Totally Failing Rate

So, about that total fertility rate (TFR) thing...

I won't degrade into some kind of misogynistic/misandristic argument, because that's both pointless and wrong.

I will stand by my thesis that if something matters enough to someone (where ``one'' can be a person, a corporation, a government), then plans will be made to get that thing done right.

For instance, if I value a friendship enough, I will make time to nurture said friendship. And lest anyone goes ``hur hur time isn't the same as other resources'', that's where they are wrong.

Recall that time is a very interesting non-renewable resource that all other resources take their indexing from. We try our best to bank time through the conversion [via a convoluted process of reasoning] into some form of money. We then use the said money to trade (or buy, same thing) for other things that we could not have easily/directly gotten through the expenditure of our own time.

So far, so good.

But the problem comes in when we start talking about priorities. In the bid to amass enough money, we sort of forget what basis it stems from. And so, at a personal level, people complain about children being costly to raise, and therefore aren't interested.

They get villified, and castigated---``You dishonour your family!'' levels too, were we to live in an age where [geographical] mobility were not as great as now.

However, all the complaints of the people at their own personal levels are but a highlight of the symptoms.

You see, there is a much larger influence cycle that is happening beyond the individual level. Roughly, the individual's choices bubble up, with the majority setting the social-level trend, and then the representative government takes heed on what the trends are like, put in their own ``big picture'' planning elements, before percolating the final trend down to the individuals, which affect their choices, ad infinitum.

Of the two, it is without doubt that the government's choices weigh the heavier, for the sole reason that they have a monopoly on the most powerful arbiter of ``truth''---force, or more bluntly, violence.

So, as clichéd as it sounds, TFR issues are government policy issues, and the blame should not be pushed back down to the individual citizens. We can argue about how improved access to education has liberated women to pursue a life beyond ``being stuck as a homemaker'', or how that improved education for women led to a greater imbalance between the number of highly educated women against that of highly educated men that led to less marriages in general (hypothesis that women are hypergamous while men are generally adverse to hypogamy), but those are just deflecting the blame around.

If the TFR were really a problem that is large enough for concern, then the government policies should reflect that. Instead, we see that a vast majority of the policies address more of the short-term economic issues, as opposed to the slow but steady re-architecture of the social fabric to support a better TFR.

``But MT, TFR is just the capitalistic idea of a Ponzi scheme, where societies rely more on the next generation to pay for the living for the previous one!''

If that were the case, then shouldn't it be motivating enough to adjust policies to address the TFR? After all, it does contribute to the economy, right?

And no, consistent immigration isn't a permanent solution. It's a bit like trying to write plug-ins for various third party software for a piece of core software that one uses (say a text editor). No matter how good the plug-ins are written, there will be incompatibility issues, since we are literally trying to create an interpretation of the third party's framework that ``makes sense'' within the framework of the core. And as long as the third party software remains as a plug-in, it is never truly a part of the core; and as long as migrants keep within the confines of their self-created enclave and never truly venture out to integrate with the country that they migrated to, their mentality will forever be that of a migrant, and not a citizen, no matter what their official immigration status is with the government.

Crucially though, consistent immigration is a zero-sum game that trades off on comparative advantage. To ensure that it can continue to work, is to assume that the places where they have more people who want to leave will continue to do so, and in the worst case scenario, steps may even be considered/taken to ensure that they remain so (i.e. removing/stunting any of the social advances that we know that leads to decreased TFR).

We like to talk about ``whole-of-government'' approaches. I think that TFR itself is an excellent problem to tackle with that. Moreover, it also involves a time horizon much longer than that of a single election cycle.

Perhaps it is truly time for the government to show that long-term planning of doing what is right that it has boldly claim before.