We already heavily subsidise child-rearing through taxes and other benefits. As I said elsewhere, there are mechanisms for supporting parents already. If you tried to let any other charitable endeavour take over your work schedule, you wouldn't expect your compensation to remain unaffected.
I'm not resentful at parents. It just seems completely unfair to make childless employees subsidise this adventure, as if they didn't already do it through 40 years of tax contributions.
Besides, let's not pretend that people choose to have kids as a service to humanity. I've never, ever heard anyone claim that. People have kids because they're fun, and because making them is fun.
The US and most other Western countries run huge budget deficits at essentially zero interest costs. This is only possible because creditors have full faith in the ability of future tax payers to meet debt obligations.
In light of that, I’d say the overall balance is that those with children are massively subsidizing the childless.
Taxes are perpetual and mandatory. It goes towards subsidizing other people’s genes and then the childless have to be thankful for that.
Let’s not forget the children who grow up to be thugs and criminals. Not every fruit of the loin is a productive member of the society. I find it appalling that after 12 years of subsidied education, they still want free education, housing is a human right and most haven’t even paid off the cost of society paying for them ..never mind paying it forward for the next generation.
This isn’t about macro economics at all. This is all about religion forcing women to breed and the tyranny of scrotums to see who can pee farther most into the gene pool.
However a contract does exist between the parents of the child. With the male..due to the lack of anatomical bits to carry a fetus to term within his body or capable of feeding said offspring through mammary excretions is responsible for the well being of the offspring. Financially or otherwise. Because. Biology.
In the jungle, when the alpha male is unable to provide for the litter, he gets displaced. Insect brains seem to be far superior with reasoning. Clearly mammalian instincts are not up to scratch when it comes to collecting on contracts. The female praying mantis being more sensible simply devours the male after mating. The male drone bee breaks off its penile appendage and free falls from above while in the throes of a kamikaze orgasm. Homo sapiens get to go to a job and support a child. Do it. If you can’t, don’t do it. There is no societal contract to nourish the fruit of strangers’ loins.
Dear men, please curb your ejaculation. And if you can’t, make enough to support your mutated chromosome financially and when a pandemic comes around the corner, man up.
There are no contracts stating the the companies in the S&P 500 must perform enough in the future to support the current market cap of the index, but still the index is where it is.
The market is forward looking, and children are implicit in that valuation.
The rest of your post, again, seem to sidestep that argument.
Assumptions and math make market valuations, including bonds.
But I'm not even sure you are attempting to argue in good faith, so I will check out now.
The accusation reg lack of ‘good faith’ also makes no sense. Good faith is only relevant if both of us are in agreement according to contract law.
I am pretty sure that I disagree with you. No need to beckon ‘good faith’.
Markets don't care about any particular specific implementation of children; the market just cares that there will be children, of some average productivity level to maintain economic growth. Sure, if we went full eugenics, markets would likely shift to expect a much higher productivity level in future generations, but... that seems like a pretty obvious outcome.
> Good faith is only relevant if both of us are in agreement according to contract law.
I think maybe you're talking about the legal definition of "good faith", wherein the rest of us are talking about the "don't be a dick" definition. Not saying you're being a dick, but it does feel like you're willfully misunderstanding the parent's argument.
To you, kelnos:
1. Sub replacement fertility rates in countries like Italy has already led to Natalist policies.*
2. The world will do better economically with a lower fertility/sub replacement rate. Why? Because the notions of money and currency is changing. Automation will reduce jobs and wages.
3. When technology will replace human labour faster than ever before in our history, we can no longer relate to replacement rate of population as an indicator of economic growth.
4. With eventual UBI adoption and possibly crypto that will change how we see ‘money’ as a financial construct, the old rules NO LONGER APPLY.
5. Being in the middle of the sixth extinction event and being a super apex predator, a higher population is guaranteed to accelerate our extinction as a species sooner than a sub replacement fertility rate. 6. In the event of a catastrophe or unforeseen disaster, we should have our genetic material preserved in a gene vault. Like a seed vault. 6. If the climate crisis becomes worse before it becomes better(which it is guaranteed to be..), then we need a robust, healthy population that will likely have to deal with a nomadic lifestyle. 7. We are no longer at the mercy of good old fashioned boinking and breeding to perpetuate the human species. We need to protect our environment instead of looking to perpetuate our own gene pool. 7. HALF a surviving child per person or a replacement fertility rate of 1.00/woman should bring us back to carrying capacity of our planet.
8. It is also likely that we will discover anti ageing technologies and perhaps even become hybrid carbon-silicon based life forms.
We can’t breed ourselves to extinction. At the current rate of consumption due to exponential population increase, if we don’t control population before the inevitable depopulation occurs in terrible and devastating ways, we won’t have any resources left in the only planet that sustains life as we know it.
*[..]Some governments, fearful of a future pensions crisis, have developed natalist policies to attempt to encourage more women to have children. Measures include increasing tax allowances for working parents, improving child-care provision, reducing working hours/weekend working in female-dominated professions such as healthcare and a stricter enforcement of anti-discrimination measures to prevent professional women's promotion prospects being hindered when they take time off work to care for children. Over recent years, the fertility rate has increased to around 2.0 in France and 1.9 in Britain and some other northern European countries, [..]
[..] In Italy, for example, natalist policies may have actually discouraged the Italian population from having more children. This "widespread resistance" was the result of the Italian government, at one point,[when?] taxing single persons and criminalizing abortion and even contraception.[..]
European analysts hope, with the help of government incentives and large-scale change towards family-friendly policies, to stall the population decline and reverse it by around 2030, expecting that most of Europe will have a slight natural increase by then.[..] <—- if this isn’t eugenics, I don’t know what is...whatever economic benefit increased population has, immigration and automation tech will compensate.
That's the thing -- you won't actually go volunteer with the homeless. (Or at least, 99% of us wouldn't.) But parents actually have to change those diapers. If there's a little kid running around in the background of that Zoom call, someone is doing a lot of hard work to keep the kid alive. And unlike volunteering at the homeless shelter, they can't just decide they don't feel like it.
This was in response to the parent post:
> an essential service that some people perform to ensure that society as we know it can continue to exist
If this was the reason why parents get a free pass, people who provide essential services would also get to do it on their employer's dime, at the expense of their colleagues.
My point across this entire comments section is that this privilege is arbitrary. A lot of people do hard work for all sorts of important reasons, but when they miss work, it gets mentioned in their performance review.
You’re framing this discussion as something you flat out don’t accept as reasonable, despite the thoughtful responses in the thread.
Is there any point in actual engaging, or have you already made your mind up?
Perhaps, rather than repeatedly and blindly repeating your view over and over, like you might somehow convince parents that they’re bad humans who deserve to be punished, try considering the views of the others here...
This a pandemic, if there was ever a situation where the situation was a bit more complicated and a bit more empathy to the circumstances was required, this is it.
Parenting in the pandemic is a systemic problem. And even in non-pandemic times, we have public schools, child services, parental leave, etc. The national guard and jury duty are likewise systemic problems; we need lots of guardsmen and lots of jurors.
Homelessness is a systemic problem, but the particular way you choose to do community service (or not do it) is for you to sort out mostly on your own.
They do. They're called government employees, and they are paid by taxes at the expense of everyone.
(1) I chose not to have children, and
(2) I find it unfair that I'm expected to work longer hours for the same compensation/work profile.
Is that it? ... No, that's not it. Your position assumes that:
(1) Child-rearing is some a-priori, guaranteed good, and
(2) That it apparently should be subsidized by employers,
(3) and (both implicitly and explicitly, from you and others) at the expense of their non-child having coworkers.
Am I getting something wrong, or missing something?
I absolutely think parents should get a break during the pandemic. I think everyone should. The work people are doing here to act like we should worship the ground parents walk is easily the most shocking thing I've witnessed.
Honestly, it's not at all a stretch to say you basically insist parents get extra compensation (in the form of extra paid vacation). Call me whatever name you want, but people are well within their rights on this, of all places, to raise an eyebrow.
---
The other generous interpretation is that there is some base assumption that we ALL (parents and non-parents) should running ourselves at 90+% capacity. And that children are an accept caveat since parents are usually at 100% capacity. What a terrifying dismal way to look at life. I hope that's not it.
When you say "longer hours" do you mean "longer hours than I worked before COVID" or "the same amount of hours, but longer than parents will be working during COVID"?
If you mean the former, then you need a better employer, because agreed, you should not be required or expected to increase your work hours due to COVID, for any reason, and certainly not to pick up the slack caused by parents losing productivity.
If you mean the latter, then this just sounds like entitled whining. Your life has not changed because parents get more flexibility. It's exactly the same as it was before.
Parents don't get to stop taking care of their kids. I know quite a few working parents, and I guarantee you that they don't want to take time away from work for child care right now. But they have no choice. You are incredibly lucky that you aren't a parent right now; take that blessing as your "subsidy" and stop complaining about things that don't actually affect you.
Parents deserve extra flexibility.
So do single people working from their bedrooms, 50 hours a week, thinking about alternatives to this existence regularly because they have literally nothing else going on and don't have the vacation to take to get away.
So do people in relationships who are trapped in tiny, tiny SF apartments with no room to breathe in, when OH ALSO, your city is constantly filled with the noise of sirens because your police department keeps gassing your neighborhood.
Everyone deserves extra flexibility right now. Acting like your kid is some exception while calling me entitled is something else.
Reading these threads, I think the conversation has blurred COVID and non-COVID times. COVID has highlighted how much leeway parents get in general, regardless of whether people think they should/should not get it.
How, exactly? It feels like the glass-makers fallacy every time this point is expanded on.
> Anyhow, try the empathy thing out
empathy means "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another"; you assume this isn't the case because others draw a different conclusion to you own. What If others understand perfectly well? From my perspective the phrasing "try the empathy thing out" is pretty patronising, leading me to conclude you either lack empathy on that point, or else wanted it to be that way; it's possible to be (if not act) empathetic while acting vindictive.
>I absolutely think parents should get a break during the pandemic. I think everyone should.
I am alone. I am completely alone. Completely socially isolated. And being expected to work 50 hours a week, as always, in my home. I get no extra time off. I get no allowances for a screaming kid in the background.
I THINK PARENTS SHOULD GET A BREAK. And I think everyone should equally.
Point-of-fact, only parents are the people in this thread demanding something and acting entitled and the fact that no one can respond to the arguments without resorting to name-calling just drives that point home.
Tell that to all the children born into poverty with parents who don't want them/are indifferent to them, and to the communities they inhabit who bear the fallout.
(This is in the context of supporting making parent leave available for non-parents).
Note also that parents did not choose the situation we are currently in. This is not a matter of lifestyle choice. The lifestyle we chose when we decided to have kids included the expectation of childcare during the day and that is what is failing here.
Parents actually have to have kids to be in a position of caring for a dependent.
What if I have no children but I have a grandparent who is ill and requires care. My point is that if employees with families require support during these hard times, there are probably many who don't have children who also have changed their lives due to this pandemic. Perhaps we should relax the expectations for EVERYONE and not find one circumstance more special than others.
I (also as a non-parent) have been mostly ok, but I've been taking more Fridays off than I would otherwise, just to have some more recharge time.
But I don't think there's necessarily a one-size-fits-all allowance solution. Taking care of a grandparent does not require the same time commitment, and, crucially, the same lack of control over one's schedule, as child care. Barring emergencies, you can schedule when you take care of your grandparent. With children, you are on call all day long, and kids can and will interrupt you for whatever (or no) reason. You can't just put them in a room by themselves for 8 hours and expect things to go well. Hell, with most young kids you can't even put them in a room by themselves for 30 minutes and expect things to go well.
At least where I work you are entitled to the same leave that is being offered to parents to help anyone in your family/household/etc.
"Perhaps we should relax the expectations for EVERYONE and not find one circumstance more special than others"
Like other parents I made it clear to my boss that if I was required to work from home my productivity would be lower because there is a toddler running around my workspace. It is not that my circumstance is "more special" as much as that I am being required to work from an environment that makes work more difficult. My company operates a large system of offices for the purpose of providing employees with a workspace that improves productivity and I have been forbidden to enter any of those offices for six months.
(Just to be clear on what it means for a toddler to play in your workspace, given the opportunity my son will try to "type" on my keyboard and wreak havoc on whatever code I am writing. If I close the door, he will start banging on it and then crying if nobody opens it up. If I step into the kitchen to get some coffee he will chase after me and demand that I read him a book, and if I go back to my workspace he will start crying. My son is starting to figure out doorknobs and it is likely that by the end of this month I will not actually be able to keep him out of my workspace by closing the door.)
Well, why shouldn't it be?
> I'm not resentful at parents. It just seems completely unfair to make childless employees subsidise this adventure, as if they didn't already do it through 40 years of tax contributions.
Those children will later subsidize many childless people's retirement, either through contribution to pension funds or simply by keeping the world going.
> Besides, let's not pretend that people choose to have kids as a service to humanity. I've never, ever heard anyone claim that. People have kids because they're fun, and because making them is fun.
As I wrote earlier, it can be both a choice and a service to society/humanity.
It depends where you work, but potentially? I work at one of the FAANGs and we can take up to 20hr/y of work hours for volunteering.
A lot of companies will happily let you do that. Microsoft and Google even donate in $ for every hour you volunteer, up to a certain limit.
It seems that situation, wherein you cannot reduce or substitute your working hours as an individual to instead volunteer, is what they are commenting on. Parents are being allowed to do this with their parental duties, which seems to be the perceived unfairness.
You don't have to help the homeless during the work day; that's a choice. But parents don't get to decide not to care for their children during the work day, when school/daycare/etc. is not available.
> It just seems completely unfair to make childless employees subsidise this adventure
How is that happening, though? As a non-parent who chose to work from home most of the time pre-COVID (despite HQ being a 30-minute walk from home), my work life is nearly unchanged due to COVID. I get up, work 8-10 hours, and then go and do whatever I want (obviously "whatever I want" has been curtailed due to COVID, but that's not my employer's or parent-coworkers' fault). I'm not "subsidizing" anything when a parent gets more flexibility during their work day due to child care obligations. The thing that changes for the company as a whole is that projects take longer to complete because many employees have taken a productivity hit, but that's no skin off my back.
> Besides, let's not pretend that people choose to have kids as a service to humanity. I've never, ever heard anyone claim that. People have kids because they're fun, and because making them is fun.
Agreed, and as a non-parent I can't help but roll my eyes whenever a parent tries to tell me what a grand service to humanity their child-rearing is. But, at the end of the day, humanity would cease to exist without people having kids, so regardless of their actual motivation, they are providing a valuable service to humanity.
maybe? at my company we get a few days worth of "VTO" (volunteer time off) per year. so if you worked here, you could absolutely do that.
People don’t have kids directly to service humanity. But the bet effect is kids do benefit humanity. It’s worth supporting. In fact it’s quite sad how low the birth rate has become among those that can afford to have kids.
I kind of want our race/country/planet to continue existing even if I can’t.
I want to emphasize that a sustainable average number of children per family is not zero [0] but around 1-1.5 for a sustainable population size in 100 years, according to the linked article. So given that you presumably live in a developed country (well educated, and don't need children for labour), and have a human's normal biological urges to reproduce, it's not immoral to produce children, but it's certainly not morally commendable.
[0] https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/yes-overpopulation-problem/
I also think we should work towards preserving genetic material so in case of a catastrophe we will still have a diverse human gene pool.
This couldn't be further from the truth. I don't know anything about you but I can confidently say for every person like you, there are 5 that have a lot of kids purely out of inability or unwillingness to try not to. We are so far from not having enough children that your service to humanity is nothing but a stroke of your own ego. If you really, truly believed what you're saying, would you give up your right to have children under a guaranteed contract that someone else would in your place? Probably not.
Your comment would be completely correct if the children ceased all communications and transactions with the parent upon entry into the labor force; but that's not what happens.
In fact, your entire existence as an old person will be completely dependent on those kids working.
Non-parents get many benefits from children, but the parents get far more. To be clear, I think many of the arguments for subsidizing the rearing of children are coherent, such as arguments in favor of public schooling and healthcare (on the basis that the children are the primary beneficiaries), but I think those arguments do not apply to the parents' workplace.
Regardless of any direct benefit to me, I am willing to accept parents getting some small benefits that I will not as a childless person as an overall investment in society as a whole.
I empathize with parents, but please don't make it sound like it's a selfless act they are doing for the good of society.
Also, childless couples/singles get taxed at quite a high rate (after any returns) vs parents. You compound that over 21 or whatever years it takes for kids to become "productive". Furthermore, people who choose to stay childless still have to work and pay higher taxes till the age of at least 66 in US. Life expectancy for males is 78, so that gives you 12 years. Social security is in no way enough, and you must survive on pension that you paid into for your retirement. So the child that I helped raised with my extra taxes and without any preferential treatment at work will never even come close to paying me back.
As far as being taxed “more” than a couple with kids, yes you do potentially miss out on a tax credit of $2k/year. Going through my food bills I easily spend that much just feeding that child- let’s just call it $5/day. So that child I’m rearing is at best netting me $0, and most likely will never be able to pay me back! So much for my supposed economic advantage!
So no it’s not some selfless act to society. After all nature makes the kid making process somewhat enjoyable and you take immense pride in your offspring. On the other hand the argument that you’re disadvantaged as a non parent because you miss out on a small tax break that, at the end of the day, at most subsidizes the nourishment required for said human to survive, rings hollow.
Your taxes enable young people to exist/grow-up and extend those services to you. Providing for kids is selfish, not selfless. Until the singularity happens, we need young children to grow into functioning adults that continue and (hopefully) advance society.
Let's stick to the simpler rationale that some people have kids because they love kids and/or want to pass down their genes.
Similarly, people choose to have kids for lots of reasons (family pressure, want to pass on genes, etc.) but society's continued existence depends on people having kids, so it's on all of us to support the people who do have kids whether or not any given individual's motivation is noble.
How might we use the trillions of dollars spent on the military for education, healthcare, retirement and other betterment initiatives for U.S. citizens? If hypothetically all nations agreed on world peace, then having a military becomes superfluous but the would-be soldiers can find other meaningful professions in society rather than being soldiers.
Again I'm not against supporting parents. Just when there's immarginal benefits being conferred, that are not available to non-parents.
In a perfect world, that would work. We don't live in a perfect world, which is why virtually no society has ever disbanded their armed forces and lived to tell about it.
Similarly, in a perfect world, we could treat every individual exactly fairly and never given someone slightly more than they should have. But in this real fallen world we live in, sometimes the best we've got is simplistic decision rules like "support categories of people who do work that is essential for society to survive".
Yes parents should be given the time off. But do all parents need the time off? What if you have teenage kids? Also why limit this for parents only, why can't the same benefit apply to singles who can use the extra time off to find their potential partner and hence help in societies growth. I feel it's tone deaf to just talk about parents problems during these crisis.
You're mistaking an acute problem for a chronic one. Society won't be harmed if you have to put your dating life on hold for 6 months because of a pandemic. But putting child care on hold for 6 months will result in a lot of dead, injured, or developmentally messed-up kids.
> I feel it's tone deaf to just talk about parents problems during these crisis.
I don't think that's the case at all. As an example, my employer also talks about general mental health during this pandemic, and encourages everyone -- parents and non-parents alike -- to take the time they need to care for themselves.
But as a non-parent I recognize that I haven't been affected much by the pandemic. Yes, I miss seeing my friends, and doing normal things out of my home, but I'm dealing with it reasonably well. If I had kids, what I'd be dealing with would be orders of magnitude more difficult. So I expect and accept that orders of magnitude more time will be spent talking about the problems parents are having right now.
It's really not like military service or jury duty: things which in most cases people do not have an extremely strong biological urge to do.
The best available evidence is that fertility rates are highly sensitive to external incentives. For example Russia managed to raise its fertility rate from the lowest in Europe to one of the highest in just a decade. They did that through a combination of cash incentives, extended maternity leave, and various social status and privileges for mothers.
The only way it is beneficial is because some jokers decided that running country on ever increasing debt (esp. retirement) is acceptable, and another decided that growth rates have to be high.
So the biological urge apparently isn't doing the trick.
While that may end up being the case for centuries to come, I don't think it's a great outcome for humanity as a whole to require vast wealth inequality between nations in order to keep humanity from dying out.
I raise you Israel as an example of not a poor country with big increase in birth rates.
You have people who essentially outsourced parenting to have a career and that’s not a ‘sacrifice’. It’s a choice.
Which begs the questions: is the race to fulfill replacement rate in developed countries the real reason to incentivise child births?
However, retirement and social systems were designed during a boom and were inadequately funded.
Or immigrant labour. I'm not a parent-hater or a child-hater (One Billion Americans Go Go Go!) but you can import a lot of people. Heck I'd boost the economy by sustained long term importation of labour to bolster birth so that we can target long term of a billion Americans.
We owe the coming generations one last push to glory.
> We owe the coming generations one last push to glory.
This is not a Marvel movie. If our oceans turn acidic, if our glaciers melt, it's going to take a lot more than a magical South African to turn back time.
If you think modern science's very real concerns for the near future of our planet amount to "Doomsday Cult nonsense", I don't know what to tell you. This stuff isn't magic- it's not made up- the evidence is right there out in the open. We can bury our head in the sand or we can face it with clear eyes.
We have too many of them. It's not polite to say, but ultimately many of the problems faced by the human race (like global warming) are a result of over-population. We don't want the replacement rate to drop too low, because it fucks up cross generational dynamics (e.g. social security), but we really would be better off if we had like 5% less kids over the next 20 years.
That won't happen: Parents will insist on raising their kids (with their DNA), their way, without any strict oversight, or societal interference. The "essential service" is as much about the desires of the parent, than the desires of society.
And as for "society as we know it" - what if I don't care for society as we know it?
I like that analogy a lot and it has me switching my opinion to an extent. While having children is a huge responsibility, many parents don't actually treat it as so. (I would like to think the vast majority do). Is there a way we (socitey) can reward for responsible parenting? Can we decide as a collective what makes "good parenting".
Raising children isn't like smoking, a hobby, a side hustle, or other miscellaneous personal obligations. It's more like military service and jury duty -- an essential service that some people perform to ensure that society as we know it can continue to exist. And one which employers can, should, and often do make special allowances for.