i love it. i know many grandparents who do at least 1 day of babysitting, and of course they love it and would never take money from their kids. in saying that, it's tiring work, especially depending on their age/mobility/condition. if this is what gets an extra parent working a couple more days, i love the idea of keeping the money in the family.
The article doesn’t feel anything like the author has any direct experience of Sweden or the Swedish welfare and childcare system (which is awesome btw; great country to be a parent as well as a child)
A few years ago the “left” politics were trying to encourage dads to take parental leave, as mothers taking it all was making the women in the workforce less equal. And if money was the carrot then making some of the dads entitlement non-transferable was the stick.
More recently the “right” is now in government and my gut reaction to hearing about this new change in policy is that it is probably trying to subtly reverse that? Seems likely.
16 months over 12 years is not care time, it's something to use up on errands and occasional R&R. Right or left, subsidizing childcare sounds less about affecting sex balance in the workplace, and more about increasing the amount of two-income families.
(Which is a ratchet and arguably a mistake, but that's another topic.)
In Poland, there is proposed legislation (or did it pass already?) for the govt to pay for babysitters XOR babysitting grandparents. The idea is to allow parents to work. I imagine Sweden is going for the same thing.
(Sorry should add: childcare is organised and heavily subsidised in Sweden too, and all families can easily afford it if working. There are even “night care” facilities for the children of parents who work night shifts.
The normal way to spend the 16 months is for the mother to take the first 6 months off after birth to care for the baby, and the father to take the next 6 months, and the child to go to a day playgroup after a year ish. And then the rest of the time is sometimes taken as one day a week for a while when the kid is older but before they start school. Lots of ways to vary it though)
I wrote ratchet, not racket, though arguably both fit.
> No one is forcing two income families.
Except for all the other dual-income families. That's the ratchet. Or, the magic of supply and demand at play.
In a society where single-income households are dominating, the households that choose to go dual-income suddenly have 2x the income (obviously), and effectively jump a rung higher on the socioeconomic ladder. As more and more households choose this way, there's a surplus of disposable income on the market, which reduces pressures holding prices of everything down, and additionally, creates new classes of products and services[0]. As the society transitions to predominantly dual-income households, the socioeconomic ladder readjusts - suddenly the single-income households can no longer afford to live the way they used to, as prices of everything went up (both nominally and through inflation), and there's more required spending. The ratchet has turned a step, and there is no going back.
Or in a hot take form: the option for women to choose career over being a homemaker started as a choice. But, as enough women took the career option, it now became a requirement. Decades ago, a woman could find a job. Nowadays, she has to, otherwise she's going to be economically disadvantaged, whether single or with a partner.
That's the ratchet. Or a bait-and-switch the market pulled on women. It's fine for couples who don't plan to start a family; sucks for those that do.
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[0] - In short: the market adjusts to keep average disposable income in a population at zero. More than zero means there's money left on the table, and someone will soon find a way to pick it up.
> Or a bait-and-switch the market pulled on women.
I guess what I am trying to say is there is no bait and switch, or trick, or other insidious plot. Women are heavily benefiting from financial independence, and society feels some of the costs.
More work and effort equals the ability to have more purchasing power is a fundamental part of capitalism. If we are so concerned that single income families are being priced out of sufficient quality of life, then we should be mandating overtime after 20 hours per week of work, instead of having one partner in a relationship becoming forced to depend on the other.
> Women are heavily benefiting from financial independence
The ones who wanted to be financially independent, yes. The ones who wanted children, whether from young age or suddenly, as adults, they're screwed. It's not just society that's screwed - so are many of the women, because as I wrote earlier: there was a moment when they had a choice between career and homemaking, but that time is past.
> More work and effort equals the ability to have more purchasing power is a fundamental part of capitalism.
Capitalism has its failure modes, and this is one: the market adjusts to bring average disposable income to zero. If almost everyone puts in more work and effort at the same time, their purchasing power stays the same on average. More work, same results. A ratchet.
> If we are so concerned that single income families are being priced out of sufficient quality of life, then we should be mandating overtime after 20 hours per week of work, instead of having one partner in a relationship becoming forced to depend on the other.
Would be nice, but unless you set up a ceiling (which would be unfair for any number of reasons), then the market will nullify those efforts. As long as anyone can get ahead on the margin by putting some extra work or making some sacrifice, everyone will be pressured to do it.
(Or: race to the bottom doesn't only affect companies, and it doesn't stop being a race to the bottom just because "more work" sounds like something is increasing.)
The current fertility rate for Sweden in 2024 is 1.842 births per woman, a 0.05% decline from 2023.
The fertility rate for Sweden in 2023 was 1.843 births per woman, a 0.05% decline from 2022.
The fertility rate for Sweden in 2022 was 1.844 births per woman, a 0.11% decline from 2021.
The fertility rate for Sweden in 2021 was 1.846 births per woman, a 0.05% decline from 2020.
???? Sweden is a great country to be a parent. Source: I'm an immigrant to Sweden with two Swedish-born kids.
My mother was one of 8. That doesn't make rural Michigan in the 1950s a great place to be a parent. That means, as an aunt put it, that my grandparents didn't know about birth control.
If only women take parental leave, then employer attitudes will, consciously or not, consider parental leave an extra 'cost' attached to hiring women. Sweden found that this remained true even when the parental leave was explicitly made available for both parents to take. Among other reasons, making some parental leave only available for fathers is intended to further encourage fathers to take leave, until in theory people think of parental leave as a gender-neutral option.
As much as I dislike nudges and trying to fix things via tax policy. We should let the IRS beat the snot out of companies where married men don't take enough parental leave.
In the US at least, parental leave and other care obligations is what creates the gender wage gap [1] [2] [3]. Ergo, women being the gender to shoulder the care burden in Sweden, even with generous leave, still incurs an equality penalty. Interestingly, in Spain, when parental leave for men was made equal to women, men's desire for children declined [4]. The data also shows men desire children more than women in the US [5] and Finland [6].
Hot take thesis is that women still incur most of the cost of children, even in the most progressive socioeconomic systems. They know it, and it is a material contributing factor in the fertility rate decline. They obtain equality by opting out of reproduction, eliminating opportunity cost and other expensive penalties reproduction incurs. The cost of children is simply too damn high.
Bonus comment from PepsiCo CEO Indra K. Nooyi:
On Monday, PepsiCo CEO Indra K. Nooyi spoke at the Aspen Ideas Festival about her work-life balance. “The biological clock and the career clock are in total conflict,” she observed. Just as women are reaching middle management, kids need the most parenting and attention. Then when women move up the corporate ladder, they must turn their attention to aging parents. “We’re screwed. We cannot have it all.” [7]
I mean, children are just really expensive with no financial benefit no matter how you cut it, regardless of who the parent is.
It used to be that children would look after you in your old age, or would contribute to the family relatively young, etc etc, or in a single-income household with a stay at home parent incurred no material cost to the family beyond a mouth to feed.
Nowadays, in a dual-income household, children cost an income to look after or daycare until they are old enough to look after themselves. Financially speaking, there's no benefit (not that children are a financial decision, but certainly the financial logic today is worse than many times in the past)
To some, children are not important, and that is okay. Those who do want children should of course have a robust support system and accommodations made available, but those who don’t should be equally empowered to not have them. Unwanted children are an enormous source of suffering in the aggregate.
> Hot take thesis is that women still incur most of the cost of children, even in the most progressive socioeconomic systems.
This shouldn't be even remotely controversial, considering the fact that men don't get pregnant. The cost to employers doesn't start with parental leaves - it starts with pregnancy, which involves medical checkups, and an early health leave, and at least in some countries[0], making the future mother effectively unfireable for the duration. In some countries (again, [0]) this can, and often is, chained to keep employment going for multiple years over multiple pregnancies, without the employee showing up even once[1].
I'm not criticizing the women or families here in any way, only pointing out that a strong incentive for gender discrimination in hiring and (perception of) wage gap comes from the employers accounting for the above. Women in child-rearing age are seen as higher-risk employees, and businesses naturally want to mitigate the risk.
With that in mind, your statements that women "obtain equality by opting out of reproduction, eliminating opportunity cost and other expensive penalties reproduction incurs", and that "it is a material contributing factor in the fertility rate decline", pretty much follow directly.
People aren't stupid. Companies want to mitigate risks. Couples planning to start a family consider whether they can afford it in the first place. Costs of living are rising in the west, which can't possibly not impact fertility rates.
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[0] - My home country, Poland, being one.
[1] - The primary benefit isn't financial, but avoiding having a hole in your CV. Done properly, it looks indistinguishable from just working the entire time.
Alright so get this, some of the grandparents will be less encumbered by the frailties of advanced age, some more, but on average there will be enough childcare capacity to cover all of our forecasts. We can pool the grandparents into some kind of instrument, and if we pay a bunch of guys wearing Charvet ties in the City to price the risk correctly, we can sell a Babysitting Bond with a very compelling yield by securitizing this with favorable tax treatment…
Hot take, but 3-generation nuclear families do not work if there are 30-35 years between generations.
The average age of childbirth has gone by ~10 years over the last 50 years.
So instead of having 22 yr old parents and 45 yr old grandparents.... you now have 32 yr old parents and 65 yr old grandparents.
A 45 yr old grandparent is an able-bodied helper. A 65 yr old is a dependent. This is doubly true once you realize that obesity rates are rising and having grandparents as guests in cities is getting prohibitively expensive.
Don't have a general-purpose solution at hand. All options feel horrible. But, we don't seem to be making much progress in aging....so grand parents will often find themselves needing to help when they need a lot of help themselves.
To individuals, I'd recommend prioritizing your health. If you avoid cancer, hip replacements, and heart disease, then you can easily live to your late 80s in good health. It is the greatest gift you can give yourself or your children. Attia is popular in these parts, maybe start there.
p.s : I am in a sermonizing mood after I realized how bad my cardio had gotten in a recent hike.
This is a really interesting theory and I agree with everything you said about taking care of your health.
I think that your theory could be very easily tested with simple survey methods. Find grandparents, ask their age, and ask if they regularly care for their grandchildren. It doesn't really matter the age of their own children because we can basically infer it with the grandchildren being under 12.
Such a survey could be improved by asking people their country. My anecdotal observation is that German grandparents provide much more childcare than their American counterparts, despite comparable generational gaps. Another anecdotal observation is the Filipino grandparents also provide more childcare with a smaller generational gap.
A fourth useful question might be to ask why grandparents are raising kids. I speculate that in rich countries, it is because they want to, but in poor countries, it is because the 20/30-somethings are financially providing for both the children and the grandparents.
>The average age of childbirth has gone by ~10 years over the last 50 years.
The tarbaby behind this is there's a direct correlation between women's education and age of childbirth, and inverse with fertility rate. This crosses cultures and isn't Western-exclusive. The fallout is also the impetus for replacement migration policies, lest the debt-entitlement schemes fail.
> The fallout is also the impetus for replacement migration policies, lest the debt-entitlement schemes fail.
And every boomer who championed this braindead idea will get EXACTLY what is coming to them. It will be glorious and I will absolutely laugh and mock them.
Disagree. Having grandparents who are 65 means they’re close to retirement meaning more free time.
Having grandparents at 45 means they are still at peak earning capacity, and likely earning more than their 22 year old kids, so it wouldn’t make economic sense for 45 year olds to take time off.
that may be true for some, but others I have seen are highly capable at that age still. And of course in the US we have two octogenarians running to be presidents.
Nuclear families are, by definition, two-generation; 3-generation families are one of the more common things that nuclear families are defined in opposition to.
> A 45 yr old grandparent is an able-bodied helper. A 65 yr old is a dependent....
What are you even talking about? My mother's parents were 74 and 76 when I was born and they were routinely my caregivers several times a week (while my parents were working) until I was about 6, and occasionally after that. That wouldn't work in every family, but the idea that "a 65 yr old is a dependent" is utterly unfounded as a general rule.
> the idea that "a 65 yr old is a dependent" is utterly unfounded as a general rule.
They're either dependent, or able-bodied, or dead. Not sure what the relative percentages are, but I doubt that "able-bodied and healthy enough to provide ongoing childcare for grandkids" is the majority here.
Looking at my area (urban Poland) there's a matter of urbanization as well - plenty of parents in the cities are first-generation city dwellers; their parents live in the countryside. The logistics (and CoL in cities, as GP noted), makes involving grandparents on regular basis prohibitively expensive.
N=1 in my case, we have one grandmother in the city, still professionally active (so limited time), and two grandparents retired and self-supporting, but living far away in the countryside (so unable to help most of the time).
Of my kids’ four grandparents, one recently died, one is massively obese and in a wheelchair, one is lazy, and one is able and willing to help. All are mid sixties to 71.
Anecdote? Look up employment stats in any relatively old country, you’ll find that a significant portion of 65 year olds are still in the workforce. Calling them dependents is ridiculous. And in Asian American immigrant circles, 60+ yr old grandparents taking care of young children is basically the norm.
I don't know enough about Sweden to comment authoritatively. I'm guessing urban prices and obesity are not the main factors in Sweden.
Here, my half-baked intuition is the state takes on a paternalistic relationship with the individual. It undermines family & partners as the primary support system.
Sweden has very-high rates of single parenthood [1] and children outside wedlock [2]. If individuals place low importance on the family as a unit, then I do not see why baby-sitting would appeal to Grandparents (to derive joy or as a duty) In a way, being paid to babysit makes a pure relationship seem rather transactional.
Most people eat worse and exercise less than the previous generation. A small visible minority do a lot more, but that doesn't speak to the health of the average individual.
New GLP-1 agonists might medicate us into good health. But somehow, I am sceptical that it is going to be that simple.
Having gone through this recently with grandparents in their late 60s and 70s, it is absolutely a problem for new parents now. Both my dad and I had our first kids in our late 30s, and now he really struggles to do much of anything helpful for child care, despite wanting to. He has no energy, his poor eyesight and attention to detail make him untrustworthy for anything but "keep the kid in the playpen and let us know if anything happens". Similarly, my wife's parents struggled to take care of one relatively easy 1 year old between the two of them.
Meanwhile some of our friends with late 50s/low 60s parents are able to fully entrust their kid to one of the grandparents and go out for date nights/weekends. My wife and I are able to somewhat compensate for the lack of family help by throwing vast sums of money at the problem, but not many parents can do what we do.
Society messed up big time by allowing late parenthood to become the norm. It's really going to hurt future generations, but it's already making my generation shy away from having kids.
> My wife and I are able to somewhat compensate for the lack of family help by throwing vast sums of money at the problem, but not many parents can do what we do.
We also do this, but in our case the reason is further complicated by the fact that both of our mothers passed away some time ago, and so the kid has no grandmother. She just has two grandfathers, one still working and the other retired but incompetent at child rearing (never really did it with his own kids).
I wonder if cases like ours would have been easier (without money) in a tighter community. We live in a large apartment building in a big city. We live super close to our neighbors, and yet people barely even know each other. I imagine if this was a small village, people might know about our situation and be eager to pitch in (and of course we would do the same for others).
I do think a tighter community would be a much better, universal part of a solution to the difficulties of being a parent in the modern day. Maybe another part of the solution is to have some "buffer" of humans in a community instead of economically pressuring everyone to be a part of the economy. Combine those two and you'll have a more fungible pool of labor that is willing to pitch in for whatever the collective needs. And being tightly integrated into your community probably has beneficial effects on mental health, crime, social harmony, etc.
Because children are growing up less and less connected to their relatives. Not just grandparents but also cousins too [1]. This is contributing (along with 2-income households) to the decline of local cultures and institutions, and the death of community overall [2].
Are Scandanavian grandparents less family oriented? My friend married a Norwegian, she asked the retired mother in law if she could help baby sitting a day a week and the answer was no too busy sorry.
Scandinavian societies in general are completely atomized, even more so than the US. Youngest people in the world to leave the parents home, highest rate of single person households, very few inter-generational households. Basically the same economic logic you have everywhere taken to its conclusion. As Gibson said the future's already here, just not evenly distributed. Grandparents-as-a-service is coming to the market near you.
Almost everyone in Scandinavia during the Viking age were farmers. Only a very few were Viking warriors. So I'm guessing that the vast majority of Scandinavians lived quite similarly to all other farmers of the times at northern latitudes.
Also I'm pretty sure that modern Swedes have more in common to modern North Koreans than either do to the Vikings. They lived in such different times and cultures that I don't really think it makes sense to compare them. Maybe you could ask how cold dark winters affected Vikings and how they affect modern Swedes, but even then the winters were much harder for Swedes 100 years back than they are today when the country is much richer. So really the inhabitants 1000 years back might as well be considered aliens compared to the Swedes of today.
In a farm, with a house building being shared by a large family or a few smaller ones, sharing beds in the same room to keep it warm during winter. Just like anywhere else in Europe at the time.
Compared to the Balkans, Southern Europe? Probably. They have more disposable income to travel instead of babysitting. I'd say they're more financially independent. It's also culture. In Southern and Eastern Europe family is everything. There's pressure from the parents, grandparents onto kids to have children of their own. It's also due to religion (Catholic, Eastern Orthodox) and family values. In Northern Europe (Protestant) once you're grown up, you're on your own.
There are so, so many factors that go into that. While I'm sure you could generalise to some degree, a single case will be meaningless and the variance person to person would be very high (here is an example of some real data but is missing both of these countries: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10519902/)
The immediately obvious factors to me that would all strongly influence this would include:
How many commitments they really have (this might include work, volunteering, friend groups);
How much time & energy they already spend caring for someone else (particularly their partner);
How much energy/general impact of their physical health - e.g. is it easy for them to move around and chase kids;
The age at which the grandparents and parents both had kids will heavily impact all of the above (Quick scan/aggregate of Google images graphs for this suggests this has risen about 5-7 years total steadily since about 1975. We'd now now be seeing the impact of this adding up from both generations pushing the age of grandparents quite a bit older on average);
What the family relationship is like in both directions;
How much that person enjoys or more specifically doesn't enjoy kids in general;
How much free money they have to spend on the care;
Travel time to/from
Speaking from an Australian perspective about your specific example though, once a week seems like a lot of time, especially to make an exacting persistent commitment rather than organising it on a more ad-hoc basis.
We have an absolutely amazing relationship with my wife's parents. As an estimate, they probably end up helping out for at least part of a day in most fortnights and easily 1-2 full days every month, with some months easily double that.
I don't think I'd ask for a persistent once a week. That said, we also have government subsidised child-care and it's affordable for us so we don't really have a need for the regularly scheduled work-days.. our needs are the ad-hoc times that doesn't cover like appointments, school commitments, a random extra work day, school holidays, a date night/concert/party/dinner, etc.
I work full time (but from home, so I get to see my kids when home at least a little), my wife works 3 days (only 2 for our first child) so we also have been happy having them in daycare for only 2-3 days a week.. we are both very keen NOT to have them in daycare every weekday until school age and fortunately are in the situation to be able to do so. If we weren't, the desire for more regular grandparent care over daycare would probably be higher, purely for not having them in a rigid external environment 5 days a week.
But it would not surprise me if once a week or more was normal in some cultures or places. I know some definitely lean more heavily on the family unit than others, and some are also more likely to live in multi-generational houses which would likely lend to making that more likely - no one really has to go anywhere.
It’s certainly also a cultural phenomenon. Most young people in their teens and twenties in the West do not want to start a family at a young age, and not only for economic reasons. It’s a priority to enjoy a lifestyle that’s not compatible with raising children or a marital commitment.
I don't think culturally it's changed to much -- around the mid-to-late twenties is still when most people want to settle down, get married, and have kids.
Of the people in this age range that I know, the more well-off they are the more likely they are currently married and having kids. Those that aren't well-off are not enjoying a lifestyle because they can't afford that either.
I thought this, but part of me wonders if life maybe would have been better having kids at 20.i met someone who was 30 with basically independent kids. And then in your 30s and 40s you actually have money to enjoy the world with. Your also still pretty fit in your 30s, maybe not the peak of your fitness but it's not like we're all going pro at sports.
I had kids both in my early 20s and again in my 30s and being a younger parent was better. You have more of a social life, you have more energy, you aren't as worried about things. I had way less money and lots of things were a struggle but then those were all the best memories. Now money is less of a problem and time is more of a problem.
I think it depends on the person. My 30s were my most fun decade, and I can't imagine doing much of what I did if I'd had kids then. I knew a few people who'd had kids in their early 20s (and one even earlier), but I barely ever saw them during that 30s time period.
I'm in my early/mid 40s now; if I'd had kids in my early 20s I suppose they'd be college-age now, and I'd just be getting back to a more-or-less child-free social life. (Granted, that would depend on all my friends also having done the same thing.)
But I don't have kids at all, and, frankly, I don't have the energy to do much of the stuff I did 10 years ago. If I'd spent the last ~20 years raising kids I imagine I'd have even less energy than I do now.
But at the same time I can't imagine having a newborn now, or even in the past 5 years or so. That sounds beyond exhausting, and I'm not sure I'd be able to do it.
I bet that’s partially it. A lot of people don’t want to use their youth to raise kids, they want to use it to have fun. Nature however intended us to do differently.
It might be sad for the social/economical future, but it’s really not sad for people who are not having kids in their 20s. They might regret it in the future, but as of now, their decisions are pretty solid and logical, if you think about the opportunity loss.
Within my circles, especially my girl friends, are having one child around mid-30s as they don’t want to give up on their careers. Even worse to be completely depended on their partners as that gives them less choices in life. Cannot blame them, it’s easy for me to want a child, but imagining to go through 3 pregnancies (basically to increase the population) in their 20s is giving up on everything that everyone else gets to do at that age.
What opportunity? To be one of the 2% rockstars? To earn 2x median in a city with a CoL 2.5x? End up in mid-late middle age and realize you're going to die alone if you don't act (ladies: if you get here you are screwed on fertility; do not get here unless you 100% intend to)? What is the opportunity value of a spouse and five grown and integrated children when you're 62 and joints worn out? Likely not ending up in a nursing home unless you were an asshat disciplinarian. Government and pension could collapse and you would be relatively peachy. See? Lots of benefits and your children appreciate over time as investments, unlike most things you can blow your opportunity-money on!
One day you will lose your biological faculties and then some day soon after you will die. Caveat emptor, and plan accordingly.
Knowing my girl friends, if you said the same thing to them, they would probably laugh at you and continue enjoying their lives. Like it’s really not that bad out there. There are ups and downs, but we live in decent cities, have fun, find fulfilment in things other than children.
You don’t have to wait that long for this to become an issue. If your parents started having kids at 25, and you start at 25 (late by historical standards but almost early by modern), they’re at least 50, probably even pushing 60 if it’s not the first of the first. Watching very young kids is hard on your back, lots of bending over and picking up. The raw strength required isn’t totally trivial. Even 50 year olds can have trouble with this.
It gets better by the time they’re 2-3 and can walk, but of course other childcare options become more available at that point as well.
I think another side-effect of this is that parents no longer want their active grand parents to participate in looking after their children.
All their ideas about how to bring up children are completely outdated by modern standards, so it's just constant fighting over how things should be done, so we don't even bother getting them involved.
These kind of incentives have definitely helped countering the declining birthrates in Denmark and Sweden.
I wonder why people like Elon Musk and JD Vance often bring up Orban's Hungary and Putin's Russia as examples of countries that are successfully increasing birthrates when Denmark, Sweden, and Czechia have higher (native born) birthrates than both Hungary and Russia.
Pretty hard IMO to say much about the relative effect these policies are having at all, especially if you throw in other countries like Norway (1.4) and Finland (1.3).
There are 8 billion people in the world, on track for 10 billion by 2100. A gradual decline towards ~4 billion people over the next ~150 years is not extinction.
There is the asymmetry between up and down when you're talking exponential's.
Up gets steeper and steeper until something happens. We probably don't want to find out what. The way down has a very long tail.
Japan's population at this rate will decline to 50 million over a 100 years. A lot can happen in 100 years. And it's not clear that the current trend will continue.
I'm sure people on the tip top of the wealth/population pyramid are freaking out that the thing will start getting smaller. I'm dubious there is a net negative for the people on the bottom. Right now rents have been gamed up, labor power is weak. A falling population will reverse that.
In that future, those will _be_ the Europeans :) While heritage is important, culture is predominantly made up by the living.
So if something is important to preserve, pass it on to the next generations (and not just your own children).
Goths aren't extinct, they were from southern Scandinavia and their descendants are Scandinavian people.
Aztecs became the Nahua people in Mexico, there are millions of them so not extinct.
I'm not well versed in Celtic people but I guess it's the same as the Goths and Aztecs, their descendants live today in Scotland/UK/Ireland/wherever they moved.
I learned about JD Vance's existence yesterday (not really into politics) so i'm not going to defend whatever he said or didn't, but nobody in their right mind would set a country population size of Chicago (pretty much all of those above) as a demographic example to US-scale problems, if that's what is being referred to here. Perhaps something was mentioned along the lines of "at least those countries have kids subsidies which are more meaningful to the local COL than whatever measly tax allowances we have here in the US" - that would actually be accurate - but whatever. In reality, not one of the mentioned countries managed to turn anything around yet, all are stuck well below replacement, mostly with pretty bleak trends.
Elon expects every person in his companies to work 70 hrs/week. He situates his headquarters in NIMBY-maxed high-COL cities like Palo Alto. He has practically eliminated maternity leave for Twitter employees (he later reversed from internal pressure) and IVF benefits were slashed.
Elon has time and again shown himself to be hypocrite-supreme. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Pronatalist policies slow fertility rate declines, but do not stop them, and are extremely expensive for the small benefit that results. It is almost impossible to stop birth rate declines when women are empowered, have personal agency and autonomy, and there is robust access to contraceptives.
> “Once a woman receives enough information and autonomy to make an informed and self-directed choice about when to have children, and how many to have, she immediately has fewer of them, and has them later.”
> Our findings suggest that continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception will hasten declines in fertility and slow population growth. A sustained TFR lower than the replacement level in many countries, including China and India, would have economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical consequences. Policy options to adapt to continued low fertility, while sustaining and enhancing female reproductive health, will be crucial in the years to come.
> South Korea spent more than $200 billion subsidizing child care and parental leave over the past 16 years, President Yoon Suk Yeol said last fall. Yet the fertility rate fell from 1.1 in 2006 to 0.81 in 2021.
> The amount of money required to trigger even these small effects is enormous. In "The Economic Consequences of Family Policies," published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2017, researchers found "one extra percentage point of GDP spending" on early childhood education and child care programs was "associated with 0.2 extra children per woman." In the U.S., where the 2022 GDP was $25.46 trillion, that would mean spending more than $250 billion.*
(TLDR There is no political nor societal will to reconfigure economic systems and workplaces, nor incur the economic drag through spending on benefits programs, that would be required to stop the fertility rate decline)
Here's a fix which I think would work well and also be wildly unpopular with wealthy {D,S}INKs: if one is not declared congenitally infertile or dangerously nuts by 30 and have less than 2 non-felon kids at 65 when bennies start (with no good medical reason)? Then no old age entitlements (Social Security, Medicare). The more kids the richer the benefits, after all you had more kids and they're paying more in! {D,S}INKs could have had kids (not infertile, not nuts), but didn't, there should be no siphoning off the children of their peers who did.
takes cover again
ADDENDUM: Also maybe encouraging an 11 girl : 9 boy birth ratio could help things, with better protections for fathers' rights to be more than the responsible payer post-divorce (and maybe just stop forcibly collecting support altogether from those men making less than median and who the woman left no-fault).
There should probably be an option for people who can’t or shouldn’t have kids to avoid pathological incentive, or simple punishment, for something that’s not their fault. There could also be a way for them to pitch in such as elder care that could be an alternative way to build up their “social credit” for retirement, as it were.
But the fact is also that a ton of people just can’t plan that far ahead. Not too sure what to do about that.
To add some context, it is perfectly acceptable in Swedish culture to have a friend of your child's over for a playdate, and NOT serve them dinner during dinner time.
Instead, the child is playing alone in the room while the family eats their dinner.
Are you just repeating a thread that went viral on reddit or have you had personal experience with this?
Because after that reddit post I asked all of my Swedish friends who are parents, none of them said it'd be normal to not serve dinner to their kids playdates. And I don't think anyone said it's happened to them when they were kids either.
In the US a lot of people don't even know who their grandparents are. Lots of broken families and the decline of marriage.
>Today, a new survey from Ancestry, the leader in family history, found more than half (53%) of Americans can't name all four grandparents – demonstrating a knowledge gap in key information about more recent family history.
There's no need to push grievances over the "decline of marriage" when the reason that people in the US can't name all four grandparents is because they've spent their whole lives knowing them as "grandma" and "grandpa", and additionally because it's quite likely that at least one of their grandparents will have died before they've gotten old enough to form memories.
Did you really think "they just call them grandma/pa" was a good argument against people not knowing their grandparents' names? What do you think people in other parts of the world call their grandparents?
I spent 30 years being wrong about my grandmom's given name, because my granddad called her by other name than the official one[0], and in all those decades there was hardly an opportunity for me to notice or for someone to correct me. Grandma was always "grandma".
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[0] - Anna vs. Hanna. Close enough to be ambiguous in speech.
Is some of that just that people tend to refer to grandparents as "grandma" and "grandpa" and not their first names? And maiden names of grandmothers have long fallen into disuse by the time their grandchildren are born, if they didn't keep them?
I think I didn't really know my maternal grandparents' names until they died and I looked at a family tree. My paternal grandfather's name isn't even well-defined: it's been butchered after 4 civil wars & invasions, 2 emigrations, different dialects, repeated anglicizations, and a change in the orthography of his native language.
Pretty surprising to me; haven't you expressed some curiosity about your grandparents or had them talk about their lives. Ever seen your parents birth certificates or marriage certificates?
My kids come from 2 lines of unbroken homes and intact marriages. I moved to SV for a career, so my parents have seen their grandkids 3 times in 3 years. My kids spend the first week they are around avoiding them because they don’t know them, start to build up a relationship right about the time they are back on a plane.
My other grand parents come once a week to hang out with the kids, nanny is off that day. I beg them to take the kids to the zoo, the playground, the library, jumping jacks, a hike, a walk with the dogs. I am constantly disappointed by a grandpa on his phone and a grandma that can’t do all that herself, and I’m stuck working so I can’t do it.
I think “the decline of marriage” or “broken homes” is a symptom. If you’re an American who frequents this board, you’re in some of the roughest late stage capitalism effects on your personal relationships and community relationships that could exist until we see the Wall-e universe.
Not having a multi-generational family to help raise the kids in your neighborhood to help ameliorate the cost and stress of raising kids puts a huge strain on a marriage. Having to work 60-70 hours a week to make life possible to have those kids, with daycare and preschool and all the other costs… it’s a self fulfilling cycle.
The 60s youth barely had 1 parent at home, my generation had none, if the parents weren’t even home why should the grand parents feel any responsibility to help right?
Anyway, something to think about when you’re just blaming “decline” (it’s actually gotten better) of marriage. Some stats:
Currently, the divorce rate per 1000 married women is 16.9.
The divorce rate per 1000 married women is nearly double that of 1960, but down from the all-time high of 22.6 in the early 1980s.
The divorce rate for couples with children is as much as 40 percent lower than for those without children.
An annual income of over $50,000 can decrease the risk of divorce by as much as 30% versus those with an income of under $25k.
Many of my daughter’s (pre-teen) friends are raised entirely by their (GenX or Boomer) grandparents: their parents are either not in their lives at all, or are total neglectful deadbeats, or divorced/fighting to the point where the grandparents had to step in. For quite a few of them, grandparents are the only family they know.
This is also something (anecdotally) common with Gen X parents. That being said, deadbeats have been a relatively common trope since the Silents or before. Is it really that surprising that, now that it's possible for both parties in the parenting equation to be deadbeats, they're taking that option?
This doesn't seem like a new aspect of moral decay: People have always been terrible, and neither sex is inherently morally superior or magically more empathetic or responsible.
It becoming equitable is just another side effect of suffrage and no-fault divorce, something decided upon by the Silents, Boomers and Xers. It's still probably better than the prior situation, but acknowledging the fact that it's a consequence of the legislative choices of society is probably better than just randomly blaming Millennials for something that isn't unique to them.
This article doesn’t speak at all to the fraud potential.
Also the real answer to the question posed in the headline is that the most powerful voting blocks will naturally receive the highest subsidies in a democracy.
I'm sure there will be fraud, but does that matter?
So what if a small percent of old people (that presumably need the money so bad they they are willing to commit fraud)? Better that than gma stealing from local businesses.
The fraud should be a relatively small percent, as gparents should at least prove they have grandkids.
I don't think pensioners are a particularly strong voting bloc in Sweden. Youth election participation is among 80-90% (vs 50% in the US which you may be thinking about) and due to immigration the population pyramid is quite healthy.
Heavens forbid elderly people get some more money every month. How much is it going to be for getting to elderly age and fostering successful children who raised their own children in turn?
It's kind of weird to say "Heavens forbid [the wealthiest age demographic] get some more money every month." Especially when that demo already tends to get a lot of cash transfers.
I make no value judgment on this policy, I’m just pointing out that systems have a natural outcome based on the incentive structure. Or, as Charlie Munger put it much more eloquently: “Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.”
I wish more people, including voters but especially lawmakers, would use this analysis technique more often as it would lead to laws that actually accomplish what they claim.
