Surrogacy costs ~$100,000-200,000 in the US. Foster care costs ~$25,000 per year. This puts the implied cost of government-created and raised children at ~$600,000. My guess is that this goes down greatly with economies of scale. Could this be cheaper than birth subsidies, especially as prefered family size continues to decrease with no end in sight?
If you’re thinking economically, I’m quite confident that children born from surrogates on average will have higher incomes and therefore pay much more tax per capita than children who have spent time in foster care.
I’m not sure if Foster Care costs are a good model for how to create people who “thrive”—most importantly on an existential level—are they emotionally satisfied? But from an economic argument, I assume that whatever foster kids are getting is not the optimal to make them productive in terms of future income, and therefore the taxes they can pay.
Surrogacy costs ~$100,000-200,000 in the US. Foster care costs ~$25,000 per year. This puts the implied cost of government-created and raised children at ~$600,000. My guess is that this goes down greatly with economies of scale. Could this be cheaper than birth subsidies, especially as prefered family size continues to decrease with no end in sight?
If you’re thinking economically, I’m quite confident that children born from surrogates on average will have higher incomes and therefore pay much more tax per capita than children who have spent time in foster care.
I’m not sure if Foster Care costs are a good model for how to create people who “thrive”—most importantly on an existential level—are they emotionally satisfied? But from an economic argument, I assume that whatever foster kids are getting is not the optimal to make them productive in terms of future income, and therefore the taxes they can pay.
I question your guess.
Childcare is similar to education and medicine in that it’s cursed to suffer from piss poor economies of scale forever.
Or, at least, until advanced AI+robots can straight up replace the human labor involved. In which case—are high birth rates even desirable?