There's a bunch of criticism, but this is in my view the only general approach that makes sense (globally) and should have been done 50 years ago already.
IMO a big factor for the whole sub-replacement fertility in developed nations (and resulting demographic problems) is that the state has invalidated/replaced all the economical gain that families got from children (cheap "workers" and elder care), but the chld-related costs to families have only increased.
Society gains massively from future workers/tax payers, but economical incentives are not aligned at all; children cost their parents a lot, society reaps all the benefits, but does not compensate parents enough economically.
In the US at least the majority of current elderly (boomers) fought tooth and nail against infrastructure improvements, and when they did happen often funded them with debt to pass the cost off to someone else. The Greatest Generation (WW2) and Silent Generation did the heavy lifting here.
IMO Germany is in a pretty tough spot, and lots of countries will run into similar problems because of demographics.
It is very difficult to diminish pension benefits that were promised 30 years ago (when the worker/retiree ration was 4:1 instead of like 2:1) and almost half your voters would be affected (>40% of voters are over 60).
Any "solution" is going to hurt and feel unfair to a bunch of people and it is very difficult to make "young-people-politics" when most of your voters are old (problems probably need to escalate more to achieve approval for anything that financially hurts retirees).
People sometimes like to point at wealth disparity as a real root cause for the floundering pension/elder care system, but even completely disowning the richest 10% of Germans would fund the pension system for less than a decade, so no easy solution from that direction, either.
> Society gains massively from future workers/tax payers
It seems to me that, all other things equal, future workers/tax payers will lead to economic increases proportional to their costs.
A reasonable forward looking plan / budget scales with the population size. Therefore there would be no need for these special one off exceptions and nudges.
All these little bandaids add up to complexity that necessitates more bandaids.
If your populations shrinks quickly, you end up needing to run the infrastructure (and elder care!) for a whole country with too few working-age people.
This is a massive problem, and some incentive complexity to avoid it is certainly worth it.
You forget the problem that's being solved here. It's not how to incentivize having kids. It's how to increase taxes while reducing pensions. Increasing the obligations of everyone currently working while decreasing what the state provides at the same time.
The full details are: this is an additional 2.5% non-progressive income tax, two thirds paid by employers, one third by employees.
Other "currently proposed" changes:
Active aging: the elderly need to keep working longer.
Elderly care is pushed onto families.
Elderly care is now much less a right that an individual can enforce. This changes the situation to that the state must put in efforts to care for elderly rather than giving individuals the right to elderly care. Right now an elderly person can sue the government if they fail to provide.
Other various rights are being curtailed. Such as the right to "digital inclusion". The state's obligation to provide access to care offline is dropped.
A child might cost its parents somewhere beyond $200k, the parents only get a tiny fraction of this from the state.
And the public paying for education is not a subsidy for parents in my view, but an investment into the children, i.e. future taxpayers (=> the parents don't really gain from that).
I think you are arguing inconsistently here. You can't claim at the same time that we should recognize all of the benefits of children (in their adulthood) and at the same time not recognize the cost to society to educate them. It's a subsidy, a wise subsidy and money well spent, but it's still a cost.
Not necessarily. It's possible that no amount of money would solve this problem. Birth control inherently broke the previously built evolutionary mechanism that insured that the extremely strong built in desire for sex would result in kids. That's no longer the case, and a lot of people would decide to not have kids even if money were no object.
As you point out, Finland famously has incredible family support, and also a birth rate under 1.3.
> Birth control inherently broke the previously built evolutionary mechanism that insured that the extremely strong built in desire for sex would result in kids.
But as has been pointed out poor people still have a ton of kids (relatively)
Now I went to a shitty public high school in the south, but even I remember learning about all kinda of anti-conceptive methods including birth control, condoms, spermicide, IUDs, etc.
Did poor people just not pay attention? Why is it only that wealthier demographics seem to know about birth control?
One possibility is that wealthy people with few (often just 1) child, a stable home life, fewer financial pressures, etc spend a lot more time on the child. And this keeps them out of trouble more often.
Also, a lot of the education around avoiding pregnancy is about the financial future of the child (eg getting present in high school will ruin your life). For that to have an impact, the child has to think they have some kind of future.
This sounds extremely plausible to me, but I would be very careful about conclusions from such studies, because I believe the general expectations of society as a whole regarding child-raising matter a lot and you can't easily quantify that.
Anecdotally, when my grandmother did not birth a child for two consecutive years in her thirties the village priest came to investigate (!!). Expectations have shifted massively since, and the single/dink lifestyle is way more "acceptable" now.
I know a big factor in Korea is social relationships between the genders (expectations about housework, childcare, etc). The current arrangements are not attractive to many women.
not much. the reality is that women still take a hit on their potential careers and income, and are expected to do most of the childcare work. another problem that i see not only in germany is that men are not trusted with children or being capable of doing housework.
also on the attractiveness for women, germany being less traditional means that more women are willing to break traditions, so even if the situation there is better for them, women are still less interested, which means the effect in the end is the same.
I am increasingly of the opinion that you can either be eligible to vote, or collect pension, but not both at the same time.
By the time you start collecting pension, you have effectively ousted yourself from economic production. And unlike a 20yo still in college and not contributing to the economy yet, you don't have 50 more years of your life to worry about. This effectively means it is safe for you to support any short term extractive policies without ever worrying about the longer term consequences.
And demonstrably, this is how pensioners vote — I get to keep my pension, you get to pay more tax. And no we won't let you build any more housing for your beautiful children, we want this town to stay the way it was in 1970. Please come wipe my ass for $15 an hour. And no, don't let people who are actually willing to work that job for that pay immigrate into the country. It's a bunch of feel good policies with insolvable contradictions. Buy because they will not live long enough to feel the backlash, they vote on.
You need to pay taxes and have kids for the numbers to work out.
If your pension benefits are calculated based on a 4 workers/retiree ratio, but then your whole generation has like 1 kid per family then the system will obviously break down...
You’re making a value statement in a discussion about factual information. Regardless of whether you think avoiding children for economic reasons is good or bad, it’s the leading reason cited by people who choose to delay having children. Regardless of whether it’s perception or real, that is the problem the needs to be solved if you want people to have kids.
doesnt mean the solution is bombarding them with free money from the state. in a democracy there is probably no sensible or passable solution regardless.
almost always the case especially in germany where you are already incentivised with super low income taxes, free kindergarten and a shit load of other payments from the goverment. its basically impossible to be poor enough not to afford children unless you are doing it intentionally.
I wasn't aware that Germany had super low income taxes. It is certainly possible to game the welfare system and many people do, but if you want a decent standard of living then you need to be employed.
if you marry you basically half your income tax burden if your partner is not employed. there are also child support payments from the government of several hundred € per month that you get as well as free kindergarten, schooling and higher ed. if you are poor you get money from the state until you hit a minimum income threshhold which together with all the other payments is more than enough to have 2 children.
children will massively compromise your lifestyle, not just financially but they require a lot of "labor" from you. this is probably the most important piece of the social contract and if you are breaking it you should be penalized.
Then why are birth rates falling across all income levels in all countries? Please take the time to research your position.
"This perception, however, is false. In most human societies, poverty does not predict higher fertility, and well-to-do families often have the highest fertility. When families in America have more money, they tend to have more children. The stereotype of fertility being skewed towards low-income women is a product of basically two data analysis errors: 1) failure to control for important underlying cultural stratification, and 2) failure to adequately deal with the relationship between age, income, and fertility."
A simply WILD statement given the rates of children raised in poverty with all the trauma and issues that gives, who then oftentimes grow up to be their parents doing the exact same thing.
> People can afford kids, they don't want to compromise on lifestyle.
Previous generations didn't have to, ours does. So if people don't want to make that compromise, they won't.
Maybe if we made it systemically a bit less awful to be parents more people would do it.
Bullshit. Ignorant people (which correlates to poor) don’t think about the long term responsibilities of having children and just fuck unprotected on a Friday night. Oops
Now sure how things are in Europe where there is a bigger social safety net, but in the US, 36% of adults under 50 describe putting off having kids due to financial reasons.
This is reductive, and incorrect. You simply need working-age people to run stuff, full stop. Approaching a 1:1 ratio of workers/retirees is simply unsustainable (yet), for very obvious reasons.
While wealth disparity is also a problem, solving it would NOT solve this one: In Germany, completely disowning (!) the richest 10% (!!) would not even pay for a decade of pensions.
It's the cost, but also the higher expectations of living nowadays. Social media, phones, computers, trips, etc.
The actual monetary cost of a child is high, for sure. But many people put that number higher due to lifestyle choices, not need. Social media certainly doesn't help.
The median family did not have a computer in the 1980s. I can't find good data but the ones a quick google search returned suggests by 1990 computer ownership was around 20%.
Computers also became ridiculously cheap in real dollars over the years, in the meanwhile education, healthcare, housing all shot up faster than overall inflation.
They could make not having kids more expensive than having them and I still wouldn’t have them.
Most people I know with kids can’t afford them and still have them. And most people I know with money don’t have them. In a way it seems wealth is inversely correlated to having kids. It’s not about money, it’s about having interesting stuff to do with your life, and having the education to know what a terrible economic decision it is to have kids.
That’s as if, in a conversation about the necessity of owning a car to buy groceries, you asked whether being able to afford a car means owning a Toyota or a Maserati.
This is a challenging topic to discuss because (rightly) it's very personal. Sadly the fact of the matter is this: we need more children and young people to keep society functioning (and continually improve our quality of life). There is no other known way. So unfortunately the "free rider" problem needs to be addressed somehow. Of course, the "cruel" part is how it affects those who either can't have children, are gay, etc. I'm not sure how to work through that.
If you want people to have children make it an attractive life choice, or even a viable option. A centrally located apartment in a desirable city with the space to house a family of 3-4 is out of reach for a very large part of the population, financially. That’s _before_ you even consider all of the other costs of having children. Meanwhile our chancellor talks of 70h+ work weeks, while spending hundreds of billions on special military budgets, and also cutting health care funding..
I’m not sure why a central location or a desirable city would be required? If that is more important than having children to someone, by all means, they should make those choices. But if they really want children, like I dreamed of since I was a teenager, then accepting a less costly living arrangement and lifestyle seems like a trivial sacrifice. I sometimes would rather live in a more expensive area, but I definitely would not trade any of my 4 children in order to do that.
If you want to incentivize people to have kids, hand out $500K-1M to anyone who wants to have kids. Don't penalize those who don't.
And yes, kids cost that much.
I'm a senior level software engineer in the bay area. I don't have kids. I don't think I can afford them. I'm tired of people telling me I can afford them. The world works differently today. In the 1980's, if you had a stable job that let you leave at 5pm, you could more or less handle kids.
Today, leaving at 5pm means risking PIP and not having an income; your company may lay off people randomly without notice; your rents could go up 10-20% unexpectedly; groceries could double in price over a couple years; you basically need to be working round the clock to not get PIPed and even sustain an income. And if you work around the clock you also need cash to hire nannies because you don't have the time to raise them yourself. As such I wouldn't even think about kids in this world without having saved up the full sum of my expenses AND their expenses for their ENTIRE life until 21 years old in CASH before even having the kid. We just don't have the job security today.
I have 4 kids and can say that they absolutely do not have to cost that much. Child care is legitimately costly until they reach school age (age 5), but if you use public schools, cook modest meals at home, recognize that kids will survive and even thrive without costly extra-curricular activities, and avoid cities with outrageous costs of living like San Francisco or New York City, then having children is quite affordable. I live in the Midwestern United States. I know many families who live very comfortably on less than $100k per year.
That isn’t to say you should have kids. That’s a really personal choice. And it can come with huge amounts of extra anxiety around job security, for sure. But there are tons of options for arranging life and work to make it happen if one really wants to.
> I have 4 kids and can say that they absolutely do not have to cost that much.
Look, my electricity bill used to be $200/month and it's now $500/month. My water bill used to be $50/month and it's now $120/month. Extrapolate those numbers.
Taco Bell used to cost $5 for a meal, and now costs $14.
My $5 sandwich now costs $15.
50%+ of my income is lost to taxes of sorts.
"Live in the Midwestern United States" and "avoid San Francisco", you say. But there are no jobs there. None that I could get. Everything I could get wanted me to be 3 days/week on site in silicon valley. Jobs that I found in even LA or Boston were literally half the salary or less. Jobs elsewhere were less than 1/3 the salary. Considering more than half my salary goes to taxes, tariffs, and more taxes of sorts, my partner and I really need that cash.
I don't have time to cook every meal at home. I don't have time to see kids. I'd get PIP from my job if I did that. Today's jobs don't let you work 40 hours a week; you need to work closer to 80. At my last job I worked 70 hours a week and still got PIPed. Didn't meet the "bar".
Public schools are expensive. Because you pay for it in housing costs. Wherever housing is cheap, public schools are shitty. I live where housing is cheap, relatively speaking, for the bay. But I don't have kids, so it works out.
My financial planning model works like this.
For every $1 I need to support myself and my partner, I need to earn about $8. $4 goes to <strike>taxes</strike> government laundering, $4 left. For the $4 left, $2 goes to retirement (base assumption is US is now irreparably broken as a country and S&P500 isn't necessarily going to grow in the next 40 years like it did the past 40), $1 goes to my catastrophe fund (in case of very realistic war or AI unemployment), $1 goes towards spending now.
I barely meet that 8x bar. That is my bar to feel safe. I couldn't meet it with kids. End of story.
Same place it always does, just print it. Of course, that still effectively penalizes those who don't want children, but the penalty is less legible to the public so there are fewer objections.
I really don't fucking know. That's not my problem. Either increase my salary by $500K for a couple years, or stop taxing me to death (state taxes, federal taxes, sales taxes, indirectly paying property taxes via rent, taxes disguised as car registrations, tariffs, so many goddamn taxes I don't have any money left to save), stop starting wars elsewhere, stop squandering money, anything.
It's not my problem, really. I'm very happy childless. Unless that money materializes, I can't afford kids.
The final fuck you from the Boomers will be that they will be dying en masse just as the consequences of their behavior really start to bite and it is no longer possible for anyone else to have what they did.
For reference, health insurance + care insurance is super expensive in Germany already (compared to most European countries) and both insurances are mandatory and generally combined. But the system is also super inefficient so a lot of the money is simply wasted on bureaucratic nonsense, making insurers rich, pointless referrals between "specialists" to make them rich, etc. The system actively stimulates waste, if you are privately insured, you get preferential treatment. Which means that if you aren't you get treated like dirt. I've been both private and public insured. I've experienced both.
My own country the Netherlands got rid of the private/public distinction. Everybody is insured via a private insurer. They can't reject patients and patients are allowed to switch insurer up to once a year. Insurers also work with health care providers to make sure money is spent more efficiently. Meaning hospitals can't just offload their inefficiencies onto insurers. And insurers can't just offload that onto patients. Because the patients switch to the insurers with the best relation ships with healthcare providers and the best deal. They all have to provide the same base coverage but you can insure for stuff on top of that.
The Dutch system also has its flaws and deficiencies. But my parents together pay much less than me by myself in Germany. And as far as I can see from their recent experiences, they are well looked after. It seems the Dutch system has a lot less bureaucratic nonsense, better information sharing, more modern hospitals, etc. It also has underpaid nurses, issues with some types of medication not getting covered, and a few other issues. But compared to the expensive German mess; much better.
Germany is mainly legislating to kick the can down the road instead of addressing any of it's structural economic issues: a government bureaucracy that stifles innovation rather than promoting it, a pension system that is essentially a underfunded slow moving train wreck at this point, broken physical and energy infrastructure that will take decades to fix, and a hopelessly inefficient health care system.
As a resident of Germany: I have two kids and would do anything for them, but from a financial point of view, you're way better off without kids in Germany, even if you have to pay these "extra fees". The public pension has already been higher for years for anybody without children.
"The bill would have contributions from childfree adults increase by 0.7% over a period of years, meaning they would pay 2.5% of their income each month. Their employer will be expected to pay 1.8%. For adults with children the rates will remain the same: 1.8% for people with one child, 1.55% for people with two children, and 1.3% for people with three or more children."
I don't have children and this doesn't seem inherently unfair to me. It's an acknowledgement of the care labor these households are doing.
That said, I'd prefer to see it be progressive by income as well. A couple without children in the bottom income decile shouldn't be paying more than a couple with children in the top income decile.
Because the elders haven't extracted enough wealth from younger generations? Because economics has nothing to do with people choosing not to have kids? I'm picturing Germany as Sideshow Bob walking right into another rake.
I'm a childfree adult, and this proposed bill makes perfect sense to me. I see it not as incentivizing people to have kids, but instead as a way to more fairly spread the burden as populations age.
I can easily understand that if everyone went my route (i.e. no kids) that society would collapse by definition, and my later years would be inherently miserable. I'm depending on others that do have kids (and sacrificed a lot in their 20s, 30s and 40s, a sacrifice I was not willing to make) so I can pay for medical and aged care when I'm old. So paying a slight amount more for this support seems highly reasonable to me.
I wonder if we'll eventually see a backlash as population growth continues slowing. In a society composed largely of old people being supported financially (and otherwise) by the younger people, it would be very possible for the younger people to decide they're simply tired of spending their lives subsiding the old people who just put the burden on them instead of fixing the system.
This is very unfair for people that cannot have children. On one side we have the people that can't for biology reasons, on the other those who don't have the economic stability to support a functional family. Also, adopting costs can be very high so it is not an option for many. I won't definitely be voting political parties promoting these measures. There must be other ways.
Thanks for drawing attention to cases of involuntary childlessness.
I'm not sure I agree that it is unfair, I'd need to give it more thought. My initial reaction is that there are all sorts of burdens that we want to incentivize people to take on that not everyone can take on, through no fault of their own. For example, we want people to serve in the military, and we provide all sorts of benefits to people who do, but some people are unable to join the military through no fault of their own (e.g. they are blind).
I don't think so. I believe that there will be some kind of breaking point and young people will just refuse to provide luxurious space communism for pensioners.
Prospective adoptive parents need to assume a difficult years-long process with no guarantee of placement, mid to high five-figures expenses or more (prohibitive for the average non-FAANG Americans), assume major undisclosed and significantly heritable mental health disorders, assume undisclosed in-utero substance exposure requiring challenging and costly care, and be aware of revocation periods up to one year in length.
I've seen people exhaust themselves financially after many years of trying only to be told by agencies they were now above the age limit. I've seen people learn later of a family history of not just Cluster C or even B disorders, but A. I've seen revocation on the last day of eligibility at the one year mark.
International agencies are notorious for not disclosing previously diagnosed FAS, drug exposure, autism, and other major medical issues to the receiving stateside agency a consistent problem adopting out of Eastern Europe, especially.
Too many good homes who would love to adopt are being put off of the process. We need major adoption reform so eligible parents have a relatively smooth process they can trust.
In what way? Here in the US it takes too long and costs too much, but there are lots of charities that assist with this. Otherwise it's fairly straightforward. I say this as someone dealing with fertility issues and in the process of pursuing adoption myself.
I just filled out the comment. And yes, just taking too long and costing to much is already a major hurdle that leaves children in another broken pipeline for far too long awaiting placement when they could be bonding with their adoptive parents.
For all my horror stories I've also seen it work out wonderfully for people, and wish you the best. In my book it's one of the noblest things anyone can do.
Not to mention, cruel towards people who are not financially ready for children and make a conscious choice to not have children without the resources for it, but get financially penalized for it.
The poor have dramatically more children than the rich on average, you don't need to be rich to have kids. Kids don't need to have rich parents to have a good live/upbringing.
The alternative is to increase immigration, which is a giant glowing "easy" button that will solve 100% of problems with domestic fecundity. re: birthrates.
Makes sense since they don’t produce future taxpayers. They should also adjust retirement age based on life expectancy -of course people won’t like this but you can’t overcome the math. Separately, I also think airfare should be in part based on weight.
Childless people have a shorter life expectancy by ~2 years. So if we unsocalize the cost and base it on that factor, people with children should be paying more as they are a strain on the system for longer.
Fair. They need to calculate the numbers and come out with fair payouts. Naively it would seem individuals (children) pay more in taxes than it takes to cover two years.
Two years ago I was booked for a flight with my wife and four kids. I would say the average of all 6 of us at the time was about 85lbs. Not only that, but because we have to fit in a vehicle with all of our stuff, we pack light, at most one roll-aboard each.
The plane was overweight so they were choosing reservations to involuntary bump to the next day and of course we were selected. No amount of reason mattered; if they bumped us based on an “average weight”, they’d be no better off than when they started.
Should people with disabled children pay even more, since they not only fail to produce future taxpayers, but are also a huge burden on the social system? What if your children die before even paying a single cent into the system? People with jobs/hobbies with a high risk of being taken out of the workforce? People with genetic diseases? Or just go straight to the root of the issue: anyone above 60, who can't even dress themselves, we get rid of.
We should really gamify the system as much as possible to make it fun for everyone involved.
There’s a difference between childless by choice and childlessness because of natural infertility, etc. presumably the parents didn’t choose their children to be burdens and so we’d chalk that up to statistical probability.
How do you know they didn't? Some people don't want to screen for birth defects or check for compatibility between themselves. They don't do all preventative measures, don't use gene-editing therapies or do harmful things like drinking and smoking while being pregnant.
There's a bunch of criticism, but this is in my view the only general approach that makes sense (globally) and should have been done 50 years ago already.
IMO a big factor for the whole sub-replacement fertility in developed nations (and resulting demographic problems) is that the state has invalidated/replaced all the economical gain that families got from children (cheap "workers" and elder care), but the chld-related costs to families have only increased.
Society gains massively from future workers/tax payers, but economical incentives are not aligned at all; children cost their parents a lot, society reaps all the benefits, but does not compensate parents enough economically.
You are not wrong. But the reality of this government in Germany is that they are also cutting down on the assistance that parents receive.
With both of those combined they are currently just redistributing wealth to the elderly that have created this mess.
> the elderly that have created this mess
Unbalanced... The elderly also created most of the infrastructure everyone depends upon.
When you get to be elderly, it will be your turn to be blamed.
In the US at least the majority of current elderly (boomers) fought tooth and nail against infrastructure improvements, and when they did happen often funded them with debt to pass the cost off to someone else. The Greatest Generation (WW2) and Silent Generation did the heavy lifting here.
IMO Germany is in a pretty tough spot, and lots of countries will run into similar problems because of demographics.
It is very difficult to diminish pension benefits that were promised 30 years ago (when the worker/retiree ration was 4:1 instead of like 2:1) and almost half your voters would be affected (>40% of voters are over 60).
Any "solution" is going to hurt and feel unfair to a bunch of people and it is very difficult to make "young-people-politics" when most of your voters are old (problems probably need to escalate more to achieve approval for anything that financially hurts retirees).
People sometimes like to point at wealth disparity as a real root cause for the floundering pension/elder care system, but even completely disowning the richest 10% of Germans would fund the pension system for less than a decade, so no easy solution from that direction, either.
Some couples are infertile so this discriminates against them.
> Society gains massively from future workers/tax payers
It seems to me that, all other things equal, future workers/tax payers will lead to economic increases proportional to their costs.
A reasonable forward looking plan / budget scales with the population size. Therefore there would be no need for these special one off exceptions and nudges.
All these little bandaids add up to complexity that necessitates more bandaids.
This only applies in a steady state.
If your populations shrinks quickly, you end up needing to run the infrastructure (and elder care!) for a whole country with too few working-age people.
This is a massive problem, and some incentive complexity to avoid it is certainly worth it.
The approach is completely backwards. You incentivise having kids, not punish those who do not have kids or worse, those who can't get kids.
You forget the problem that's being solved here. It's not how to incentivize having kids. It's how to increase taxes while reducing pensions. Increasing the obligations of everyone currently working while decreasing what the state provides at the same time.
The full details are: this is an additional 2.5% non-progressive income tax, two thirds paid by employers, one third by employees.
Other "currently proposed" changes:
Active aging: the elderly need to keep working longer.
Elderly care is pushed onto families.
Elderly care is now much less a right that an individual can enforce. This changes the situation to that the state must put in efforts to care for elderly rather than giving individuals the right to elderly care. Right now an elderly person can sue the government if they fail to provide.
Other various rights are being curtailed. Such as the right to "digital inclusion". The state's obligation to provide access to care offline is dropped.
Society pays a lot for children as well. Including members without children.
Yes, but not commensurately.
A child might cost its parents somewhere beyond $200k, the parents only get a tiny fraction of this from the state.
And the public paying for education is not a subsidy for parents in my view, but an investment into the children, i.e. future taxpayers (=> the parents don't really gain from that).
I think you are arguing inconsistently here. You can't claim at the same time that we should recognize all of the benefits of children (in their adulthood) and at the same time not recognize the cost to society to educate them. It's a subsidy, a wise subsidy and money well spent, but it's still a cost.
The fact that birth rate is so low in countries with good social security safe net suggests that the society isn't paying enough.
Not necessarily. It's possible that no amount of money would solve this problem. Birth control inherently broke the previously built evolutionary mechanism that insured that the extremely strong built in desire for sex would result in kids. That's no longer the case, and a lot of people would decide to not have kids even if money were no object.
As you point out, Finland famously has incredible family support, and also a birth rate under 1.3.
> Birth control inherently broke the previously built evolutionary mechanism that insured that the extremely strong built in desire for sex would result in kids.
But as has been pointed out poor people still have a ton of kids (relatively)
Now I went to a shitty public high school in the south, but even I remember learning about all kinda of anti-conceptive methods including birth control, condoms, spermicide, IUDs, etc.
Did poor people just not pay attention? Why is it only that wealthier demographics seem to know about birth control?
One possibility is that wealthy people with few (often just 1) child, a stable home life, fewer financial pressures, etc spend a lot more time on the child. And this keeps them out of trouble more often.
Also, a lot of the education around avoiding pregnancy is about the financial future of the child (eg getting present in high school will ruin your life). For that to have an impact, the child has to think they have some kind of future.
'having a child removes your future opportunity so don't have a child until you are ready' resonates more with people with future opportunity.
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Afaik according to research, the only thing that helps is
1. Lump sum, pretty big (like year worth of salary or close) payment on birth
2. Works for first child only.
That's it. So, it kinda works, but very limited. Increasing sum did not increase birthrates, if I remember correctly.
This sounds extremely plausible to me, but I would be very careful about conclusions from such studies, because I believe the general expectations of society as a whole regarding child-raising matter a lot and you can't easily quantify that.
Anecdotally, when my grandmother did not birth a child for two consecutive years in her thirties the village priest came to investigate (!!). Expectations have shifted massively since, and the single/dink lifestyle is way more "acceptable" now.
And often the payment merely changes the timing of the child
E.g. they have "free" higher education in Germany isn't it? Maybe not even just for domestic students?
I know a big factor in Korea is social relationships between the genders (expectations about housework, childcare, etc). The current arrangements are not attractive to many women.
How is it in Germany? I would guess better
not much. the reality is that women still take a hit on their potential careers and income, and are expected to do most of the childcare work. another problem that i see not only in germany is that men are not trusted with children or being capable of doing housework.
also on the attractiveness for women, germany being less traditional means that more women are willing to break traditions, so even if the situation there is better for them, women are still less interested, which means the effect in the end is the same.
I am increasingly of the opinion that you can either be eligible to vote, or collect pension, but not both at the same time.
By the time you start collecting pension, you have effectively ousted yourself from economic production. And unlike a 20yo still in college and not contributing to the economy yet, you don't have 50 more years of your life to worry about. This effectively means it is safe for you to support any short term extractive policies without ever worrying about the longer term consequences.
And demonstrably, this is how pensioners vote — I get to keep my pension, you get to pay more tax. And no we won't let you build any more housing for your beautiful children, we want this town to stay the way it was in 1970. Please come wipe my ass for $15 an hour. And no, don't let people who are actually willing to work that job for that pay immigrate into the country. It's a bunch of feel good policies with insolvable contradictions. Buy because they will not live long enough to feel the backlash, they vote on.
So the plan is to make the cost of living even more expensive for people without kids?
Do they understand the problem in the first place? Many people can't afford to have kids.
I think the thinking is that if you had kids you created future cows for the tax plantation so you contributed more to the country.
Yep, gotta keep breeding more little tax slaves to keep the plantation operational.
But I'm paying taxes for my pension, and my kids will pay taxes for theirs.
I know that the economics don't actually work like this, but this is the social contract.
You need to pay taxes and have kids for the numbers to work out.
If your pension benefits are calculated based on a 4 workers/retiree ratio, but then your whole generation has like 1 kid per family then the system will obviously break down...
> Many people can't afford to have kids
Wrong. Poor people have 0 problems having kids.
People can afford kids, they don't want to compromise on lifestyle.
You’re making a value statement in a discussion about factual information. Regardless of whether you think avoiding children for economic reasons is good or bad, it’s the leading reason cited by people who choose to delay having children. Regardless of whether it’s perception or real, that is the problem the needs to be solved if you want people to have kids.
doesnt mean the solution is bombarding them with free money from the state. in a democracy there is probably no sensible or passable solution regardless.
almost always the case especially in germany where you are already incentivised with super low income taxes, free kindergarten and a shit load of other payments from the goverment. its basically impossible to be poor enough not to afford children unless you are doing it intentionally.
Super low income taxes?
The general income tax brackets break down in Germany is as follows:
- Up to €12,348: 0% (Tax-free allowance)
- €12,349 – €69,878: 14% to 42% (Progressive increase)
- €69,879 – €277,825: 42% (Proportional rate)
- Over €277,826: 45% (Reichensteuer or "rich tax")
Source: https://www.expatrio.com/about-germany/german-tax-system
IMO: that doesn't look "super low".
A better tax system is the one used by Estonia: a flat tax rate of 22%
Source: https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/estonia/individual/taxes-on-per...
I wasn't aware that Germany had super low income taxes. It is certainly possible to game the welfare system and many people do, but if you want a decent standard of living then you need to be employed.
if you marry you basically half your income tax burden if your partner is not employed. there are also child support payments from the government of several hundred € per month that you get as well as free kindergarten, schooling and higher ed. if you are poor you get money from the state until you hit a minimum income threshhold which together with all the other payments is more than enough to have 2 children.
children will massively compromise your lifestyle, not just financially but they require a lot of "labor" from you. this is probably the most important piece of the social contract and if you are breaking it you should be penalized.
Then why are birth rates falling across all income levels in all countries? Please take the time to research your position.
"This perception, however, is false. In most human societies, poverty does not predict higher fertility, and well-to-do families often have the highest fertility. When families in America have more money, they tend to have more children. The stereotype of fertility being skewed towards low-income women is a product of basically two data analysis errors: 1) failure to control for important underlying cultural stratification, and 2) failure to adequately deal with the relationship between age, income, and fertility."
https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-babies-whats-the-...
> Then why are birth rates falling across all income levels in all countries? Please take the time to research your position.
Well yeah, if they are falling across all income levels then not being able to afford children can’t be the reason.
In a complex situation this is perhaps the most idiotic reductive thing you could think. But if you must insist on being reductive than i'd go with:
People could feed kids, but they can't afford to give their child a lifestyle similar to their own childhood.
> Poor people have 0 problems having kids.
A simply WILD statement given the rates of children raised in poverty with all the trauma and issues that gives, who then oftentimes grow up to be their parents doing the exact same thing.
> People can afford kids, they don't want to compromise on lifestyle.
Previous generations didn't have to, ours does. So if people don't want to make that compromise, they won't.
Maybe if we made it systemically a bit less awful to be parents more people would do it.
Bullshit. Ignorant people (which correlates to poor) don’t think about the long term responsibilities of having children and just fuck unprotected on a Friday night. Oops
Now sure how things are in Europe where there is a bigger social safety net, but in the US, 36% of adults under 50 describe putting off having kids due to financial reasons.
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/07/29/fewer-adults-ha...
Asking people why they don’t have children is worthless. We should look at revealed preferences, not stated.
The machine needs more tax payers to keep politicians flying around the world in private jets. Produce tax slaves people, produce them now!
This is reductive, and incorrect. You simply need working-age people to run stuff, full stop. Approaching a 1:1 ratio of workers/retirees is simply unsustainable (yet), for very obvious reasons.
While wealth disparity is also a problem, solving it would NOT solve this one: In Germany, completely disowning (!) the richest 10% (!!) would not even pay for a decade of pensions.
It's the cost, but also the higher expectations of living nowadays. Social media, phones, computers, trips, etc.
The actual monetary cost of a child is high, for sure. But many people put that number higher due to lifestyle choices, not need. Social media certainly doesn't help.
right, its the phones and computers driving the high cost of raising a human being for 18 years + /s
It... literally is? How much money did families spend on computers and phones in 1980?
The snarky nonsense is not helpful, or appropriate, for this forum. Do better.
The median family did not have a computer in the 1980s. I can't find good data but the ones a quick google search returned suggests by 1990 computer ownership was around 20%.
Computers also became ridiculously cheap in real dollars over the years, in the meanwhile education, healthcare, housing all shot up faster than overall inflation.
They don't. Chancellor Merz has an approval rating of 13 %. The German population almost unanimously thinks that he is doing a terrible job (https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-05/umfrage-bund...)
They have no vision for the future and no idea how to bring Germany forward other that taxing the poor.
Sound like “the beatings will continue until morale improves”
The point is to incentivize people to have kids.
The Bundeswehr needs human supplies
They could make not having kids more expensive than having them and I still wouldn’t have them.
Most people I know with kids can’t afford them and still have them. And most people I know with money don’t have them. In a way it seems wealth is inversely correlated to having kids. It’s not about money, it’s about having interesting stuff to do with your life, and having the education to know what a terrible economic decision it is to have kids.
What does "afford" mean in these cases? Do the kids have clothes? Food? Vacation?
That’s as if, in a conversation about the necessity of owning a car to buy groceries, you asked whether being able to afford a car means owning a Toyota or a Maserati.
> it’s about having interesting stuff to do with your life
This is the conclusion I came to as well. I do have kids.
So I wholly agree with the sibling comment "compromise on lifestyle"
You don't say?
You do that by establishing support networks for parents, not by punishing those who don't have or cannot have kids
This is a challenging topic to discuss because (rightly) it's very personal. Sadly the fact of the matter is this: we need more children and young people to keep society functioning (and continually improve our quality of life). There is no other known way. So unfortunately the "free rider" problem needs to be addressed somehow. Of course, the "cruel" part is how it affects those who either can't have children, are gay, etc. I'm not sure how to work through that.
If you want people to have children make it an attractive life choice, or even a viable option. A centrally located apartment in a desirable city with the space to house a family of 3-4 is out of reach for a very large part of the population, financially. That’s _before_ you even consider all of the other costs of having children. Meanwhile our chancellor talks of 70h+ work weeks, while spending hundreds of billions on special military budgets, and also cutting health care funding..
I’m not sure why a central location or a desirable city would be required? If that is more important than having children to someone, by all means, they should make those choices. But if they really want children, like I dreamed of since I was a teenager, then accepting a less costly living arrangement and lifestyle seems like a trivial sacrifice. I sometimes would rather live in a more expensive area, but I definitely would not trade any of my 4 children in order to do that.
If you want to incentivize people to have kids, hand out $500K-1M to anyone who wants to have kids. Don't penalize those who don't.
And yes, kids cost that much.
I'm a senior level software engineer in the bay area. I don't have kids. I don't think I can afford them. I'm tired of people telling me I can afford them. The world works differently today. In the 1980's, if you had a stable job that let you leave at 5pm, you could more or less handle kids.
Today, leaving at 5pm means risking PIP and not having an income; your company may lay off people randomly without notice; your rents could go up 10-20% unexpectedly; groceries could double in price over a couple years; you basically need to be working round the clock to not get PIPed and even sustain an income. And if you work around the clock you also need cash to hire nannies because you don't have the time to raise them yourself. As such I wouldn't even think about kids in this world without having saved up the full sum of my expenses AND their expenses for their ENTIRE life until 21 years old in CASH before even having the kid. We just don't have the job security today.
I have 4 kids and can say that they absolutely do not have to cost that much. Child care is legitimately costly until they reach school age (age 5), but if you use public schools, cook modest meals at home, recognize that kids will survive and even thrive without costly extra-curricular activities, and avoid cities with outrageous costs of living like San Francisco or New York City, then having children is quite affordable. I live in the Midwestern United States. I know many families who live very comfortably on less than $100k per year.
That isn’t to say you should have kids. That’s a really personal choice. And it can come with huge amounts of extra anxiety around job security, for sure. But there are tons of options for arranging life and work to make it happen if one really wants to.
> I have 4 kids and can say that they absolutely do not have to cost that much.
Look, my electricity bill used to be $200/month and it's now $500/month. My water bill used to be $50/month and it's now $120/month. Extrapolate those numbers.
Taco Bell used to cost $5 for a meal, and now costs $14.
My $5 sandwich now costs $15.
50%+ of my income is lost to taxes of sorts.
"Live in the Midwestern United States" and "avoid San Francisco", you say. But there are no jobs there. None that I could get. Everything I could get wanted me to be 3 days/week on site in silicon valley. Jobs that I found in even LA or Boston were literally half the salary or less. Jobs elsewhere were less than 1/3 the salary. Considering more than half my salary goes to taxes, tariffs, and more taxes of sorts, my partner and I really need that cash.
I don't have time to cook every meal at home. I don't have time to see kids. I'd get PIP from my job if I did that. Today's jobs don't let you work 40 hours a week; you need to work closer to 80. At my last job I worked 70 hours a week and still got PIPed. Didn't meet the "bar".
Public schools are expensive. Because you pay for it in housing costs. Wherever housing is cheap, public schools are shitty. I live where housing is cheap, relatively speaking, for the bay. But I don't have kids, so it works out.
My financial planning model works like this.
For every $1 I need to support myself and my partner, I need to earn about $8. $4 goes to <strike>taxes</strike> government laundering, $4 left. For the $4 left, $2 goes to retirement (base assumption is US is now irreparably broken as a country and S&P500 isn't necessarily going to grow in the next 40 years like it did the past 40), $1 goes to my catastrophe fund (in case of very realistic war or AI unemployment), $1 goes towards spending now.
I barely meet that 8x bar. That is my bar to feel safe. I couldn't meet it with kids. End of story.
There are plenty of people in the bay area who have kids who likely make less than you do.
> If you want to incentivize people to have kids, hand out $500K-1M to anyone who wants to have kids. Don't penalize those who don't.
Where does the money come from?
Same place it always does, just print it. Of course, that still effectively penalizes those who don't want children, but the penalty is less legible to the public so there are fewer objections.
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I really don't fucking know. That's not my problem. Either increase my salary by $500K for a couple years, or stop taxing me to death (state taxes, federal taxes, sales taxes, indirectly paying property taxes via rent, taxes disguised as car registrations, tariffs, so many goddamn taxes I don't have any money left to save), stop starting wars elsewhere, stop squandering money, anything.
It's not my problem, really. I'm very happy childless. Unless that money materializes, I can't afford kids.
seems like cope.
you’re probably making like 500k TC
if you’re 30 and worked in tech you should have around 1m nw
if your partner makes 200-400k you can afford to have children
i see arab/muslims and mexicans here with like 3-4 kids. i live in sf, so somehow they’re able to do it without a high paying tech job.
A good way to work through that is by not framing people as free riders in the first place.
I am sure countries will do everything to incentivise the population to have more children.
Except, of course, reduce income inequality, address housing shortages, that sort of thing.
Do you mean something like this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/05/uproar-germany...
But aimed at childless women? To balance things out a bit?
Wow, once again older generations pulling up the ladder on advantages they had that no longer exist for younger generations.
The final fuck you from the Boomers will be that they will be dying en masse just as the consequences of their behavior really start to bite and it is no longer possible for anyone else to have what they did.
For reference, health insurance + care insurance is super expensive in Germany already (compared to most European countries) and both insurances are mandatory and generally combined. But the system is also super inefficient so a lot of the money is simply wasted on bureaucratic nonsense, making insurers rich, pointless referrals between "specialists" to make them rich, etc. The system actively stimulates waste, if you are privately insured, you get preferential treatment. Which means that if you aren't you get treated like dirt. I've been both private and public insured. I've experienced both.
My own country the Netherlands got rid of the private/public distinction. Everybody is insured via a private insurer. They can't reject patients and patients are allowed to switch insurer up to once a year. Insurers also work with health care providers to make sure money is spent more efficiently. Meaning hospitals can't just offload their inefficiencies onto insurers. And insurers can't just offload that onto patients. Because the patients switch to the insurers with the best relation ships with healthcare providers and the best deal. They all have to provide the same base coverage but you can insure for stuff on top of that.
The Dutch system also has its flaws and deficiencies. But my parents together pay much less than me by myself in Germany. And as far as I can see from their recent experiences, they are well looked after. It seems the Dutch system has a lot less bureaucratic nonsense, better information sharing, more modern hospitals, etc. It also has underpaid nurses, issues with some types of medication not getting covered, and a few other issues. But compared to the expensive German mess; much better.
Germany is mainly legislating to kick the can down the road instead of addressing any of it's structural economic issues: a government bureaucracy that stifles innovation rather than promoting it, a pension system that is essentially a underfunded slow moving train wreck at this point, broken physical and energy infrastructure that will take decades to fix, and a hopelessly inefficient health care system.
As a resident of Germany: I have two kids and would do anything for them, but from a financial point of view, you're way better off without kids in Germany, even if you have to pay these "extra fees". The public pension has already been higher for years for anybody without children.
"The bill would have contributions from childfree adults increase by 0.7% over a period of years, meaning they would pay 2.5% of their income each month. Their employer will be expected to pay 1.8%. For adults with children the rates will remain the same: 1.8% for people with one child, 1.55% for people with two children, and 1.3% for people with three or more children."
I don't have children and this doesn't seem inherently unfair to me. It's an acknowledgement of the care labor these households are doing.
That said, I'd prefer to see it be progressive by income as well. A couple without children in the bottom income decile shouldn't be paying more than a couple with children in the top income decile.
Because the elders haven't extracted enough wealth from younger generations? Because economics has nothing to do with people choosing not to have kids? I'm picturing Germany as Sideshow Bob walking right into another rake.
I'm a childfree adult, and this proposed bill makes perfect sense to me. I see it not as incentivizing people to have kids, but instead as a way to more fairly spread the burden as populations age.
I can easily understand that if everyone went my route (i.e. no kids) that society would collapse by definition, and my later years would be inherently miserable. I'm depending on others that do have kids (and sacrificed a lot in their 20s, 30s and 40s, a sacrifice I was not willing to make) so I can pay for medical and aged care when I'm old. So paying a slight amount more for this support seems highly reasonable to me.
An excellent, apolitical(*) video from Kurzgesagt about the current situation in Germany: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-gYFcVx-8Y
It explains how we got there, the problems we are facing, the problems inherent to the proposed/possible solutions, etc.
(*) as in, they really try hard to stay neutral on the topic until the end, in the clearly marked conclusions and opinion section.
I wonder if we'll eventually see a backlash as population growth continues slowing. In a society composed largely of old people being supported financially (and otherwise) by the younger people, it would be very possible for the younger people to decide they're simply tired of spending their lives subsiding the old people who just put the burden on them instead of fixing the system.
Still a draft bill, nothing final yet.
What are the chances it goes through?
This is very unfair for people that cannot have children. On one side we have the people that can't for biology reasons, on the other those who don't have the economic stability to support a functional family. Also, adopting costs can be very high so it is not an option for many. I won't definitely be voting political parties promoting these measures. There must be other ways.
Thanks for drawing attention to cases of involuntary childlessness.
I'm not sure I agree that it is unfair, I'd need to give it more thought. My initial reaction is that there are all sorts of burdens that we want to incentivize people to take on that not everyone can take on, through no fault of their own. For example, we want people to serve in the military, and we provide all sorts of benefits to people who do, but some people are unable to join the military through no fault of their own (e.g. they are blind).
Remember we borrow from future.
Every rapidly aging country (most of them) will need to either do something like this, or deal with a total collapse of social services.
No, the solution is increasing pension age. Funneling money from young to elderly is the opposite of solution.
I mean sure, but that's even less likely to happen.
I don't think so. I believe that there will be some kind of breaking point and young people will just refuse to provide luxurious space communism for pensioners.
What about redistribution of housing and readjustment of older pensions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
This is very cruel towards people who want to have children but can't.
They can always adopt?
The adoption process is incredibly broken.
Prospective adoptive parents need to assume a difficult years-long process with no guarantee of placement, mid to high five-figures expenses or more (prohibitive for the average non-FAANG Americans), assume major undisclosed and significantly heritable mental health disorders, assume undisclosed in-utero substance exposure requiring challenging and costly care, and be aware of revocation periods up to one year in length.
I've seen people exhaust themselves financially after many years of trying only to be told by agencies they were now above the age limit. I've seen people learn later of a family history of not just Cluster C or even B disorders, but A. I've seen revocation on the last day of eligibility at the one year mark.
International agencies are notorious for not disclosing previously diagnosed FAS, drug exposure, autism, and other major medical issues to the receiving stateside agency a consistent problem adopting out of Eastern Europe, especially.
Too many good homes who would love to adopt are being put off of the process. We need major adoption reform so eligible parents have a relatively smooth process they can trust.
In what way? Here in the US it takes too long and costs too much, but there are lots of charities that assist with this. Otherwise it's fairly straightforward. I say this as someone dealing with fertility issues and in the process of pursuing adoption myself.
I just filled out the comment. And yes, just taking too long and costing to much is already a major hurdle that leaves children in another broken pipeline for far too long awaiting placement when they could be bonding with their adoptive parents.
For all my horror stories I've also seen it work out wonderfully for people, and wish you the best. In my book it's one of the noblest things anyone can do.
Not to mention, cruel towards people who are not financially ready for children and make a conscious choice to not have children without the resources for it, but get financially penalized for it.
The poor have dramatically more children than the rich on average, you don't need to be rich to have kids. Kids don't need to have rich parents to have a good live/upbringing.
Do children that are the product of sexual assault count?
The alternative is to increase immigration, which is a giant glowing "easy" button that will solve 100% of problems with domestic fecundity. re: birthrates.
Makes sense since they don’t produce future taxpayers. They should also adjust retirement age based on life expectancy -of course people won’t like this but you can’t overcome the math. Separately, I also think airfare should be in part based on weight.
Childless people have a shorter life expectancy by ~2 years. So if we unsocalize the cost and base it on that factor, people with children should be paying more as they are a strain on the system for longer.
Fair. They need to calculate the numbers and come out with fair payouts. Naively it would seem individuals (children) pay more in taxes than it takes to cover two years.
Two years ago I was booked for a flight with my wife and four kids. I would say the average of all 6 of us at the time was about 85lbs. Not only that, but because we have to fit in a vehicle with all of our stuff, we pack light, at most one roll-aboard each.
The plane was overweight so they were choosing reservations to involuntary bump to the next day and of course we were selected. No amount of reason mattered; if they bumped us based on an “average weight”, they’d be no better off than when they started.
Someone hasnt heard of Goodharts Law.
Should people with disabled children pay even more, since they not only fail to produce future taxpayers, but are also a huge burden on the social system? What if your children die before even paying a single cent into the system? People with jobs/hobbies with a high risk of being taken out of the workforce? People with genetic diseases? Or just go straight to the root of the issue: anyone above 60, who can't even dress themselves, we get rid of.
We should really gamify the system as much as possible to make it fun for everyone involved.
There’s a difference between childless by choice and childlessness because of natural infertility, etc. presumably the parents didn’t choose their children to be burdens and so we’d chalk that up to statistical probability.
How do you know they didn't? Some people don't want to screen for birth defects or check for compatibility between themselves. They don't do all preventative measures, don't use gene-editing therapies or do harmful things like drinking and smoking while being pregnant.
basically "you WILL have children so ours can have slaves to exploit (and if you don't we'll just exploit you more now)", lol, lmao even
Ah yes, let’s funnel more money to pensioners!
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