A few tumbleloggers ran with quotes about Ben Stein’s Fortune article Assessing the net value of children. Unfortunately, rather than excerpting Stein’s piece, they excerpted an ax-grind post at Reuters by Felix Salmon - which did more to miss Stein’s droll humor and criticize him for the sin of lamenting the struggles of a higher social class rather than a lower one - than to explore the underlying question: on a whole-cost basis, is it still ‘worth it’ to have children?
Joe Weisenthal weighed in at Business Insider, noting it was almost uncontroversial “that the high-cost of kids explains falling birthrates.” That said, if your society’s goal is to have more children, what can be done? Enter Land of the Rising Sun Son.
Japan, confronting a resource crunch for would-be child-bearers, coupled with a rapidly aging population, is floating an annual per-child grant of ~$3400 to ease the burden. Maybe Stein could pick up some more cash by syndicating the article to 朝日新聞.
A more interesting question is what to do if the phenomenon effects mainly one class. If the birthrate is dipping especially among the upper-middle/professional class (I don’t know that it is, but let’s assume) - do we just let it play itself out? After all, they’re hardly victims in any typical sense. Does valuing diversity suggest we should do something otherwise unpopular (targeted child-related tax breaks for some six figure types) to induce behavioral changes (as we’ve done to mixed results in housing)?
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