play a role.” Capping graduate student loan borrowing (https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2025/02/20/trumps_opportunity_resolve_the_student_loan_debt_crisis_without_a_bailout_1092853.html ) might be a good move for many reasons.
Friedman’s 5th (artificial wombs) and 6th (evolution) responses to changes in fertility might be enhanced with AI assisted embryo selection and gene splicing so that humans become ever more economically optimized and closer to achieving the evolutionary success of termites. Sterile workers pumped out through increased specialization all producing for the good of the high-rise. What’s not to love for an economist?
Stone’s article is thought-provoking. Still trying to workout how and if it might square with studies finding what to might seem to be contrary results: “The widespread phenomenon of polyandry (mating by females with multiple males) is an evolutionary puzzle, because females can sustain costs from promiscuity, whereas full fertility can be provided by a single male. Using the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, we identify major fitness benefits of polyandry to females under inbreeding, when the risks of fertilization by incompatible male haplotypes are especially high.”
Does this help to explain why the large investments cousin-marriage societies make in repressing female promiscuity seem counterproductive? How close to inbreeding does Western assortative mating get? Does population density increase assortative mating?
Consider the case of the Brazilian state of Roraima ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roraima ), both the least dense state and the state with the highest fertility rate. It is also about 57.3% pardo (a mix of Indigenous, African, and European blood - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardo_Brazilians) and 14% indigenous. Its Northern neighbor states have even higher percentages of both. And these are also the regions most unburdened by education credentials. One wonders how assortative works in these areas. Perhaps, AI-enabled autodidact education will allow these areas to leapfrog over the credentialing toll-gate era of the university as roadblock to employment and enable both higher skill and employment remuneration at an earlier age while still retaining children as a viable life choice?
Some terrible handwaving there. "But let’s look at the evidence! First, I’ll note that <b>if you just google “polygyny-fertility” you’ll find decades of good research which basically argues</b> that polygyny modestly reduces fertility" (etc etc)
As someone who grew up with the overpopulation fears of 1950s and '60s, and who is a sort of environmentalist, I'm tempted to think, "So what if populations go down and skew older? Fewer people doesn't have to mean a worse life for those still around. And humanity will have a smaller ecological footprint. But, alas, the people least able to provide for kids are the ones most likely to have them. Copying from a previous comment, birth rates from the World Bank:
2 cool maps: "Is the majority of your population born in the 20th or the 21st Century?" and "When will the majority [of] your country be born in the 21st Century?"
Of course, no one is supposed to notice that because the poor people having lots of kid are overwhelmingly People of Color and the ones having few are not. To be concerned is to be accused of racism (by others and by your guilty conscience).
On good thing that has come out of "woke": Chinese and Japanese and Koreans are no longer chinks and slant-eyes and so on. For purposes of affirmative action and such, they are honorary whites.
Well, maybe not honorary whites, but OVER-represented minorities, who social justice requires also be discriminated against (this was the background of the Harvard admissions case, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard University, June 29, 2023).
Elon had five kids with his first wife. Three with second. Two with IVF partner. And one with recent IVF partner. Clearly on the downward slope here, the more women the less kids per woman.
All of those women could theoretically have married one man and had kids. The average is only 3.25, and it's brought up by the first wife.
To make this work he needed to be the richest man in the world. All the divorce settlements, IVF, surrogates, houses, nannies, private schools, etc. Considering all that, it's not too impressive. Gheghis Kahn has his direct DNA is 2% of all Asians.
Overall, I think Elon is probably a fertility suppressant. The way he runs his companies and the culture he looks to build in this country lead to very low fertility. He's constantly complaining that all his subordinates have 0-1 kids, but what do you expect working 80 hours a week for a tyrant when you don't have billions of dollars to smooth it over.
Yesterday some kids came over to our house for a playdate. The father of one just went from fully remote to return to office due to Elon. He now has a two hour commute each way to another state every day. Obviously, this is causing strain with having to raise three kids. I don't think they are having another while this is going on. The general pattern in DC is the more kids you have the further away from the office you live to save on the real estate. People built lives around their telecommute status. A lot of people with big families that are more conservative are about to drop out of federal service.
Elon is a narcissistic autist. That's great for having the balls to take on cost plus contracting in rocketry. It's not clear he has the slightest clue how to increase fertility or even really cares outside himself. His relationships with these baby mama's are all scatter brained and they literally fight with him on X.
Good explanation on the social suppression of kids with an alpha-successful semi-polygamous guy going with more women.
While that one male has more kids total, the many women have fewer—and often fail to get married to another man later. Thus more unsexed, unmarried, incel type non-fathers, about one for each of the extra women of the womanizer.
I think he (Lyman Stone) covers "incels" (I despise that word) in his paywall, it's implied but IDK as not going to pay but I think what gets missed, both by him and above, is many of those women would just remain childless instead ala the old saying "better the kings whore than the farmers wife" hence in fact polygyny results in more children.
I.e..the model assumes modern women will settle hence those monogamous gains will be realized but I think reality has shown no, they have wed hypergamy and take that vow until death to they depart seriously.
Many, yes. Most? Probably not. If the king, or Musk (or JFK or…) is hooking up with only top 10 or top 20% women, all are likely to attract attention from other top 30% men. How many settle &have kids, vs unmarried childless (angry cat ladies)?
Reality has shown that human action is not repeatable like physics experiments. Low birth rates before WW II, very high baby boom, now lower, low, very low over most of the world.
Too many men today act like pigs, according to my married daughter who complains about her husband sometimes acting less nicely than she would like. Yet huge numbers of women get more aroused by brutes than by nice guys, who get stuck in the friend zone.
Lots of talking about it should make more men and women both consider their expectations. Both my wife and I have unmarried sisters with too high expectations. Unmentioned is “relative to their own attractiveness”. Which is very highly correlated with age, for most men. Considering 18-48 (or 58? 68?), men’s attractiveness goes down much slower than women’s.
Which is unfair, but real. Women’s empowered feminism doesn’t yet deal well with unfair reality. We should all be talking more about it—it’s as big an issue as climate change, and far more culture influenced.
Indiscriminately firing hundreds of thousand of federal workers won't encourage anyone to have more children. Has anyone considered how the federal government will ever hire any remotely competent individual in the future?
I have no inherent problem with decimating the federal workforce. I don't like these people or their mission for the most part. Many of the FBI and USAID people near me that have been laid off did some really shitty things since 2020 and often before that.
I'm simply remarking that if your goal is to purge the federal workforce of your enemies, you ought to have some kind of reasonable plan of how to do it. It doesn't have to be perfect or look into the soul of every employee, but this WFH method is clearly counter productive in my mind.
A simple fix would be to exempt people with children from the WFH requirement. Say 3 days per week with one kid, 1 day with two kids, 0 days with 3+ kids.
They generally don't hire them now, no loss. 5% the Federal workforce does 90% the work, the problem is they will be the ones chopped because they are productive hence don't have the patronages to remain because they were too busy working rather than acting as courtiers.
Kids are important—they are the future! And everybody who writes cares about the future, so there’s a reason to write about kids. Plus we’ve all been kids, and most of the adult writers have kids.
Why people do what they do are seldom single cause reasons, more multiple feelings & inconsistent desires, often contrary, incompatible desires. So there are plenty of ideas to write about.
Lots of old people, fewer young people, is not yet a problem—but will induce more changes in most OECD countries than most other single tech or legal changes.
Increasing house building should be the single biggest govt/social change.
Govt rewarding marriages would be positive.
More govt jobs being part time jobs would be helpful to parents, especially kid carers, usually mothers—but I’d rather have more eGovt that has no living worker, just form filling out & tax & benefit tracking.
"High rise apartment towers (as they are usually built these days) are catastrophic for birth rates, and the causes are clear: there is no yard for kids to play in; kids bother the neighbours; and most apartments are too small for families.
I keep making the case for cul de sacs."
Two points:
Tenement housing was pretty dense. Didn't seem to stop the immigrants. Same goes for people in public housing high-rises. Also, I don't think we're all that far from all-time high home ownership, though I suppose the share of homes that are condos has increased. Still, I'd bet the share of child-bearing age adults in high-rises is way down from its peak however many decades ago that was.
Actually there is an option that is probably better than cul de sacs. In a grid of residential streets, block off each street at one or more points to make impossible to drive straight through the neighborhood. Besides being something easily done to old neighborhoods, it has the advantage of allowing pedestrians and bicycles to pass through the closures.
The commies in Slovakia made large squares with limited pass thru possibilities next to larger connecting roads that often included tram lines. With dense apartment/now condos that protected common courtyards where kids could play safely. Often only a few minutes walk from undeveloped hilly forest.
Walking to school, & shops.
Pretty child friendly, except only one bathroom and a tiny kitchen in the 500-900 sf 2-4 room places.
I agree. 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn', aside from a wonderful novel in itself about a young woman growing up in a pre-WWI Brooklyn tenement, helps to understand how tenement housing produces greater than replacement rate levels of children. The urban community around the tenement is complex, interesting and safe for kids who are almost feral for hours a day. The numerous adults at street level working in the shops, small businesses, deliveries etc keep watch over the kids in a Jane Jacobs style urban ballet.
Not picking on David Friedman here but I found "There is one more explanation that someone offered in an online discussion, one that had not occurred to me but probably has to many others." amusing and appreciate he was honest about the bubble.
On the flip side, I've never NOT heard that as the primary reason to have kids until I left the Midwest. Hell I've told my kids the same and my childless siblings are in panic mode over it now as they enter middle age. It's not just about whether SS, MC, and long term care insurance will cover your bills, it's also just about having someone care. No one wants to end their days in a state nursing home surrounded by apathetic former addicts who wish you'd die already while doped up in a soiled diaper. I've seen that way too often and it's sad.
Why should we care about the total population? Only the ruling elites want more followers and people to order around or die invading other territories. As an individual human on a finite planet that has 3 billion more people on the way and not nearly enough energy to even think about leaving the planet, I don't see any relevant people "shortage". I see the expanding human population as a potential problem on this finite planet, where our survival is totally dependent upon energy and our technological creativity providing the required food and supplies.
Inquisitive Bird notes that Western fertility rates fell before WWII. Not a subscriber so can’t read his whole post, but it seems that WWI would certainly have had some effect on European fertility: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/demographic-consequence-first-world-war
Likewise, not an Alice Evans subscriber so don’t know what all is in the article, but it does seem noteworthy that Egypt’s fertility rate is still over 3. I am also curious why Egypt apparently had a baby boom from 2009 through 2013. Algeria also had an fertility increase in roughly the same period (https://database.earth/population/algeria/fertility-rate ) as did Tunisia (https://database.earth/population/tunisia/fertility-rate ) but Turkey did not (https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/tur/turkey/fertility-rate ). Could the Arab Spring while it lasted have had an upward influence on fertility? Doing a google scholar search using “Arab Spring fertility” turns up several articles that appear to document such an influence. Perhaps the convergence in the nature of Arab and EU governance practices explains some of the convergence in their respective fertility trends?
Daniel Hess certainly provides good evidence in support of more cul-de-sacs. I think in the past Dr. Kling has commented on how postponing life for the acquisition of education credentials contributes to lower fertility. Part of this phenomenon might involve people in their 20s and 30s wanting to live in cheap, lousy apartments because their student loan debt precludes purchase of desirable housing
(https://bipartisanpolicy.org/increasing-student-debt-yet-another-reason-balanced-housing-policy/ )
. And Grok3 suggests “Women with significant student loan debt, especially those with advanced degrees, often delay family formation. The financial burden of debt can push back milestones like marriage and childbearing, as women prioritize financial stability or career advancement to manage repayment. Data suggests that households with graduate degrees—where student debt is typically highest—tend to have higher debt loads and lower fertility compared to those with less education. For instance, among U.S. women with bachelor’s degrees or higher, those with substantial debt are less likely to have children in a given year than those without. However, this isn’t universal—some studies find that for women with moderate debt or lower educational levels, the link between debt and fertility is less clear-cut, suggesting other factors like cultural norms or partner income play a role.” Capping graduate student loan borrowing (https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2025/02/20/trumps_opportunity_resolve_the_student_loan_debt_crisis_without_a_bailout_1092853.html ) might be a good move for many reasons.
Friedman’s 5th (artificial wombs) and 6th (evolution) responses to changes in fertility might be enhanced with AI assisted embryo selection and gene splicing so that humans become ever more economically optimized and closer to achieving the evolutionary success of termites. Sterile workers pumped out through increased specialization all producing for the good of the high-rise. What’s not to love for an economist?
Stone’s article is thought-provoking. Still trying to workout how and if it might square with studies finding what to might seem to be contrary results: “The widespread phenomenon of polyandry (mating by females with multiple males) is an evolutionary puzzle, because females can sustain costs from promiscuity, whereas full fertility can be provided by a single male. Using the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, we identify major fitness benefits of polyandry to females under inbreeding, when the risks of fertilization by incompatible male haplotypes are especially high.”
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1207314
Does this help to explain why the large investments cousin-marriage societies make in repressing female promiscuity seem counterproductive? How close to inbreeding does Western assortative mating get? Does population density increase assortative mating?
Consider the case of the Brazilian state of Roraima ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roraima ), both the least dense state and the state with the highest fertility rate. It is also about 57.3% pardo (a mix of Indigenous, African, and European blood - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardo_Brazilians) and 14% indigenous. Its Northern neighbor states have even higher percentages of both. And these are also the regions most unburdened by education credentials. One wonders how assortative works in these areas. Perhaps, AI-enabled autodidact education will allow these areas to leapfrog over the credentialing toll-gate era of the university as roadblock to employment and enable both higher skill and employment remuneration at an earlier age while still retaining children as a viable life choice?
Some terrible handwaving there. "But let’s look at the evidence! First, I’ll note that <b>if you just google “polygyny-fertility” you’ll find decades of good research which basically argues</b> that polygyny modestly reduces fertility" (etc etc)
Not sure who’s counting but acc. to Google there were 15 to twenty million Arabs in the year 1900.
400 million in 2025.
And I’m to add to my list of correct, received opinions - that among other such shortages, the world is suffering a shortage of Arabs?
I’m tired of playing pretend, can we play freeze tag instead?
As someone who grew up with the overpopulation fears of 1950s and '60s, and who is a sort of environmentalist, I'm tempted to think, "So what if populations go down and skew older? Fewer people doesn't have to mean a worse life for those still around. And humanity will have a smaller ecological footprint. But, alas, the people least able to provide for kids are the ones most likely to have them. Copying from a previous comment, birth rates from the World Bank:
High Income 1.5
Low Income 4.6
European Union 1.5
East Asia 1.5
Sub-Saharan Africa 4.5
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN
2 cool maps: "Is the majority of your population born in the 20th or the 21st Century?" and "When will the majority [of] your country be born in the 21st Century?"
https://brilliantmaps.com/20th-vs-21st/?utm_source=brilliantmaps.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=13-monday-maps-phantom-borders-invasions-breakups-the-entire-history-of-the-world-in-60-seconds&_bhlid=8f09a122ce8e2164e2d1f0ae0100d0f533c04d2c
Of course, no one is supposed to notice that because the poor people having lots of kid are overwhelmingly People of Color and the ones having few are not. To be concerned is to be accused of racism (by others and by your guilty conscience).
On good thing that has come out of "woke": Chinese and Japanese and Koreans are no longer chinks and slant-eyes and so on. For purposes of affirmative action and such, they are honorary whites.
Well, maybe not honorary whites, but OVER-represented minorities, who social justice requires also be discriminated against (this was the background of the Harvard admissions case, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard University, June 29, 2023).
Did the promiscuous men study exclude Elon Musk as an outlier?
Elon had five kids with his first wife. Three with second. Two with IVF partner. And one with recent IVF partner. Clearly on the downward slope here, the more women the less kids per woman.
All of those women could theoretically have married one man and had kids. The average is only 3.25, and it's brought up by the first wife.
To make this work he needed to be the richest man in the world. All the divorce settlements, IVF, surrogates, houses, nannies, private schools, etc. Considering all that, it's not too impressive. Gheghis Kahn has his direct DNA is 2% of all Asians.
Overall, I think Elon is probably a fertility suppressant. The way he runs his companies and the culture he looks to build in this country lead to very low fertility. He's constantly complaining that all his subordinates have 0-1 kids, but what do you expect working 80 hours a week for a tyrant when you don't have billions of dollars to smooth it over.
Yesterday some kids came over to our house for a playdate. The father of one just went from fully remote to return to office due to Elon. He now has a two hour commute each way to another state every day. Obviously, this is causing strain with having to raise three kids. I don't think they are having another while this is going on. The general pattern in DC is the more kids you have the further away from the office you live to save on the real estate. People built lives around their telecommute status. A lot of people with big families that are more conservative are about to drop out of federal service.
Elon is a narcissistic autist. That's great for having the balls to take on cost plus contracting in rocketry. It's not clear he has the slightest clue how to increase fertility or even really cares outside himself. His relationships with these baby mama's are all scatter brained and they literally fight with him on X.
Good explanation on the social suppression of kids with an alpha-successful semi-polygamous guy going with more women.
While that one male has more kids total, the many women have fewer—and often fail to get married to another man later. Thus more unsexed, unmarried, incel type non-fathers, about one for each of the extra women of the womanizer.
I think he (Lyman Stone) covers "incels" (I despise that word) in his paywall, it's implied but IDK as not going to pay but I think what gets missed, both by him and above, is many of those women would just remain childless instead ala the old saying "better the kings whore than the farmers wife" hence in fact polygyny results in more children.
I.e..the model assumes modern women will settle hence those monogamous gains will be realized but I think reality has shown no, they have wed hypergamy and take that vow until death to they depart seriously.
Many, yes. Most? Probably not. If the king, or Musk (or JFK or…) is hooking up with only top 10 or top 20% women, all are likely to attract attention from other top 30% men. How many settle &have kids, vs unmarried childless (angry cat ladies)?
Reality has shown that human action is not repeatable like physics experiments. Low birth rates before WW II, very high baby boom, now lower, low, very low over most of the world.
Too many men today act like pigs, according to my married daughter who complains about her husband sometimes acting less nicely than she would like. Yet huge numbers of women get more aroused by brutes than by nice guys, who get stuck in the friend zone.
Lots of talking about it should make more men and women both consider their expectations. Both my wife and I have unmarried sisters with too high expectations. Unmentioned is “relative to their own attractiveness”. Which is very highly correlated with age, for most men. Considering 18-48 (or 58? 68?), men’s attractiveness goes down much slower than women’s.
Which is unfair, but real. Women’s empowered feminism doesn’t yet deal well with unfair reality. We should all be talking more about it—it’s as big an issue as climate change, and far more culture influenced.
Indiscriminately firing hundreds of thousand of federal workers won't encourage anyone to have more children. Has anyone considered how the federal government will ever hire any remotely competent individual in the future?
I have no inherent problem with decimating the federal workforce. I don't like these people or their mission for the most part. Many of the FBI and USAID people near me that have been laid off did some really shitty things since 2020 and often before that.
I'm simply remarking that if your goal is to purge the federal workforce of your enemies, you ought to have some kind of reasonable plan of how to do it. It doesn't have to be perfect or look into the soul of every employee, but this WFH method is clearly counter productive in my mind.
A simple fix would be to exempt people with children from the WFH requirement. Say 3 days per week with one kid, 1 day with two kids, 0 days with 3+ kids.
They generally don't hire them now, no loss. 5% the Federal workforce does 90% the work, the problem is they will be the ones chopped because they are productive hence don't have the patronages to remain because they were too busy working rather than acting as courtiers.
Ha! I was half way writing the same thing when I saw you'd beat me to it.
Kids are important—they are the future! And everybody who writes cares about the future, so there’s a reason to write about kids. Plus we’ve all been kids, and most of the adult writers have kids.
Why people do what they do are seldom single cause reasons, more multiple feelings & inconsistent desires, often contrary, incompatible desires. So there are plenty of ideas to write about.
Lots of old people, fewer young people, is not yet a problem—but will induce more changes in most OECD countries than most other single tech or legal changes.
Increasing house building should be the single biggest govt/social change.
Govt rewarding marriages would be positive.
More govt jobs being part time jobs would be helpful to parents, especially kid carers, usually mothers—but I’d rather have more eGovt that has no living worker, just form filling out & tax & benefit tracking.