First off your argument is just the "women in the workforce will make us all richer" argument but with Epstein island demographics of women.
Second, I wasn't even looking at it on that level. I was just looking at the high level economics. I'm saying that it takes certain amount of material plenty to get a kid from vagina to workforce. You've got food, clothing, the labor of educators, etc, etc, etc. None of that is free. Current foster care system costs do not scale. Our society is simply not wealthy enough to afford that for any sizable fraction of children. You could perhaps cheapen it up but I don't see much potential there since the outcomes are already sub par. You could perhaps make it more efficient, but what form would that take?
Unless we commit to walking back the standards of acceptable levels of investment in children by 70-100yr there's just no way rich western countries are gonna have more kids. Even if you pop them out of artificial wombs the whole rest of the "infant to workforce" pipeline is a mess.
I'm not sure what "Epstein island demographics of women" are, but I honestly do think that allowing women to work outside the home (and get an education, and own property etc.) has been a net win for our economy, but removing unnecessary constraints on people's ability to pursue their own career/education goals seems like a good thing for everybody
> Current foster care system costs do not scale. Our society is simply not wealthy enough to afford that for any sizable fraction of children.
I suspect that the US is more than wealthy enough, it's just historically been unwilling to do any better. It would take some massive changes, and there'd still need to be a lot of administration to make sure that the kids were safe and well cared for, but our current foster care expenses probably aren't a good way to judge the cost.
Forster care is hugely inefficient and involves a lot of overhead which pushes the price tag way above the usual cost of raising a child. A child might cost a typical family $18,000 a year, but the cost for one child in the foster care system over that same period could cost $40,000 to $200,000.
Many of those costs wouldn't apply to a situation where the state was committed to raising a kid from birth though. For example all the legal costs involved in determining if kids should be placed into or taken out the system and then also doing that wouldn't exist. There would a lot less need for kids to be shuffled around. Plus lots of kids in the system need extra care, either because those needs made it impossible for their parents to care for them, or because they ended up in the system after traumatic circumstances.
Second, I wasn't even looking at it on that level. I was just looking at the high level economics. I'm saying that it takes certain amount of material plenty to get a kid from vagina to workforce. You've got food, clothing, the labor of educators, etc, etc, etc. None of that is free. Current foster care system costs do not scale. Our society is simply not wealthy enough to afford that for any sizable fraction of children. You could perhaps cheapen it up but I don't see much potential there since the outcomes are already sub par. You could perhaps make it more efficient, but what form would that take?
Unless we commit to walking back the standards of acceptable levels of investment in children by 70-100yr there's just no way rich western countries are gonna have more kids. Even if you pop them out of artificial wombs the whole rest of the "infant to workforce" pipeline is a mess.