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Big Worker's avatar

It's really a no brainer to have large child subsidies since they're worthwhile spending as a way of improving child welfare even aside from any fertility impacts.

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Thomas E Beach's avatar

This is a terrifying article -- not just because it is dead wrong, but because it represents the petrified state of economic scholarship. At a time when humanity desperately needs economic systems that can address the mess we've made of the modern world, economists still blindly ignore externalities (pollution, health effects, climate impacts), wasteful inefficiencies (plastic waste in the oceans and now microplastics in our brains), the impacts of runaway inequality, the loss of wildlife (down 70% in 50 years) and wildlife habitat, etc.

The authors are eager for new ideas from the yet-to-be-born while producing no new ideas that solve any of these problems. Circular economies, donut economics and other models need more attention, have one characteristic that is lost on traditional economists -- they echo the patterns of nature itself, which seeks to maximize efficiency and minimize waste as a fundamental part of each of its designs. In an age of unprecedented technological innovation, sclerotic economic thinking denies the possibility of vastly enhanced productivity methods that smaller working sectors might use to support their top-heavy population of elders. It's a math problem, and one that needs serious attention.

Finally, you don't need math to see the horrors of modern life. Drive any crumbling traffic-choked four-lane highway past endless parking lots filled with massive vehicles used by consumer-addicts to buy more stuff to hoard into their pricey housing units, and you see a vast panorama of the widespread high anxiety unhappiness of contemporary American life. Humans can't even manage the populations we have now, even in the richest parts of the world -- or the inevitability of food and water shortages to come, as climate change finally works itself into the attention of world leaders, and economists. Of course, by then it will be too late.

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