> Vast amounts of money are needed to encourage each extra baby. And handouts tend to go to all babies, including those who would have been born anyway.
> As a result, schemes in Poland and France cost $1m-2m per extra birth.
Note the wording "handout".
> Only a tiny number of citizens are productive enough to generate fiscal benefits to offset that kind of money.
Wealth is not strongly linked to productivity.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press.
--
Then there's lovely line:
> Due to low social mobility only 8% of American children born to parents without bachelor’s degrees end up getting such a degree themselves.
"low social mobility". That is the most cryptic way I've ever seen to say "structural class inequality".
> High-skilled immigration can plug fiscal gaps, but not indefinitely, given that fertility is falling globally.
> Most economies will therefore have to adapt to social change, and it falls to governments to smooth the way.
> Welfare states will need rethinking: older people will have to work later in life, for instance, to cut the burden on the public purse.
And so, instead of addressing the issue of wealth inequality which underpins the class inequality, the people (via the government) will have to do something. Recommending austerity ("older people will have to work later in life"), which never works.
The conclusion of the article seems to be encrypted in statements like that. Decrypting the implications:
1) Poor people are the least likely to have children.
2) Low social mobility means only the wealthy have the luxury of having children.
3) As the wealthy are only a vanishingly smaller percentage of any population, birth rates tend to be smaller than they should be.
4) The wealthy are too powerful to tax and address the issue, and so they recommend pushing the problem onto the people via austerity.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 22.6 ms ] thread----
> Vast amounts of money are needed to encourage each extra baby. And handouts tend to go to all babies, including those who would have been born anyway.
> As a result, schemes in Poland and France cost $1m-2m per extra birth.
Note the wording "handout".
> Only a tiny number of citizens are productive enough to generate fiscal benefits to offset that kind of money.
Wealth is not strongly linked to productivity.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press.
--
Then there's lovely line:
> Due to low social mobility only 8% of American children born to parents without bachelor’s degrees end up getting such a degree themselves.
"low social mobility". That is the most cryptic way I've ever seen to say "structural class inequality".
> High-skilled immigration can plug fiscal gaps, but not indefinitely, given that fertility is falling globally.
> Most economies will therefore have to adapt to social change, and it falls to governments to smooth the way.
> Welfare states will need rethinking: older people will have to work later in life, for instance, to cut the burden on the public purse.
And so, instead of addressing the issue of wealth inequality which underpins the class inequality, the people (via the government) will have to do something. Recommending austerity ("older people will have to work later in life"), which never works.
The conclusion of the article seems to be encrypted in statements like that. Decrypting the implications:
1) Poor people are the least likely to have children. 2) Low social mobility means only the wealthy have the luxury of having children. 3) As the wealthy are only a vanishingly smaller percentage of any population, birth rates tend to be smaller than they should be. 4) The wealthy are too powerful to tax and address the issue, and so they recommend pushing the problem onto the people via austerity.