The New York Times, ever on the lookout for more revenue sources to feed the 14 PSI vacuum that is the government, has the answer to the fertility crisis that threatens the tax base.
Wonder of wonders, it calls for more government intervention. Just like the Nordic countries have.
Err, there's just one problem with that.
The Nordies don't know nuthin' 'bout birthin' no babies, Miss Scarlett.
This leads me back to the famous Thomas Sowell quote and my musings on sex, Sex, SEX!
The tradeoff in question is tradwife vs career boss-babe. We're not having babies because women are waiting too long to get married. You can either focus on education and career or you can find a man, get a ring and make with the horizontal monkey dance. Yes, you can do both, but the longer you wait, the fewer babies you will have.
If having babies is any kind of goal, and survival subtly hints that it should be, you can't be waiting until you are in your mid-30s to get down to business. It's not much more complicated than that.
The problem isn't a lack of government spending, it's that we are emphasizing career and education over family, consciously making that trade-off decision that we value women's agency and self-reliance more than we do babies.
You don't have to make a moral judgment either way to see that this is what's happening.
The Times is committing the common error of assuming that they know why people are doing something, and so don't bother asking.
ReplyDeletePew Research actually asked people who don't have children why it is that the don't.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-experiences-of-u-s-adults-who-dont-have-children/
Basically, well over half of people who don't have children, just don't want to have children. A substantial fraction (20%) don't even like children, and would likely make awful parents. Trying to persuade them to have more children by either social pressure or money is unlikely to do much.
In my last IT job before retiring, a co-worker and his former boss-babe wife had married late, yet had managed to have a son and a daughter, who were then high-school aged. I could be misremembering, but I think his wife had home-schooled the kids.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, one day -- which the crazed feminist witch on our team was away from her desk, he happened to mention that his daughter's ambition was to get married and be a "stay-at-home mom" (*). I replied, "That's a worthy ambition for a young woman to have." Both he (the girl's father) and the other guy on the team, looked around in horror, in case the crazed feminist had overheard.
And *that* is why we have a "birth dearth" -- even fathers are afraid to "offend" feminists, and so they encourage their own daughters to avoid giving them grandchildren.
(*) I detest the use of the word 'mom' in a non-familial setting, for instance, in refering to "moms and dads" in public speaking.