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Robin Hanson's Novel Solution to Low Fertility Rates
Economist Robin Hanson returns to discuss his proposal for increasing fertility rates through financial incentives for parents. He explains how governments could pay parents for having children by issuing shares of the future tax revenue those kids will generate. Robin argues this would provide better motivation for good parenting. The hosts consider potential impacts on social classes, racism, sexism, cultural objections, arbitrage opportunities, and more.
[00:00:00]
Simone Collins: Hello, everyone. We are so excited today. A little bit, a little bit fanboying and girling out because we are joined by the fantastic, brilliant, and super fun Robin Hanson. He, in addition to being a professor of economics at George Mason University, has written some of my favorite books, including The Elephant in the Brain, which is just mind blowing, and The Age of M.
He, he talks about prediction markets, grabby aliens,
Malcolm Collins: signaling. Well Simone didn't know that he had invented the term grabby aliens. And I didn't know he had invented the term great filter. This is in regards to the Fermi paradox. So genuinely like a huge figure in terms of and, and, and being at the we, we go to these events where it's all like young, like up and coming, like supposed to be all the smartest hip young people.
And he's always at these events. Because he is considered like the one person not in our generation who is Seminal to these communities. He's so with it. He's so with
Simone Collins: it.
Malcolm Collins: So what we're going to talk about on this one is we were giving a lecture at one of these that have been called manifest [00:01:00] about pronatalism.
And then he just drops this idea about how it could be solved. That we had never heard before and was really interesting and we want to go into it.
Would you like to know more?
Robin Hanson: All right. So let's first acknowledge that any solution requires some policy people to do some things. And if they don't do certain things, it doesn't happen.
And I'm honestly not that optimistic. The right people would do the right thing here. And we should, we could talk a bit about that. So the fundamental problem is a lot of things in our culture. Are oriented toward low fertility and a lot of people really like those things that is they're really deeply attached to intensive parenting, long years of schooling, delayed mating, gender equality, and there's a whole bunch more and any solution that induces high fertility.
Is going to cut into some of those things. And so even if we could get people to adopt the solution, which I'm about to tell you, and they [00:02:00] try it for awhile, there's a risk that they'll see that. In fact, it cuts into those things. They'll go, Oh no, Oh no, we can't have that. And then they would turn it off because they'd rather have declining population and low fertility than to have some of those things that, that I think is a fundamental risk that is just a fundamental cultural conflict.
And a lot of. Maybe even the majority of elites really prefer the package that leads to declining population, even when they understand that they could do otherwise. But doing otherwise will change some of these key parts of their culture that they're really attached to. So that's my fundamental warning.
But given that, if you're willing to prioritize fertility high enough, i. e. doing what it takes to raise fertility I think there is in fact a simple solution. So, first of all, there's a lot of studies on how incentives to increase fertility and their effects. And so there are definitely a lot of studies that show small incentives have pretty small effects.[00:03:00]
And then there's some studies that show modest incentives have modest effects. And as an economist, I feel really confident. Huge. Big effects. No qu
Published on 2 years, 2 months ago