> But why would they actually risk hiring young women of child bearing age?

Why would they risk hiring young women, regardless? With mandatory parental leave some of the risk of absenteeism shifts to men, which means women are comparatively less of an absentee risk. Likewise, the costs (onboarding, insurance, etc) are also shared across the sexes which makes women comparatively less costly to hire.

Whether society is overall better off is a different question. And whether women come out ahead is still ultimately an empirical question. But "gotcha" arguments about how the unintended consequences of such well meaning policies will have the opposite effect aren't very persuasive to me.

How is it the opposite effect? I’m merely saying that such well-meaning polices can have other consequences. Perhaps it’s still beneficial to society overall but I don’t like to pretend that we can get something for nothing.

In general, I’d like to think we could define generous parental leave policies that a) don’t achieve their ends by forcing consequences onto businesses and the labor market, b) don’t tie parental benefits to insurable earnings.

Seriously how messed up is (b)? Sorry, you had a hard time holding down a job last year, so we’re going to give you much less than the person who doesn’t need it.

Yeah, except they have nationalized health care.

Much different bucket than America's contracts without bennies.

Yes. But employers still generally provide dental and drug coverage.

I don't know anyone who has been bankrupted by an emergency dental surgery. I'm sure they exist, but generally dental in Canada is something you can pay for out of pocket without costs being ridiculous.

I’m simply pointing out the down side to the equivalently “meaningless” argument that backfill contracts are a good on-ramp. I’m not claiming that the consequences of the policy overall are positive or negative — you’re reading that in.

I haven’t written “just an opinion”. It’s self-evident that the generous mandatory policy changes incentives for businesses. My data itself is anecdotal of course, so the extent of impact is unknown — but I felt it important to clarify that these policies are not without negative effects (in addition to the obvious positive ones).

It’s not helpful to say you’re providing numbers, and cite only Canada’s fertility rate. And? A much more useful number would be the number of temporary jobs vs. permanent. Unfortunately, in Canada temporary jobs have been growing much faster than permanent positions over the past twenty years [1]. (Not a hard connection, but Canada’s major parental leave change coincidentally came around 2000, which made it 52 weeks.)

Obviously I understand there are many factors at work there. But this is probably one. I similarly understand there are many factors that cause public institutions to hire contractors. I pointed that out only to highlight that it’s not just “bad actors” engaging in this behavior.

On that note, if government has sufficient incentives to kill permanent positions in favor of temporary ones (and you cite this), then isn’t self-evident that additional incentives in private industry would also lead to more of that behavior broadly? Of course. Is society still better off? IMHO probably, but 18 months seems excessive.

I think if society truly values early childhood development, there are ways to support parents other than forcing private businesses to “keep a position” for years.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/temporary-workers-employmen...

US has no similar policy. But haven’t contract positions grown here too at the expense of temporary ones?

Dunno. I suspect the US and Canada are very different both from a policy perspective, i.e. many states are “at will” (Canada has more labor protection, including things like mandatory severance), and how they measure “temporary”. The numbers in this graph at least are lower overall [1], and similar to 20 years ago. Doesn’t feel sane though. Teasing all this apart is probably an economist thesis though.

[1] https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/2016/07...

> Canada's fertility rate is estimated to be approximately 1.6 children born per woman[1], and I'm fairly confident in my guess that the people who have children in excess of the average are disproportional unemployable people on social welfare, given that is presently the state of the things in the very similar Commonwealth country I reside in, Australia.

This is also why I don't buy the arguments common from millennials regarding why they're choosing not to have children. Setting aside the fact that such choices are hardly as selfless as they appear, the people I would most want to have children are the very ones both economically capable and ethically willing to be so considerate. This is true even if (and I assume it so) the decisions of other less consideration-capable people are entirely independent.

More concretely, if you're concerned about global warming, the carrying capacity of the world, ecological stewardship, etc then one of the worst things you could possibly do is not have a family. Whether to have your own biological children or adopt is a more complex issue, but suffice it say simply choosing not to have kids doesn't further the supposed ethical goals. That's less living what you preach and more an abdication of responsibility.

Whoa nelly, that is a tough argument to make in the face of a global rate of natural increase (RNI) of 1.06 (that's 6% being added year-over-year on top of the last census population of the 7.53 billion we've measured in 2017).

If you consider making sure your own particular genepool sustains, as your prime directive, then sure, power to you. When it comes to sustaining humanity, then there is something to be said about sustaining global resources, relaxing supply, improving literacy levels, maximizing public funds, human happiness indexes, etc. that have all long correlated lower population densities with better outcomes.

But if you want to sustain political policies that benefit the environment, you need to ensure that your political preferences carry forward into the next generation. The poor and uneducated are far more conservative than other groups, especially with regards to the environment. Understandably so as they're focused on getting ahead.

So long as there exists substantial income inequality in a nation, such as is the case in the U.S., the middle- and upper-middle class need to literally raise future generations of themselves. Otherwise they're de facto abdicating political power to the rich elite and poor masses. And even if eventually the poor masses produce what will become the new middle class, there can still be substantial regressions in political values in the interim, which in the context of accelerating global warming is extremely costly. We've literally seen this--as income inequality has grown in the U.S., and as the stable middle-class has declined, we've become a much more conservative nation.

There's no more effective way to perpetuate your values than through your own children. Education of other people's children is not very effective or efficient, at least beyond basic skills like reading and writing. Ask any teacher, especially teachers with children of their own. And in any event people who don't have children aren't engaged in those aspects of our society designed to socialize the young. If you are intent on educating other children, what better way than to have empathetic children of your own who can model your values and keep you productively engaged?

I'm not arguing that educated and conscientious groups need to somehow out reproduce everybody else, or even match the reproductive rate of other groups. I'm certainly not saying it's a genetic phenomenon, or that it's equivalent to genetic-based phenomenons in terms of the role of reproduction. But having no children whatsoever and persuading similarly situated people to abstain, well that's a different matter entirely.

The fact of the matter is that we know the more educated, wealthy, and independent people are--especially women--that the fewer children they'll have. We see it across cultures. That's good. But it also means that in the presence of disparities in those factors, there exists a dynamic that slows down the reduction in reproductive rate.[1] To accelerate the reduction in reproduction as well as other ecological pressures (reduced carbon consumption, etc), you have to strategically ensure that political policies which diminish inequality, and which in the interim directly mitigate global warming, persist and expand. In democracies where every vote is nominally the same, where educated groups have higher rates of voting and political participation, and where both political preferences and economic mobility are sticky across generations, you can't ignore the implications. At best advocating for fewer children is pointless as it'll happen regardless; at worst it's counter productive.

[1] I bet there's a correlation between rate of slowdown in reproduction with low Gini coefficients. For example, Japan. I haven't tested it but I'm gonna put it on my todo list. (Immigration is a confounder in terms of reproduction rate, but I bet it also tends to positively correlate with inequality, and in any event the destination for immigrants are richer nations with much higher per capita resource consumption... but I digress.)

>The poor and uneducated are far more conservative than other groups

so... this is a meame that seems really weird to me. I've heard a lot of people opine on why the poor do, in fact, vote against public benefits and for huge tax cuts for the rich.

But the data doesn't back it up. Pretty consistently, poorer people tend to vote democrat, and wealthier people tend to vote republican. This was true in the last election, too. And this is exactly what you'd expect, considering.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps...

> There's no more effective way to perpetuate your values than through your own children. Education of other people's children is not very effective or efficient

The former may be effective, but considering the effort and resources it takes to bring up children and the impact additional people will have on the environment, it is at least possible that it is not efficient at all.

To anyone living in the West, the best thing to do for the environment is to NOT generate another human that produces 50 times the CO2 than every other human in second and third world countries.

You fail to articulate as to why having kids would be beneficial for the environment. Sorry but you sound like a bitter parent envious of other people's time and freedom, you know, misery loves company. Are you also worried about the disappearance of the white race and the replacement by immigrants?

Having a kid or not isn't selfless or selfish, is simply not anyone's business except for the two involved.

Environmental problems won’t be solved by conservation, it’ll be solved by the next generation of engineers.

... engineers who will still be there, just less white and western than you're used to.

There will still be a next generation if Millenials and post-Millenials in developed economies decide to not have children due to environmental concerns, just like there was a next generation after the baby boomer women took to their careers with as much dedication as men.

There will be a next generation. End of story. But its superstar engineers won't be white.