I imagine the financial claim isn’t that offering financial support doesn’t work, but a claim more like—there aren’t enough resources to offer enough financial support to enough people to meaningfully alter the US fertility rate on the basis of this alone.
Like—how much does it take to raise a child? I’ve heard 250k, so let’s go with that. You don’t need to offer the entire amount as financial support, but something like 5k/year seems reasonable. Across 18 years, that’s still $90,000. That means that if you give a billion dollars away as financial support, with zero overheads, you’ve supported the birth of ~11,000 children. This is a rounding error compared to the size of the issue, so I wouldn’t see it as “directly moving the ”. To directly move the needle at a cost of 90k/child, you’d need to invest hundreds of billions of dollars. It would probably work effectively, but the resources just aren’t there in private philanthropy.
By contrast, political advocacy actually could work on the scales that we’re talking about.
I imagine the financial claim isn’t that offering financial support doesn’t work, but a claim more like—there aren’t enough resources to offer enough financial support to enough people to meaningfully alter the US fertility rate on the basis of this alone.
Like—how much does it take to raise a child? I’ve heard 250k, so let’s go with that. You don’t need to offer the entire amount as financial support, but something like 5k/year seems reasonable. Across 18 years, that’s still $90,000. That means that if you give a billion dollars away as financial support, with zero overheads, you’ve supported the birth of ~11,000 children. This is a rounding error compared to the size of the issue, so I wouldn’t see it as “directly moving the ”. To directly move the needle at a cost of 90k/child, you’d need to invest hundreds of billions of dollars. It would probably work effectively, but the resources just aren’t there in private philanthropy.
By contrast, political advocacy actually could work on the scales that we’re talking about.
Yeah, this is what I meant. Thanks, Jay!