> I’m curious what what happen if someone wanted to have ten kids and abused this system, and the mother didn’t work.

Don't take this the wrong way, but that is such an American way of thinking. You guys are so preoccupied with thinking about somebody getting something they don't deserve that you forget about thinking about what is good for everybody else.

Consider this, Nordic countries have generous public services in all walks of life. If we applied American logic to Nordic countries we should expect the following outcomes:

1. Nobody works, because unemployment benefits are so generous. 2. Everybody is on never ending education, because education is next to free. 3. Everybody has 10 kids because of long parental leaves. 4. Everybody is sick and unhealthy because nobody cares about their health because hey health care is free.

Of course no Nordic countries is anything like this. We have the highest work participation rate in the world (more than supposedly hard working Japanese). Nordic people are quite healthy and live long. Most people just have 2 kids. The average birth rate is something like 1.7 to 1.8 in Nordics. In other words we are under replacement.

So our system definitely helps getting more kids as countries with less generous services have much lower birth rates. Look e.g. at developed asian countries how terrible their birth rates are. Yet the generous system does not lead to some abundance of kids.

Let us get real. Having kids is a lot of work. I love my kids to bits but I don't want more than two. I also enjoy my work and other things. So does my wife. Why would we want tons of kids? Some weirdos probably do, but so what? Why should not I and other Norwegian benefit from a great system because a couple of oddballs exist than abuse the system?

Put some trust in your fellow man. People are not all selfish and self centered assholes ready to take, take and take whatever they can get their hands on.

To be fair right wing governments have put time limits on things like paid for higher education.

It is amazing how Europeans like to make fun of Americans for their supposed ignorance of political matters, yet they manage to boast this kind of non-sense that GP wrote. Elternzeit can be for up to 14 months, but it comes with lots of restrictions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22247242 It is not some kind of "cash-for-kids" system that turns wombs into goldmines. Even Kindergeld (~220EUR/month for every child until they are 18) is not really profitable.

As to your gut feel: once you get used to the idea that the Welfare State is something that you can not opt out of and how strong it is at leveling out society, I am sure you wont feel like you are "burdening other people". After I moved here and started leaving 43% of my paycheck to the government, 14% to income-based (not actuarial risk based) health insurance and paying 19% for VAT and seeing how little I was keeping of that "good software engineer income", I started worrying less about my burden and more about how I could get some of my fair share back.

> ...“have two kids and that’s as many as you should have”, and any more would introduce strong social pressure to stop.

I live in Denmark (but I suppose it's somewhat similar in Finland), there is very little social stigma to recieving support from the state.

Because such support is everywhere: child care is supported, parents are given money for each child under 18, when you turn 18 you get educational support, university is free (in fact you get educational support), when graduating you get unemployment support the next month while looking for a job.

I don't think we think of receiving benefits as burdening others, it's more a matter of solidarity. Most people more or less pay off the cost they incur to the state through taxes. So accepting benefits isn't shameful.

Note. it is possible to not get benefits, my little brother said no to educational support during highschool (while he was living at home). It was ~200 USD/month -- but he is a special case, most 18 yearolds do not say no to free money :)

(My little brother later did accept educational support during university ~1k USD / month).

Sweden has an even more generous system and our birth rates are below 2, so... I'm not worried for Finland.

The thing is, kids are damned expensive today. When you are not working, you are forgoing "normal" salary. The mother will get ~80% of the pre-pregnancy salary, up to a limit which is not very high. There are afaik no "virtual salary increases" here, at all. We even have "barnbidrag" and "flerbarnstillägg" meaning you get a small amount of money per month per child, and that amount goes UP with more kids. So if you have 7 kids you get even more money per child than if you would have 2 kids. Still nobody has 7 kids to "make money", because its still a loosing proposition. There is a template about how much a kid costs here until theyre 18, and its about $104,000.

Sure, you could stay at home and being poor for 10 years or so but how much fun is that really? =)

"abused the system"? Fertility rate in Germany is 1.50 at the moment. Every new child will be a precious asset to sustain the future pension system.

Freedom of movement means you can look at the EU rate.

Immigration moves people about quite well.

"We shouldn't make things better because one person might do something weird at some point".

I mean, really, how do people think like this?

The goal is probably more to reach equal pay/opportunity as opposed to any population growth agenda.

When I was in the EU, I knew a woman who had 4 kids, each ~1/1.5 year appart. So she would have a kid, be out 6 month, go back to work for 6 month, have another kid, rinse and repeat 4 times :) .

It was a total nightmare for her employer because they couldn't let her go, and they couldn't hire anyone permanently to do her job. They could only use short term contractors who would stay 6 months (barely enough time to get up to speed) and then leave. I don't know if she was "abusing" the system, I mean, it was her right by law to do that, but after popping the 4th one she left work to be a stay at home mom. I don't know how well her employer took it :)

A smart employer would have hired someone full time to have slack. Especially after the 2nd kid.

Makes sense. Having kids is one thing, but what if she got hit by a bus. You should never be that dependent on any one person. And there are many lines of work where having the employee take some time off helps with making sure that they're doing their work properly and not hiding something. You just have to plan for it.

I don't believe it was that simple. Technically the full time position existed and hiring someone else would have required finding long term budget for another one. It was in a country were firing people is very difficult when they're on a permanent position so when you hire, you have to be sure you can make it work.

what is the cost to the employer of hiring another person just for “slack”?

Looks like it would lead to bloat & waste

Not sure that this was the real intent. Germany was notorious for having many stay at home mothers.

So women had to chose between family and career, which partly explains the low birth rate. Actually it is still the case because school finishes around 2 pm, so many parents (often the mother) have to work part time because of that.

An indirect consequence maybe a decrease of the gender salary gap, but I doubt this was the main purpose...

Could you imagine if you had a really important job you needed doing and the person you hired pulled this. Honestly I'd probably "Expand the team" of people doing the job to two, get the not-a-replacement up to speed and just chalk it up to the cost of doing business that people can play the system like this.

Perhaps it makes more sense when viewed from the perspective of the child?

Every child has the right to spend time with their parents. Every child has the right to an education. And so on. You should not be given less parental time just because you were born with nine siblings. It's not your choice.

I believe the "unwashed masses having lots of children and draining the wellfare systems" is a quite popular far right anti-immigration trope. And while that may even be true somewhere, as long as it remains individual cases, the economic impact on society is still net positive as long as those kids get an education and a job.

According to statistics increased education leads to lower number of child births (and later). At least from what I've read.

So it's all connected, free school and good social support.

As a parent you can never make a profit from it anyhow. There are of course people who don't know how to work and actually don't want to contribute. But they are far apart.

Having both parents be economically unproductive for an extended period of time is clearly not a tenable arrangement in the long term. But the long term, in this case, is measured in tens of generations. In the short term, most developed societies are more than wealthy enough to shoulder such a burden. People would still probably get looked at weird for having tons of kids, but that already happens anyway.

> I’m curious what what happen if someone wanted to have ten kids and abused this system, and the mother didn’t work.

The easy solution would be to have this set up for the desired number of children. 1-3 children: 100% of the benefits, >3: 20% or something similar.