Thanks for your talk with Lyman, I enjoyed it. I had some technical difficulties and couldn't get to my question.
The crux of the problem is that middle to upper middle class people (men and women combined) have below replacement (and falling) fertility. This causes many issues but at a minimum it means entitlements, which are politically unassailable, and also fiscally impossible.
There are many causes of this, but one big driver appears to female earnings. Women of these classes are choosing to earn and spend money rather than have additional children. We don't have to assume they are spending it in any particular way, perhaps it's hard to afford a home on one income, but they are consuming their younger fertility years producing income rather children because they perceive this as a path to a better life, and its useless to argue with them about those preferences.
If they can find a man to marry that produces income deemed reasonable for the woman's social class (a substitute for her own earnings) she will dial back earned income in order to have more children. However, these men are relatively hard to find, especially below age 30.
Lyman is correct that "fix the entire economy to improve male earnings" is beyond the scope of public policy recommendations we can consider here.
It seems to me the solution here is to increase income to families from a source other than female earned income, though scaling with potential female earned income. A payroll tax refund based on # of children is actuarially sound from a social insurance perspective (taking on the cost of raising a future tax contribute should be acknowledged as a form of paying into the system). So you take line 3 of your W2 and multiply by X% for each child, and send people a check.
This would automatically be a marriage bonus because getting married would mean two people were getting the X% payment instead of one. This is BTW one of the problems with the Hungarian tax incentives for children, they have no concept of "married filing jointly" and so the income tax break for having lots of kids is only worth something if you increase female earnings, so its working at cross purposes. There are several issues with the Hungarian incentives along these lines.
You could have different X% based on the age of the earner. Making numbers up, it could be 10% below age 30, 5% above age 35, and smoothed in-between. Whatever the CBO says will match whatever amount of money you want to spend.
You could also consider a child only someone below age Y instead of 18. I gather that focusing benefits on younger and younger parents has the most bang for the buck.
My only caution is not to get so focused that the % of parents receiving benefits becomes so small that there isn't a strong enough political constituency to support it. For instance, a bonus that only paid on new births would leave myself with nothing, even though I have three young children. Your probably going to have to pay some for existing children if you want it to be politically viable.
---
I've read his essay about the U* shape and didn't find it wholly satisfying. It seems that there is:
1) A big difference between whites** and non-whites.
2) A big difference between men and women.
It is true that poor white men aren't having a lot of kids.
But 50% of births in the US are non-white, and it's probably much higher amongst the poor. If the fertility pattern for women and especially non-white women is high amongst the poor then it's a different story. It's more consistent with the data of 55% of children under 18 being enrolled in Medicaid/CHIP.
I bring this up not because it's such an outlier, it's probably a TFR close enough to replacement and more or less what we want to accomplish with the middle and upper middle classes. It just shows me that if you provide enough non-earned income from the government to make marginal children cost-free then people will achieve replacement fertility (the government basically takes on all the marginal cost of raising a child for the medicaid set, Uncle Sam as husband).
I simply wish to replicate that incentive structure up the income ladder (marginal cost of child = 0). Obviously the government is never going to compensate parents for sleepless nights or temper tantrums, but it can at least smooth out disposable income amongst class peers so child rearers don't feel like they are falling behind (and to more fairly recognize their contributions to stable social insurance funding).
*I grant his point about rich people being too small a sample size on the other side of the U, but it stands to reason that if fertility increases with male earnings this continues at very high levels of income.
**It seems like there is no cultural shame for non-white women bearing children out of wedlock and relying on government transfers, but there is for whites.
Realizing your numbers were made-up and not a proposal, it's worth noting that a household with $100,000 wages would pay ~$8,000 wage tax so the 10% would only be $800 refund.
I think part of the issues is that there are many tax benefits of having children but they are mostly small things like this and even people getting them don't always realize how much they add up to.
Ok, I was confused because a 10% refund on wages is more than the payroll tax so it isn't exactly a refund. Regardless, that seems like enough that it might make a difference.
It does leave another problem though. If people aren't even coupling, that seems a bit too distant to get cause coupling too. Maybe we also need some kind of tax credit for couples under ~35 AND couples with children. Good to also have an incentive for them to stay together.
"I simply wish to replicate that incentive structure up the income ladder (marginal cost of child = 0)."
I heard one of Louise Perry's guests describe the mindset of women who have many children this way: "Kids don't belong in the cost column." I love that. I agree with it, and having spent years building spreadsheets, I also see how hard it is to understand.
I like your proposal, and I think it could help as a stepping stone. If people get accustomed to seeing the dollar-values associated with raising kids continually net-out to zero on the budget, they may eventually be able to relax to the point where they stop including the line-item altogether. Once it's off the books, it might have a chance to find a place in the heart where the accounting is positive-sum through and through.
- "90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0, which does not reflect the importance women place on height in the real world. …What we see with algorithmic online dating isn't a mechanism to assign the perfect match to each person of the opposite sex. Instead, we've created a machine where the top 20% of men mate with many different partners and the top 80% women try to get the top 20% of men to date and ultimately marry them (and not just have sex with them)." Arnold Kling, 24 Sep 23, https://archive.ph/MKrpq
- "Men swipe right on 60% of women, women swipe right on 4.5% of men. The bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. A guy with average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females. This means one “like” for every 115 women that see his profile." Erik Torenberg, 23 Sep 23, https://archive.ph/Ps8pI
- “Most single men on dating apps struggle to even get “likes” from women. Only a tiny minority of men receive a preponderance of matches, and that this disparity was comparable in scale to the income inequality of South Africa under apartheid. In contrast, the match disparity among females was similar to the magnitude of economic inequality found in Western Europe.” Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy, Quillette, 12 Mar 19, https://archive.is/EvIj5
- "Women Say 80% of Men Are “Below Average. Are women’s standards just too high? A study by dating app OkCupid found that women find 80% of men unattractive or 'below average.'", Medium, 9 Sep 22, https://archive.is/SvBrV /
- Sociologist Rob Henderson cited statistics from a study on Tinder finding that women “like the profiles of only four percent of the men they see on the app, whereas men swipe right or like 60 percent of the profiles” (see 33:30 minutes into the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6ZyQKiwMQw).
- 80 percent of men will only receive a reply to their first message one-third of the time, suggesting that a large proportion of matches do not translate into meaningful interactions with the opposite sex. OK Cupid: Your Looks and Your Inbox, 17 Nov 09, https://archive.ph/yse2
I found the discussion thought-provoking and insightful. Lyman Stone suggested there were 30-40 small changes that could have a significant impact on fertility. My takeaway was that we don't face a dominant challenge that one or two large changes can impact, but there are two to three dozen interventions that would address many small factors that are accumulating to drive a fertility decline.
It would be very helpful to draft a write-up of these interventions and why they may help (what decline mechanism or incentive they address). I made a note of four:
1. Better housing access enables a higher rate of marriage.
2. Enoxaparin (Lovenox) can help with some forms of age-related miscarriage.
3. Female fertility starts to drop in the late teens / early 20s; encouraging marriage and starting families in the early 20s instead of early 30s would lead to a higher birth rate.
4. Increase iodine (e.g. switch back to iodized salt) and folate (e.g. folate enriched bread) in diet.
I am sure there were several others implicit in his analysis that I was not able to infer. A complete list, or at least a start on one, would be very helpful.
Stone offered Israel as existence proof that a country could be "First World" / wealthy and have population growth. Some of the misunderstandings seem like Jevon's or Simpson's paradox, where totaling different seemingly related factors leads to incorrect conclusions. I think it would be helpful to construct some animations or clearer diagrams coupled with the plain English explanations to promote a better understanding.
I agree with the opinions that the solutions to fertility are strongly influenced by culture and social prestige, especially among women. I would suggest solving the problem by two simple processes which will flip culture from resisting or delaying childbirth and marriage to promoting them:
1) Provide a $500 housing allowance and pay for an au pair for any couple with two children before the age of 30, payable until the youngest child turns 7. This will create an immense pressure to find a mate and have kids as soon as practical. Women will aspire to have a full time, live-in nanny, and it will be a status marker than no self respecting woman would want to miss.
Just as importantly, this will result in the importation of tens of millions of young, fertile girls who will be interested in American males, even those of lower status. Marriage will make them citizens, and the competition for males will reinforce the cycle.
As long as we give extensive selection of au pair quality to the moms, they will select higher caliber girls from culturally appropriate places.
2) Provide 4 years subsidized or free tuition and free full time child care (on campus) to any woman with children at college under the age of 24.
The details need working out, testing and refinement, but the net result would be a program importing millions of reasonably bright and conscientious girls (future mothers) without the crime and violence of young males. Marriage rates would skyrocket, divorce rates plummet, and fertility rates would fully recover. The US would become the magnet for opportunity.
The biggest problem would be backlash from all the other nations losing their girls. Of course, the UK already kind of lost this right based upon their recent performance on protecting young girls.
Thanks for your talk with Lyman, I enjoyed it. I had some technical difficulties and couldn't get to my question.
The crux of the problem is that middle to upper middle class people (men and women combined) have below replacement (and falling) fertility. This causes many issues but at a minimum it means entitlements, which are politically unassailable, and also fiscally impossible.
There are many causes of this, but one big driver appears to female earnings. Women of these classes are choosing to earn and spend money rather than have additional children. We don't have to assume they are spending it in any particular way, perhaps it's hard to afford a home on one income, but they are consuming their younger fertility years producing income rather children because they perceive this as a path to a better life, and its useless to argue with them about those preferences.
If they can find a man to marry that produces income deemed reasonable for the woman's social class (a substitute for her own earnings) she will dial back earned income in order to have more children. However, these men are relatively hard to find, especially below age 30.
Lyman is correct that "fix the entire economy to improve male earnings" is beyond the scope of public policy recommendations we can consider here.
It seems to me the solution here is to increase income to families from a source other than female earned income, though scaling with potential female earned income. A payroll tax refund based on # of children is actuarially sound from a social insurance perspective (taking on the cost of raising a future tax contribute should be acknowledged as a form of paying into the system). So you take line 3 of your W2 and multiply by X% for each child, and send people a check.
This would automatically be a marriage bonus because getting married would mean two people were getting the X% payment instead of one. This is BTW one of the problems with the Hungarian tax incentives for children, they have no concept of "married filing jointly" and so the income tax break for having lots of kids is only worth something if you increase female earnings, so its working at cross purposes. There are several issues with the Hungarian incentives along these lines.
You could have different X% based on the age of the earner. Making numbers up, it could be 10% below age 30, 5% above age 35, and smoothed in-between. Whatever the CBO says will match whatever amount of money you want to spend.
You could also consider a child only someone below age Y instead of 18. I gather that focusing benefits on younger and younger parents has the most bang for the buck.
My only caution is not to get so focused that the % of parents receiving benefits becomes so small that there isn't a strong enough political constituency to support it. For instance, a bonus that only paid on new births would leave myself with nothing, even though I have three young children. Your probably going to have to pay some for existing children if you want it to be politically viable.
---
I've read his essay about the U* shape and didn't find it wholly satisfying. It seems that there is:
1) A big difference between whites** and non-whites.
2) A big difference between men and women.
It is true that poor white men aren't having a lot of kids.
But 50% of births in the US are non-white, and it's probably much higher amongst the poor. If the fertility pattern for women and especially non-white women is high amongst the poor then it's a different story. It's more consistent with the data of 55% of children under 18 being enrolled in Medicaid/CHIP.
I bring this up not because it's such an outlier, it's probably a TFR close enough to replacement and more or less what we want to accomplish with the middle and upper middle classes. It just shows me that if you provide enough non-earned income from the government to make marginal children cost-free then people will achieve replacement fertility (the government basically takes on all the marginal cost of raising a child for the medicaid set, Uncle Sam as husband).
I simply wish to replicate that incentive structure up the income ladder (marginal cost of child = 0). Obviously the government is never going to compensate parents for sleepless nights or temper tantrums, but it can at least smooth out disposable income amongst class peers so child rearers don't feel like they are falling behind (and to more fairly recognize their contributions to stable social insurance funding).
*I grant his point about rich people being too small a sample size on the other side of the U, but it stands to reason that if fertility increases with male earnings this continues at very high levels of income.
**It seems like there is no cultural shame for non-white women bearing children out of wedlock and relying on government transfers, but there is for whites.
Currently there is a child tax credit of $2,000.
Realizing your numbers were made-up and not a proposal, it's worth noting that a household with $100,000 wages would pay ~$8,000 wage tax so the 10% would only be $800 refund.
I think part of the issues is that there are many tax benefits of having children but they are mostly small things like this and even people getting them don't always realize how much they add up to.
You misunderstand. I'm talking 10% * $100,000 = $10,000. $10,000 > $2,000
The % is just random. This is an outline of a structure. As a society we would need to determine what we want to spend on that structure.
Ok, I was confused because a 10% refund on wages is more than the payroll tax so it isn't exactly a refund. Regardless, that seems like enough that it might make a difference.
It does leave another problem though. If people aren't even coupling, that seems a bit too distant to get cause coupling too. Maybe we also need some kind of tax credit for couples under ~35 AND couples with children. Good to also have an incentive for them to stay together.
"I simply wish to replicate that incentive structure up the income ladder (marginal cost of child = 0)."
I heard one of Louise Perry's guests describe the mindset of women who have many children this way: "Kids don't belong in the cost column." I love that. I agree with it, and having spent years building spreadsheets, I also see how hard it is to understand.
I like your proposal, and I think it could help as a stepping stone. If people get accustomed to seeing the dollar-values associated with raising kids continually net-out to zero on the budget, they may eventually be able to relax to the point where they stop including the line-item altogether. Once it's off the books, it might have a chance to find a place in the heart where the accounting is positive-sum through and through.
Internet dating ruined women. They are now only interested in the top 10% of men. Such men may sleep with them, but nothing more.
I've compiled a bunch of articles on this phenomenon here: https://controlc.com/b3843b5a
They begin:
- "90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0, which does not reflect the importance women place on height in the real world. …What we see with algorithmic online dating isn't a mechanism to assign the perfect match to each person of the opposite sex. Instead, we've created a machine where the top 20% of men mate with many different partners and the top 80% women try to get the top 20% of men to date and ultimately marry them (and not just have sex with them)." Arnold Kling, 24 Sep 23, https://archive.ph/MKrpq
- "Men swipe right on 60% of women, women swipe right on 4.5% of men. The bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. A guy with average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females. This means one “like” for every 115 women that see his profile." Erik Torenberg, 23 Sep 23, https://archive.ph/Ps8pI
- “Most single men on dating apps struggle to even get “likes” from women. Only a tiny minority of men receive a preponderance of matches, and that this disparity was comparable in scale to the income inequality of South Africa under apartheid. In contrast, the match disparity among females was similar to the magnitude of economic inequality found in Western Europe.” Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy, Quillette, 12 Mar 19, https://archive.is/EvIj5
- "Women Say 80% of Men Are “Below Average. Are women’s standards just too high? A study by dating app OkCupid found that women find 80% of men unattractive or 'below average.'", Medium, 9 Sep 22, https://archive.is/SvBrV /
- Sociologist Rob Henderson cited statistics from a study on Tinder finding that women “like the profiles of only four percent of the men they see on the app, whereas men swipe right or like 60 percent of the profiles” (see 33:30 minutes into the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6ZyQKiwMQw).
- 80 percent of men will only receive a reply to their first message one-third of the time, suggesting that a large proportion of matches do not translate into meaningful interactions with the opposite sex. OK Cupid: Your Looks and Your Inbox, 17 Nov 09, https://archive.ph/yse2
I found the discussion thought-provoking and insightful. Lyman Stone suggested there were 30-40 small changes that could have a significant impact on fertility. My takeaway was that we don't face a dominant challenge that one or two large changes can impact, but there are two to three dozen interventions that would address many small factors that are accumulating to drive a fertility decline.
It would be very helpful to draft a write-up of these interventions and why they may help (what decline mechanism or incentive they address). I made a note of four:
1. Better housing access enables a higher rate of marriage.
2. Enoxaparin (Lovenox) can help with some forms of age-related miscarriage.
3. Female fertility starts to drop in the late teens / early 20s; encouraging marriage and starting families in the early 20s instead of early 30s would lead to a higher birth rate.
4. Increase iodine (e.g. switch back to iodized salt) and folate (e.g. folate enriched bread) in diet.
I am sure there were several others implicit in his analysis that I was not able to infer. A complete list, or at least a start on one, would be very helpful.
Stone offered Israel as existence proof that a country could be "First World" / wealthy and have population growth. Some of the misunderstandings seem like Jevon's or Simpson's paradox, where totaling different seemingly related factors leads to incorrect conclusions. I think it would be helpful to construct some animations or clearer diagrams coupled with the plain English explanations to promote a better understanding.
"But if he thinks that “densely built” and “libraries, parks, public buildings, and community centers” are the answer,"
Maybe not but al least we coud make it LEGAL
I agree with the opinions that the solutions to fertility are strongly influenced by culture and social prestige, especially among women. I would suggest solving the problem by two simple processes which will flip culture from resisting or delaying childbirth and marriage to promoting them:
1) Provide a $500 housing allowance and pay for an au pair for any couple with two children before the age of 30, payable until the youngest child turns 7. This will create an immense pressure to find a mate and have kids as soon as practical. Women will aspire to have a full time, live-in nanny, and it will be a status marker than no self respecting woman would want to miss.
Just as importantly, this will result in the importation of tens of millions of young, fertile girls who will be interested in American males, even those of lower status. Marriage will make them citizens, and the competition for males will reinforce the cycle.
As long as we give extensive selection of au pair quality to the moms, they will select higher caliber girls from culturally appropriate places.
2) Provide 4 years subsidized or free tuition and free full time child care (on campus) to any woman with children at college under the age of 24.
The details need working out, testing and refinement, but the net result would be a program importing millions of reasonably bright and conscientious girls (future mothers) without the crime and violence of young males. Marriage rates would skyrocket, divorce rates plummet, and fertility rates would fully recover. The US would become the magnet for opportunity.
The biggest problem would be backlash from all the other nations losing their girls. Of course, the UK already kind of lost this right based upon their recent performance on protecting young girls.