incentivizing marriage will take more than payments I fear, because we have 2-3 generations of kids growing up in broken, dysfunctional homes who do NOT escape that social world. The pessimism is largely internal. I agree that the elite poo-pooing of marriage has led to bad policy oversight, for sure...it's just very hard to change multi-generational trauma without relocating people (which is also Rob's story!)...If you look at the multi-generational trauma of Indian reservations, you can see how hard it is to fix this kind of issue through policy alone.
This piece is, as always, filled with relevant and thought-provoking material. But I heard someone say this week (I think on a podcast but for the life of me I do not know for sure) that "[H]happy people have children". That rings very, very true to me. If you think about it We The People exist with guarantees of not only life and liberty but also pursuit of HAPPINESS. Being controlled does not generate happiness. Never has. Never will. In fact it appears that it has broken too many of those over whom control has been sought.
I don't buy it. Why does Asia, which doesn't have a previous generation of single moms have even lower birth rates than us? Unless you can show statistics that there are less single-parent mothers in 2020 than there were in 2000, I think this is just wishful thinking.
If Taylor Swift (and a dozen other celebrities) were to get married and announce they they were going to have 3-4 children we would have a new baby boom.
The best way to incentivize marriage among the working class would be to increase the number of blue collar jobs that pay breadwinner wages. Men who don't make much money already feel like failures; adding a wife and child to that only makes them feel worse.
Incentivizing marriage is a good thing. Incentivizing childbirth and raising kids from 0 to 18+ is good.
If the incentives could be beyond financial, that would be even better.
I’m not sure how to characterize non-financial incentives, but it speaks to the cultural and social influences — perhaps it is intertwined very deeply with the elite messaging in culture that Henderson is always talking about.
If the elite messaging is morally helpful to culture, then non-financial incentives become aligned with the common good.
Strengthening the common good will lead to family stability and unity, and that is a pinnacle of human achievement. From there, the unity can spread from family to family community to community nation to nation throughout the entire world.
No federal income tax for young married parents until the children are 14 years old. Get divorced, benefit goes away. Have children out of wedlock... no tax benefit. Once the kids are 14, if the parents don't have their economic house in order they likely never will. But by 14 the kids are old enough that they won't be destroyed by a divorce of the parents.
I don't agree that paying people to get married and have children is good. The principle is always "what gets incentivized gets done" and what we want done is married with children. But we also want families to be working, as raising children in a home where neither of the parents work and are on social welfare has proven to create a multi-generational cycle of welfare families.
Hugh Hefner in the 50s was the first bigger impact event. Then the 60s and 70s increased to the impact going up and out to today. Up to today; we were being, to coin the current phrase woked this far back. Speak on about Luxury Beliefs the young are listening and evaluating and hopefully rediscovering some better stable and comfortable ways of living a life.
Any financial incentives for childbearing should be a form of tax rebates because it is foolhardy to subsidize childbearing among the poor. People who are already struggling should not be encouraged to take on additional responsibility. Childbearing incentives in the form of tax breaks should be extremely generous and should scale with income. Is that eugenics? Maybe we need it after 50+ years of policies that encourage the opposite.
It’s not the incentive to marry that is missing, it is the person to marry. Young adults have dismal results from dating apps that seem designed more to keep compatible youth apart rather than facilitate actual relationships between partners interested in marriage. The promotion of player-types within the app, along with the free access of the app where people currently married are up to 30% of the “available matches”. Honestly with the range of daily surveillance intended to prevent the theft of a pack of gum or preventing 3.42 ounces of liquid aboard a plane it’s remarkable that the dating apps have zero interest in gating their apps to restrict the participants to be single and verified as far as age and other important information like felony convictions or assault. An effective algorithm would create lifelong marriages not be a supercharged option for cheating spouses and serial sexual hobbyists.
"In the U.S., the average age of first-time motherhood for this group has risen only slightly, from 28 in 2000 to 30 today. "
My grandmother was born in 1898, married at the age of 14 and was widowed at the age of 18 with two children. She remarried and had two more children, including my father. My mother was almost 17 when she married and almost 18 when I was born. This was common for the time periods. During those times a single woman in her mid-20s was considered an"old maid."
South Korea's birthrate is so low that the government offers a range of incentives for children, including substantial cash payments upon birth, monthly childcare subsidies, expanded parental leave, housing assistance, and free access to public education, all aimed at boosting the country's declining birth rate. Parents can receive a cash payment of around 2 million won (approximately $1,500) for their first child, with additional payments for subsequent children, alongside monthly allowances for young children. The private construction and housing group Booyoung, has been offering employees a $75,000 bonus for each new child they parent.
Marriage in the United States is on the decline with less than half of American households headed by a married couple. Plus, more couples are choosing not to have children, and the trend is projected to continue. According to recent estimates, the projected cost of raising a child to age 18 in the United States is around $310,000 to $375,000 for a middle-income family.
While financial incentives might work for a relatively small number of men and women, the solution to this issue more likely lies in finding ways to restore belief in the benefits of marriage, having children, and family life to the generations who have so far rejected that path.
Today's dating landscape resembles a Neolithic mating pattern, where the top 20% of men dominate nearly all romantic opportunities, while the bottom 40% find themselves largely excluded. In contrast, marriage continues to be shaped by traditions and customs rooted in our Christian heritage. Offering financial incentives for marriage represents an effort to stem the ongoing erosion of our cultural foundation which is probably a good idea because Christianity’s monogamous marriage custom is arguably the main driver behind the birth of western civilization.
> Though college-educated women are having children later, the shift is minor. In the U.S., the average age of first-time motherhood for this group has risen only slightly, from 28 in 2000 to 30 today. (...) In the U.S., more than half of the fertility drop since 1990 comes from a sharp decline in births among teenagers, partly because more of them are attending college.
The first claim contradicts the second.
Also, "the average age of first-time motherhood for this group has risen only slightly, from 28 in 2000 to 30 today" doesn't answer as to whether the average age was already much higher in 2000 that it was in say 1980 or 1970 or 1960. If it was, then this "only slight rise" from 28 to 30 could just be the tapering off of a significant rise that had already been mostly completed by 2000.
incentivizing marriage will take more than payments I fear, because we have 2-3 generations of kids growing up in broken, dysfunctional homes who do NOT escape that social world. The pessimism is largely internal. I agree that the elite poo-pooing of marriage has led to bad policy oversight, for sure...it's just very hard to change multi-generational trauma without relocating people (which is also Rob's story!)...If you look at the multi-generational trauma of Indian reservations, you can see how hard it is to fix this kind of issue through policy alone.
This piece is, as always, filled with relevant and thought-provoking material. But I heard someone say this week (I think on a podcast but for the life of me I do not know for sure) that "[H]happy people have children". That rings very, very true to me. If you think about it We The People exist with guarantees of not only life and liberty but also pursuit of HAPPINESS. Being controlled does not generate happiness. Never has. Never will. In fact it appears that it has broken too many of those over whom control has been sought.
I don't buy it. Why does Asia, which doesn't have a previous generation of single moms have even lower birth rates than us? Unless you can show statistics that there are less single-parent mothers in 2020 than there were in 2000, I think this is just wishful thinking.
If Taylor Swift (and a dozen other celebrities) were to get married and announce they they were going to have 3-4 children we would have a new baby boom.
The best way to incentivize marriage among the working class would be to increase the number of blue collar jobs that pay breadwinner wages. Men who don't make much money already feel like failures; adding a wife and child to that only makes them feel worse.
Incentivizing marriage is a good thing. Incentivizing childbirth and raising kids from 0 to 18+ is good.
If the incentives could be beyond financial, that would be even better.
I’m not sure how to characterize non-financial incentives, but it speaks to the cultural and social influences — perhaps it is intertwined very deeply with the elite messaging in culture that Henderson is always talking about.
If the elite messaging is morally helpful to culture, then non-financial incentives become aligned with the common good.
Strengthening the common good will lead to family stability and unity, and that is a pinnacle of human achievement. From there, the unity can spread from family to family community to community nation to nation throughout the entire world.
No federal income tax for young married parents until the children are 14 years old. Get divorced, benefit goes away. Have children out of wedlock... no tax benefit. Once the kids are 14, if the parents don't have their economic house in order they likely never will. But by 14 the kids are old enough that they won't be destroyed by a divorce of the parents.
I don't agree that paying people to get married and have children is good. The principle is always "what gets incentivized gets done" and what we want done is married with children. But we also want families to be working, as raising children in a home where neither of the parents work and are on social welfare has proven to create a multi-generational cycle of welfare families.
I like your deductions.
Hugh Hefner in the 50s was the first bigger impact event. Then the 60s and 70s increased to the impact going up and out to today. Up to today; we were being, to coin the current phrase woked this far back. Speak on about Luxury Beliefs the young are listening and evaluating and hopefully rediscovering some better stable and comfortable ways of living a life.
Any financial incentives for childbearing should be a form of tax rebates because it is foolhardy to subsidize childbearing among the poor. People who are already struggling should not be encouraged to take on additional responsibility. Childbearing incentives in the form of tax breaks should be extremely generous and should scale with income. Is that eugenics? Maybe we need it after 50+ years of policies that encourage the opposite.
If marriage was as good for women as it is for men, you wouldn't need to incentivize it.
It’s not the incentive to marry that is missing, it is the person to marry. Young adults have dismal results from dating apps that seem designed more to keep compatible youth apart rather than facilitate actual relationships between partners interested in marriage. The promotion of player-types within the app, along with the free access of the app where people currently married are up to 30% of the “available matches”. Honestly with the range of daily surveillance intended to prevent the theft of a pack of gum or preventing 3.42 ounces of liquid aboard a plane it’s remarkable that the dating apps have zero interest in gating their apps to restrict the participants to be single and verified as far as age and other important information like felony convictions or assault. An effective algorithm would create lifelong marriages not be a supercharged option for cheating spouses and serial sexual hobbyists.
"In the U.S., the average age of first-time motherhood for this group has risen only slightly, from 28 in 2000 to 30 today. "
My grandmother was born in 1898, married at the age of 14 and was widowed at the age of 18 with two children. She remarried and had two more children, including my father. My mother was almost 17 when she married and almost 18 when I was born. This was common for the time periods. During those times a single woman in her mid-20s was considered an"old maid."
South Korea's birthrate is so low that the government offers a range of incentives for children, including substantial cash payments upon birth, monthly childcare subsidies, expanded parental leave, housing assistance, and free access to public education, all aimed at boosting the country's declining birth rate. Parents can receive a cash payment of around 2 million won (approximately $1,500) for their first child, with additional payments for subsequent children, alongside monthly allowances for young children. The private construction and housing group Booyoung, has been offering employees a $75,000 bonus for each new child they parent.
Marriage in the United States is on the decline with less than half of American households headed by a married couple. Plus, more couples are choosing not to have children, and the trend is projected to continue. According to recent estimates, the projected cost of raising a child to age 18 in the United States is around $310,000 to $375,000 for a middle-income family.
While financial incentives might work for a relatively small number of men and women, the solution to this issue more likely lies in finding ways to restore belief in the benefits of marriage, having children, and family life to the generations who have so far rejected that path.
Today's dating landscape resembles a Neolithic mating pattern, where the top 20% of men dominate nearly all romantic opportunities, while the bottom 40% find themselves largely excluded. In contrast, marriage continues to be shaped by traditions and customs rooted in our Christian heritage. Offering financial incentives for marriage represents an effort to stem the ongoing erosion of our cultural foundation which is probably a good idea because Christianity’s monogamous marriage custom is arguably the main driver behind the birth of western civilization.
> Though college-educated women are having children later, the shift is minor. In the U.S., the average age of first-time motherhood for this group has risen only slightly, from 28 in 2000 to 30 today. (...) In the U.S., more than half of the fertility drop since 1990 comes from a sharp decline in births among teenagers, partly because more of them are attending college.
The first claim contradicts the second.
Also, "the average age of first-time motherhood for this group has risen only slightly, from 28 in 2000 to 30 today" doesn't answer as to whether the average age was already much higher in 2000 that it was in say 1980 or 1970 or 1960. If it was, then this "only slight rise" from 28 to 30 could just be the tapering off of a significant rise that had already been mostly completed by 2000.
A "luxury belief" sighting.
🤣