Parental leave is great. But it likely can't reverse fertility trends.
Plus: Digital forces beyond our control, my SOTU response for Reason, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.
1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
Parental leave is great. But it likely can't reverse fertility trends.
“Would you have four kids if it meant never paying taxes again?”
It’s a good question, and I think my answer is “yes.” But then, I’m the exact target audience for a policy like this, which Hungary has actually implemented: I earn enough that the lifetime tax cut would make a big difference to my family, and I’m three-quarters of the way there on the kid count. For me, the math works.
But it wouldn’t work for many people. It wouldn’t work if you earned substantially less, if you wanted to be a stay-at-home mom (the deal is only for mothers), if you couldn’t make the up-front financial investment for that long-term payoff, if you were starting with fewer children or none at all, if getting to four was likely to put your life or health at real risk.
Four kids is a lot of kids! And having kids, at least for me and people I know of childbearing age, isn’t easy. I’ve more friends who’ve decided to forgo having children than who’ve chosen to have three or more, and my friends aren’t unusual in this regard. No taxes for life is great, but is it enough to persuade you to bring multiple new lives into the world?
In Hungary, as the New York Times piece which began with that good question noted, the answer has largely been “no”:
In December, the political director for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán tweeted, “women who become mothers before turning 30 will be exempt from paying personal income tax!” That’s on top of a raft of other initiatives meant to boost the number of Hungarian babies, including allowing mothers of four or more children to be permanently exempt from paying taxes, a mortgage repayment plan for families with two or more children, a subsidy program for larger families buying seven-passenger cars and allowing grandparents to be eligible for payment for caring for their grandchildren.
Even with all that—even with spending more on family policy than on defense while literally next door to the war in Ukraine—Hungary has only managed to nudge its fertility rate from 1.2 to 1.5 children per woman, still well below the 2.1 children generally needed to maintain a steady population size.
Family policies in many other countries with plunging birthrates have seen a similar lack of success. That’s not to say they accomplish nothing. After all, 1.5 is 25 percent higher than 1.2, and maybe that figure will rise further. But generous family policies don’t guarantee a reversal of declining fertility, let alone replacement rate fertility.
And family policies as generous as Hungary’s aren’t in view here in the States. I can say “yes” all I want, but no one’s offering me no income taxes for life. We’re looking at maybe longer parental leave, more tax breaks or a child allowance, or subsidized birth or childcare costs. That sort of thing, whether implemented as federal or state policy or voluntarily offered by employers or charities, would certainly make parents’ lives easier, and it might boost the fertility numbers a bit.
But probably only a bit. This stuff matters, but my sense—and I’m in the early stages of interest and reading in this subject, so this isn’t anything like a comprehensive theory—is that it matters more in a negative sense than a positive one.1
That is, high childcare costs or lack of paid parental leave or having to buy a bigger vehicle to fit the third car seat might be enough to deter couples from having another child. But subsidies and other policy incentives likely won’t be enough to induce them to have that child.
Our cultural momentum (in many aspects of culture, not just explicit attitudes about marriage, family, and the like) is toward lower fertility, and that momentum is strong. My guess is it would take a policy nudge on an implausibly grand scale to push the average American family in the opposite direction.
2. What I'm reading this week
Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities, by David B. Auerbach (forthcoming March 14, 2023)
I got my hands on an advance copy of Meganets for a review I’m writing for The New Atlantis, and while I’ll certainly present some critiques in that piece, it was a fascinating read. Auerbach’s discussion of the metaverse was better than almost everything else I’ve seen on the subject, and if you’ve ever wanted a detailed yet lay-level explanation of the workings of AI and cryptocurrency, he’s got you covered.
More interesting—and, I expect, controversial—are the extremely grim forecasts for our near future if (or, Auerbach would say, when) the titular meganets take over even larger portions of our lives and minds.
3. A recommendation
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s got a new Substack. He’s only two posts in, but it’s already obvious this will, as is typical of his work, be a worthwhile read. The focus, in service to two book projects Haidt has underway, is “the profound psychological and sociological changes that occurred in the 2010s when human social and political life migrated onto platforms curated by a few for-profit companies whose business models drove them to maximize engagement.”
4. Recent work
That’s it this week! Doing a handful of book reviews, etc., with longer time horizons. More soon.
5. Miscellaneous
makes u think
I’m here thinking in terms of policies inside the Overton Window in countries, like the United States, that are at least democratic-ish and liberal-ish. That excludes tyrannical horrors like China’s erstwhile one-child policy or Decree 770 in communist Romania, both of which had catastrophic results—though they certainly succeeded in shifting the birth rate.
Sounds like I need to pick up this Auerbach book when it comes out!