It's unclear to me that "plain old growth" is going to get people into a higher-fertility lifestyle bucket unless and until it's accompanied by progress in addressing the Baumol cost disease for childcare. Right now, very high income people can afford a great deal of help raising their kids, freeing them up to still do all the other things they want to do with their lives in parallel. At the tippy-top, this includes the "farm them out to live-in nannies/governesses" strategy that used to be the normal way for rich people to handle childcare.
But that strategy is so labor intensive that it's logistically impossible for a majority of the population to adopt it. If I were a pro-natalist venture capitalist, I would try and fund companies working on robot diaper changers and the like; that's the only really long-term-sustainable way I can see to make the great mass of people substantively rich enough that they feel like having kids is relatively cheap and easy.
Another intuitively pro-natal progress direction, ISTM, is healthspan and fertility-span extension. Part of the opportunity cost of kids is that you only get one life, and one youth, and having kids means navigating a quite narrow fertility-vs-career timing tradeoff and spending a large chunk of your most energetic and enjoyable years burdened by raising young children. If people could confidently expect 100 years of healthy, outgoing life, and women could reliably and healthily have kids up to age 50, that would make it a lot easier to "have our cake and eat it too". And since some lucky people *do* already get that much life and fertility, it's at least in principle possible for many more people to do so.
Double "like" for the healthy life extension "solution." I think it is especially important for women so that an x year career interruption for child rearing is a low portion of the total career..
Definitely agree that baumol's cost disease is important and that life extension would be helpful for avoiding population collapse in many ways.
The only thing I think is a bit inconsistent with your first claim is that the time spent on child care is also higher for wealthier parents. This suggests they aren't just using higher wages to work and pay for outside childcare, but that they are using high incomes to buy their own time back and use it on providing childcare themselves.
Yeah, that is counterintuitive and interesting if true! Here are some deeper dives I would want to do on that:
1. See whether Lyman Stone thinks that those time use figures are believable -- he is not always right but always worth listening to about these kinds of studies.
2. Break it down by ages of kids. Preschool age child care is a very different beast from ages 5+ and my anecdotal belief is that preschool ages are where money currently buys the most labor intensive outsourcing, and 5+ is when people are most likely to instead buy more leisure time to spend with their kids.
3. Figure out where this time is coming from. Are wealthier parents working fewer hours? Are they eating more takeout so they spend less time cooking? Or what else are they doing less of?
You can currently improve on the labour productivity of child rearing (compared to either individually hiring nannies or having a stay-at-home-parent) through free or highly subsidized daycare and preschool systems. There's a reason the rest of the economy shifted from home-craft production shifted to division of labour. It's obviously a limited boost to productivity (caregiver-to-child ratios are inherently limited), but it's one that can be scaled to the entire population with enough state resources. If that's the price to pay for not only ensuring that people can afford to have the family size they want, but also that humanity can continue to perpetuate itself and even grow with time, in the long-run that's a price worth paying. Raising children has enormous positive externalities for the rest of society, yet we expect parents to internalize all the costs of deciding to have kids.
It's unclear to me that "plain old growth" is going to get people into a higher-fertility lifestyle bucket unless and until it's accompanied by progress in addressing the Baumol cost disease for childcare. Right now, very high income people can afford a great deal of help raising their kids, freeing them up to still do all the other things they want to do with their lives in parallel. At the tippy-top, this includes the "farm them out to live-in nannies/governesses" strategy that used to be the normal way for rich people to handle childcare.
But that strategy is so labor intensive that it's logistically impossible for a majority of the population to adopt it. If I were a pro-natalist venture capitalist, I would try and fund companies working on robot diaper changers and the like; that's the only really long-term-sustainable way I can see to make the great mass of people substantively rich enough that they feel like having kids is relatively cheap and easy.
Another intuitively pro-natal progress direction, ISTM, is healthspan and fertility-span extension. Part of the opportunity cost of kids is that you only get one life, and one youth, and having kids means navigating a quite narrow fertility-vs-career timing tradeoff and spending a large chunk of your most energetic and enjoyable years burdened by raising young children. If people could confidently expect 100 years of healthy, outgoing life, and women could reliably and healthily have kids up to age 50, that would make it a lot easier to "have our cake and eat it too". And since some lucky people *do* already get that much life and fertility, it's at least in principle possible for many more people to do so.
Double "like" for the healthy life extension "solution." I think it is especially important for women so that an x year career interruption for child rearing is a low portion of the total career..
Definitely agree that baumol's cost disease is important and that life extension would be helpful for avoiding population collapse in many ways.
The only thing I think is a bit inconsistent with your first claim is that the time spent on child care is also higher for wealthier parents. This suggests they aren't just using higher wages to work and pay for outside childcare, but that they are using high incomes to buy their own time back and use it on providing childcare themselves.
Yeah, that is counterintuitive and interesting if true! Here are some deeper dives I would want to do on that:
1. See whether Lyman Stone thinks that those time use figures are believable -- he is not always right but always worth listening to about these kinds of studies.
2. Break it down by ages of kids. Preschool age child care is a very different beast from ages 5+ and my anecdotal belief is that preschool ages are where money currently buys the most labor intensive outsourcing, and 5+ is when people are most likely to instead buy more leisure time to spend with their kids.
3. Figure out where this time is coming from. Are wealthier parents working fewer hours? Are they eating more takeout so they spend less time cooking? Or what else are they doing less of?
https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1776598894316581313
You can currently improve on the labour productivity of child rearing (compared to either individually hiring nannies or having a stay-at-home-parent) through free or highly subsidized daycare and preschool systems. There's a reason the rest of the economy shifted from home-craft production shifted to division of labour. It's obviously a limited boost to productivity (caregiver-to-child ratios are inherently limited), but it's one that can be scaled to the entire population with enough state resources. If that's the price to pay for not only ensuring that people can afford to have the family size they want, but also that humanity can continue to perpetuate itself and even grow with time, in the long-run that's a price worth paying. Raising children has enormous positive externalities for the rest of society, yet we expect parents to internalize all the costs of deciding to have kids.