One more rant on the libertarian idea of children

This is Joseph.

There has been a lot of angst about global fertility rates, recently. I always find it ironic when these complaints come from people with the resources to combine work and childcare. For example, Marissa Mayer famously had the office next to her turned into a nursery, not a typical strategy. Or Elon Musk, who has many children, has a different level of wealth for supporting them.

In the United States there is also a very distinct rural culture where a lot of what I am saying does not apply, as these costs are very different. There is a notable rural/urban fertility gap  in the US, and I am suspicious that the issues may be quite different in the rural context. Peter Zeihan seems to think so:

But let us put that aside for the moment and consider the urban context for children. In an urban context, children are a huge and expensive responsibility that a lot of the world is not designed for. Doubt me? Ever try to take a taxi with a 3-year old? How do you meet the legal mandate for a car seat? If you think the answer is to carry one around and just ask the Uber or taxi to let you install it for the trip . . . 

Or what about bad school planning? There are huge consequences if a child is unable to go to the local school and needs to be driven to a distant school at which they are assigned. This example is especially infuriating because the family needs to buy a car to do drop-off because there is no way to make bus service make sense. Now you might say that these things will happen but this is offsetting a large cost to parents. 

Look at the cost of childcare, while we are on the subject. Daycare in Seattle, for example, is $1480 per month. That means daycare (alone, not counting the cost of feeding or housing the children) would eat up an entire $42K a year salary. For the median salary in Seattle, 2 kids is 44% of after tax income in childcare costs. 

So why do I bring this up? Because, while I think the doomsayers are wrong, it isn't a great surprise that huge costs and low support are depressing fertility rates. And, whether we like it or not, children are the future of the society that we live in. Making it hard to have children is going to result in fewer of them. 

This seems to be a consequence of the libertarian idea of economic atomism, where the only way to see children is as a personal luxury consumption good. But I fear that ends up bringing us to a dark place.