Asia (Page 1,316)

This is the next article in a two-part series.

The first section of this essay argued that any pro-natalist coverage may be cost-effective in using public funds to recover lost work efficiency, including scale, that large families of the past centuries had captured. &nbsp,

Additionally, it noted that no pro-natalist policy has attempted to do this, and suggested that this loss may be mainly responsible for the lack of success that pro-natalist laws have had in the past.

Some administrative arrangements, out of the various ones that might recapture the lost gains from a focus on child rearing, appear to face greater social resistance than others.

There is no maximum length for orphanage-like settings where large numbers of children are raised by child-raising experts to whom the kids are not medically related. These organizations can raise children with greater scale economies than even the largest community.

But, homes have always and everyday been considered superior to people as child-raising organizations. Only when the radioactive and the prolonged relatives have failed have they been used. &nbsp,

Through a variety of organizations, including orphans themselves, culture has long encouraged the adoption of children from orphans into families.

In consequence, proponents of the use of orphanage-like organizations to adopt pro-natalist scheme, which probably would require paying women to keep children to be raised by such institutions, may experience significant opposition and event disparagement as proponents of “baby mills” or “kiddie farms.”

The massive biological home is a time-tested administrative arrangement for raising children in contrast to encourage and finance a limited number of large families where children are raised by their biological parents may experience no such resistance rooted in classic culture.

Nevertheless, there are limitations on the scales that a natural family is properly catch. About 12 is the largest frequently observed family size in the US as soon as the 1960s, which is consistent with the childbirth-risk-reducing considerations of bearing a baby every 27 to 33 months, starting at age 18 and continuing until age 45.

If a woman gives birth once every 30 months from age 20 to age 44 – i. e., every 2.5. years for 25 years – then she will bear ten children. That appears to be the ideal target for a pro-natalist policy that seeks to resurrect the benefits of specialization in child-rearing by reviving the large biological family.

However, to raise ten children in a one-child family with both parents working outside the home, with the exception of five years where the wife stays at home to raise an infant, both the father/husband and the mother/wife must stay at home and concentrate on raising children for the majority of their adult lives. &nbsp,

In the middle of that couple’s child-raising career, when they are raising five, six or seven children at once, the assistance of a maid/nanny or two might also be required. One or both members of a professional child-raising couple aged 62 or older, no longer raising children of their own, might provide such assistance.

It would be necessary to work with young married couples to begin raising children as soon as the woman graduates from secondary school, beginning no later than when the woman is 20 years old. &nbsp,

This would involve marketing to secondary school students about the career options available to them and assisting secondary school students interested in meeting and dating other students of the opposite gender, getting married soon after graduating from secondary school, and receiving a marriage-contingent offer of employment as specialized child-raisers from age 20 to 65, presumably with an old-age pension thereafter.

However, starting to raise children at age 20 need not preclude post-secondary education for either member of a specialized child-raising couple. During the first three-and-a-half years before the birth of the second child, there would be ample time for substantial post-secondary schooling, which might continue, with less time devoted to it, until the birth of the third child about 2.5 years later.

Furthermore, this post-secondary education would ideally be well-rounded schooling that specialized child-raisers might enjoy acquiring. The humanities and social sciences are useful in raising children in addition to math and science.

Additional scale economies of scale that are not directly related to particular specialized child-raising families could be achieved by cooperative purchasing between these families of various goods and services, and perhaps even by a wise minimum of co-location. &nbsp,

However, an excess of co-location, in which whole towns or neighborhoods are inhabited chiefly by specialized child-raising families, seems undesirable. It is best to stay away from a society where specialized and generalized child-rearing households are segregated from one another. &nbsp,

The children of one-child families and the children of ten-child families should not first encounter one another as adults, they should attend school together, play together, befriend one another and visit one another’s homes.

The best responses to three crucial but complex questions, which may vary from country to country, do not fall under the purview of this essay. &nbsp,

One is how best to assess and control the quality of state-funded specialized child-raising, which presumably involves monitoring both the process and its young-adult products. &nbsp,

The second question is whether a state-funded program that uses married couples who are experts in child rearing should be run by the state directly or through private contractors, subject to state-specific requirements and state monitoring.

The third is how to cope with non-performance. What should a specialized child-rearing couple do if they divorce, break up, or simply stop having children? What should be done with the children when such deterrence fails? Termination of employment and loss of pension may help to deter such non-performance.

In such circumstances, it might be possible to have specialized child-raisers older than 62 who are no longer raising their own children.

In the long run, some novel “middle way” between specialized child-raising families and orphanage-like institutions might prove useful. &nbsp,

Something like a British boarding school, students at which spend holidays ( as many as 22 weeks a year ) with their biological parents, but in which children would be enrolled from infancy, comes to mind as a way of reviving two- or three-child families.

However, to test such novel institutions would take at least two decades, until the quality of the young adults produced is observable. East Asia cannot afford to wait that long before beginning to reverse its fertility decline. &nbsp,

It might be best to experiment with novel ways to raise children in a mix of small and non-family institutions while putting together a plan to fund numerous specialized child-raising families.

So what proportion of the workforce needs to specialize in child-raising? To replace the population, given the low levels of child mortality now observed in all but the poorest countries, requires a total fertility rate ( TFR ) of 2.1 live births per woman per lifetime. &nbsp,

A nation would also have a stable population if it had a long-stable TFR of 2 and no changes in mortality or the average age of childbearing and no net immigration or emigration.

Imagine a nation wi^th 20 to 44-year-old age cohorts, half of whom were women, and a life expectancy of 80 years for bo^th males and females, and a population ^that was entirely made up of specialized child-rearing couples ^that bore and raised ten children every 2.5 years starting in ^the woman’s 20^th year and who had no o^ther paid employment from ^the age of 20 to 62. &nbsp,

The women of such couples would bear 1.31 % ( ]2.1/2.0] x]1/80^th] ) of ^the population every year. Since 2.5 women are needed to bear one baby per year safely, ^the specialized child-raising women would constitute 3.28 % ( 2.5 x 1.32 % ) of ^the population. They plus ^their husbands, constituting 6.56 % ( 3.28 % x 2 ) of ^the population, would be employed solely in child-raising. &nbsp,

If the 20-to-64-year-old workforce were 45/80^ths of the population, then 11.67 % of the workforce would be engaged in specialized child-raising ( including post-secondary education early in their careers and helping young specialized child-raisers late in their careers ). &nbsp,

Because mortality increases above 64 years and below 20 years, the 20-to-64-year-old workforce would be more than 45/80^ths of the population, so less than 11.67 % of the workforce– perhaps roughly 10 % of the 20-to-64-year-old workforce – would be engaged in specialized child-raising. &nbsp, Conversely, about 90 % of the workforce would never bear or raise a child.

In the case of a country with a long-declining and now far-below-replacement TFR, the analysis would be far more complex, even with the assumptions of no migration and no change in mortality or age of child-bearing.

Nevertheless, for a country with TFR of 1.05– which is roughly what China’s TFR is now thought to be – to double its TFR to the population-replacing TFR of 2.1 by specialized child-raising, the proportion of the 20-to-64-year-old workforce that would have to work as full-time child-raisers might be roughly 5 %, i. e., half the roughly 10 % needed to supply a stable population wholly by such means. &nbsp,

For such a country to raise its TFR by two-thirds, to 1.75, by means of specialized child-raising, might require something like 3.5 % of its 20-to-64-year-old workforce to work as full-time child-raisers.

These flimsy guesstimates give an idea of how much labor is required, despite their simplified counterfactual assumptions. &nbsp, Demographers with access to detailed national data could quickly provide far more precise country-specific estimates.

Child-raising is a relatively labor-intensive activity, using less capital than most work in rich or even middle-income countries. In other words, the share of GDP needed by state-funded specialized two-parent child-raising will be lower than the share of the workforce needed to do so in all but the poorest nations. ( Only in a few poor nations has fertility significantly decreased below replacement. )

However, for such a pro-natalist program to attain a target TFR would take 25 years, assuming no unforeseen changes in relevant variables, if only 1/25 of the eventually-desired number of specialized child-raising couples were hired every year. &nbsp,

If the program were front-loaded to shorten the amount of time needed to accomplish the goal, some of the labor would later have to be diverted from child-raising to other endeavors to avoid a period of above-target fertility.

For example, if a government wants to increase its country’s TFR to a specified target level in 12.5 years rather than 25 years, and then to keep the TFR at that level, then it will need to hire for the first 12.5 years twice as many child-raising couples as it eventually wants, then change the work of half of them, after 12.5 years, from professional parenting to something different, such as teaching school. After a rise in fertility, teachers might be in short supply.

For at least three reasons, East Asia, which has been the source of a variety of innovations that the West has found useful for millennia, seems far more likely than the West to develop effective pro-natalist policy.

First, East Asia has lower and faster-falling national TFRs than the West, so it urgently needs a pro-natalist policy. East Asians cannot afford to wait for the West to develop a successful pro-natalist policy before reversing it, as they have done for various Western innovations in terms of technology and institutional innovations over the past two centuries.

Second, even using the cost-reducing strategies suggested in this essay, reverse the decline in fertility to prevent future economic catastrophe and demographic oblivion would require significant sacrifice at the present, and it may prove impossible for nations with formally democratic governments. Contrary to the West, East Asia includes several nations with democratically unelected governments.

Third, because most East Asian nations are more ethnically and culturally homogeneous than most Western nations right now, are less susceptible to cultural, ideological, and ethnic divisions, making it nearly impossible for many Western nations to develop a state-funded program to reverse the decline in fertility by reinvigorating specialized child-raising.

To administer, legislate or even advocate such a program in the United States would be a nightmare. Some Americans would demand that any such program perpetuate existing cultural and ethnic divisions, while others would demand that it ignore them, and finally, others would demand that it work to reduce such divisions, such as by introducing a program aimed at reducing traditional Western culture and reducing white people. &nbsp, Compromise would be impossible, the culture wars among groups that loathe one another preclude it.

This problem cannot be avoided by awarding contracts for specialized child-raising to the least-cost private-sector bidders that meet specified quality requirements. Absent statutory constraints, the least-cost bidders would be bidders subsidized by some private organization or billionaire with an ideological, cultural or ethnic agenda – i. e., to increase the proportion of the population that is white ( or non-white ), or Muslim ( or Evangelic Christian, or Catholic ) or raised “woke” ( or traditionally ). &nbsp,

However, domestic cultural enemies would have impossible compromises if laws were passed to impose restrictions on such subsidies.

However, if East Asia develops a successful pro-natalist policy, the West will have a far greater chance of adopting it than it would be to adopt one, both because it will already be clear that it can reverse the fertility decline, and because it will also have contributed to the West becoming more and more poor, smaller, and weaker in comparison to East Asia.

The US central government may be too divided by different cultures and ethnic groups to copy another nation’s successful pro-natalist policy. &nbsp,

However, the US also has 50 state governments, any of which could copy such a policy. If the US central government does not censor their actions, the governments of states with culturally less diverse populations could imitate successful East Asian pro-natalist policies.

Although the US is currently too suffocated by diversity to lead the non-African world in the survival-critical task of halting the decline in fertility, parts of the US may not yet be too diverse to follow leadership offered by East Asian nations that are more homogeneous than the US.

Ichabod is a former US diplomat.

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