Freedomain Radio

I thought Daniel Mackler made an excellent point about how it is harder to get a cat in New York City than it is to have children, and I started thinking about how this might be different in a free society.

Naturally, parents who are clearly not psychologically ready to have children are inevitably going to inflict quite a bit of trauma onto a child. This would be very expensive for a DRO to have a traumatized new person entering the world, so they are likely to require some type of psychological test for people who wish to have children. If they score terribly on the test, well, no problem, their DRO rates will be raised dramatically if they still choose to have children.

While this does make me feel a bit frightened in the sense of "OMG, if they raised their rates dramatically the child wouldn't be able to get the resources he needs!", but of course people are not so bad at cost/benefit analysis that they would still choose to have children if it was obviously going to cost, say, five times as much. And also, suppose they do choose to have children despite the hyper-increased rates, the DROs could offer parenting classes (which would be well worth it economically for the DRO to do) and therapy for the future parents during the pregnancy with the offer that if they pass the course that their rates won't be as high.

Maybe there is a hole in this idea, and hey, its obviously just a mental exercise, but I thought it was interesting. Let me know what you think.

Hey Phil,

I think the DRO's wouldn't have to deal with this sort of thing that much.

In the absence of the state, people would plan having children much more carefully. E.g. the Finnish state pays big bucks to people with children, and it makes me sick to my stomach when I see people making babies just to score at the Welfare Office. In the status quo, having a kid will increase your income, and you basically achieve immunity from fiscal responsibility.

If the state weren't there to reward these disgusting individuals, they would be horrified at the very prospect of having a child - which would be the proper reaction. The state warps (even removes) the cost/benefit analysis that every responsible person makes, especially when having children. Of course, the state wants more tax cattle, so they pay idiots for breeding.

The whole thing makes my blood boil.

Ahem, anyway...

If you remove the state from the equation, the inevitable result would be 1) less children and 2) more responsible parents.

Of course, the DRO's would be highly incentivized to encourage this sort of thing, but the demand for such services would be significantly lower when you consider the customer base in "the DRO world" and how they would think and behave.

If the DRO model were in place, I'd invest in companies that produce prophylactics and/or birth control products. They'd be making solid business.

KS31:

I think the DRO's wouldn't have to deal with this sort of thing that much.

I whole-heartedly disagree, AND I think that the first posters proposal is a sound one, though again, who knows the market will determine. Nevertheless if we are to believe the evidence about the effects of bad parenting on society and the individual then I am sure this would be something to pay for, that is...people who justify their victimization today refer to criminals and police, well, in terms of cost over risk, most people prefer cost or at least that is the rationale behind most insurance, I pay house insurance over the risk of having my house destroyed by a hurricane. So to pay to keep parenting standards as high as possible is in the long run paying for lower criminality rates. 

While the welfare-induced childbearing that occurs today would be non-existant, the prosperity-induced childbearing would increase.  That is, people would be more interested in having children if they were more prosperous.  This is biologically programmed in us and would be hard to overcome.  So I think that this would be something that would occur, and I like your suggestion Phil!  I'm curious as to whether or not they would raise rates before offering some sort of class or training for people who showed an interest in having kids by taking the test.  That is, it'd be in their interest to encourage successful childbearing, as they'd have more likely customers in the future!

A very interesting topic!

Personally I don't believe DRO's would "require" any psychological tests prior to having children specifically. At the very least the DRO's marketing department would probably go into cardiac arrest at your description of the workings...

I think as a practical matter it will be much easier to detect trauma then to predict it. I might be wrong about this of course. We might expect to see children covered gratis for the first 5 years of life for example, offered alongside "well child screenings" which include those nifty brain scans we've been enjoying so much in the recent videos. 

Parenting courses would of course be offered at a steep discount and anyone of even remotely reproductive age could probably expect to get a few mailers from their DRO offering this service and providing the empirical evidence for the benifits - both in terms of child well being and eventual costs to the parent.

If there is a hole in your idea here, Phil, it's that I think you are imagining a system of ER triage (the drastic measures needed for today's moral disaster zone) and applying it to the calm dentist's office type world of the future.