Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…Well, sure. Okay, it doesn’t have to be genetic. It could be a pure cultural inheritance. That’s interesting. I don’t think it’s a big issue necessarily. I don’t think that the gaps in numbers that we’re talking about are all that enormous. I also think that a lot of the way society is structured disincentivizes educated professional people from having a second or third child, even though it’s not that the objective financial cost of doing it is so high. But you think about Democratic Party micro-targeting of everything. They’ll say, “Well, okay. If this little extra boost will help lift some people over the poverty line, we should do that. But if you’re making $140,000 a year, you don’t ‘need’ help with your childcare costs.” That’s how the people in the think tanks think. But people care about the impact on their relative standard of living of these things. So I think a program that gives people child allowance–type money or that organizes afterschool activities for people in a plausible way does have an impact, not on Mark Zuckerberg because, obviously, billionaires don’t have a lot of limits on their consumption of things. But these middle-class professionals who live in Northern Virginia — they do, right? Even though they’re comfortable, economically comfortable people, their consumption possibilities are still constrained in meaningful ways, and how we structure incentives — what we subsidize, what we don’t subsidize — makes a difference to what people do. Now, I think people, on average, should become more religious, in part because that would encourage fertility. Do you also think people should become more religious? Yeah, if I could be full Straussian and kind of —…

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