Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria

The HDI of African countries generally has gone up since the 90's (although not all countries):

https://statbase.org/datasets/indexes-and-ratings/human-deve...

Western people suggesting Africa is an un-helpable backwater has been common for decades. Bill Gates likes to talk about all the progress made, in fact.

I suspect there would be broad agreement across the political spectrum that more education means later marriage and later first pregnancy. The disagreement would mostly be over whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

The gender gap in compassion is always surprising. There is never “educate boys to fix society”. The argument is as follows: “But girls get raped, so we need to save them” “Who rapes girls?” “Boys” “What opportunities do they have?” “Drugs, army, and the street” “Wouldn’t they too deserve to be given care, notably the care that was too given to girls?” “No, [various reasons]” “But don’t you care that girls get raped by boys?” “Yes” “So what do you do?” “Take care of the girls”.

You say "fix society" but you really mean "make their society more like mine". The idea that other societies need fixing is racist and disgusting.

I think you may be reaching a bit for the "it's not this it's that" when it's obvious that a "get kids to stay in school" program is never "do exactly nothing besides make a kid be inside the school building reliably".

Every problem solved involves fixing dependencies.

No, it's not a scheduling conflict. A child getting married is entirely about if the parents choose to force that child to be married or not. They were less motivated to marry the child, if the child was going to school, because an education is an alternative path to gain moneys, which is the parents primary motive. It's interesting how disgusting greed like this is wrapped in words, like "culture" that try to make it ok. It's a repugnant behavior, which is why there was effort to correct it, and success in that is why we're reading about it here.

Many traditional cultures have a communitarian approach to decision-making. What an individual wants is often a small part of the equation, especially for girls and women.

That doesn’t sit well for a western individualist mindset but… it happens there too. Parental pressure in particular is the conduit for broader social norms.

Can offer one read:

> Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.

“Basically if you are a kid your friends/family will want you to get married if your friends/family notice you are unemployed/not in school/etc.”

(The desires of the kid were not referenced.)

I had no idea where you got your interpretation from, then I realized it was lack of interpretation.

the social pressure is traditional society on families, and then elders in families exert significant pressure on younger dependents, not to mention the strong economic pressure of nonproductive mouths to feed in circumstances without significant surpluses. It's exactly how westerners lived a century ago so it should not appear mysterious.

> Wanting to actually know what the full picture is allows us to reproduce it.

That's why there's an article, with text beyond the headline.

Yes; it's currently legal in 34 US States. Here are the 16 that ban the practice: Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Michigan, Washington, Virginia, New Hampshire, Maine, Oregon, and Missouri.

In Nigeria, nearly 40% of all girls are wed by 18 between 2000 and 2019 (https://childmarriagedata.org/country-profiles/nigeria/#comp...), whereas there were a total of less than 300K American girls in child marriages between 2000 and 2018.

It isn’t just about the letter of the law, it is also about judicial attitudes-two countries can have the same law on paper, but with radically different applications in practice, to the point that it isn’t really the same law.

Yes, in many US states, someone under 18 can legally marry with the permission of a judge. And if the applicant is a pregnant 17 year old who wishes to marry her 17 year old boyfriend so their child isn’t “born out of wedlock”, a lot of judges will say “yes”. But if the applicant is a father who says “I think my 12 year old daughter is old enough to get married, and I found her a husband I like”, no way in hell is any American judge approving that, even if the letter of the law says they could.

But in some other countries, there are judges who would be happy to give that marriage official permission.

not if you also condemn the American states that allow that...

Pretty much "yes" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_Sta...

I'd guess your pot/kettle comment is something nationalist/political? My prior comment was trying to say it's universal, not some "country X is good/bad" dig.

I would go further and say that the annual payment amount should be set by a feedback loop, so the incentive rises every year that the birth rate remains below whatever target (eg. replacement), and stabilizes as it reaches that target.

At some point, would-be parents at the margin decide they don't need a job to attain economic security.

This is basically a way of doing price discovery on the "market rate" of parenthood. Currently we're under-paying and getting the predictable outcome, and we're all out of ideas.

(In fact, I think this should basically be the solution to all labor shortages, of which parenting is just one example. The wage should increase until the market rate is found, even if that wage is much higher than people say it "should be").

Why not a child tax? 10% of children's income goes to their parents, or something similar. Also solves the problem of retirement.

I think the issue is that you pretty much can't pay enough.

I was reflecting, since becoming a parent, that there are basically two lenses with which to view the economics of parenting. You can children in terms of their cost and benefits in monetary terms, where money is the end and children are the means to that. Or you can view money as the means to support and provide for children, with raising them as the ultimate end goal. And people with the former worldview will most likely never have children, and if they do probably will not make good parents. Parenting is a 24/7 commitment for at least 18 years. It fundamentally changes the course of your life. And children also need to believe that they are the most important thing in their parents' lives, which is hard to do, by definition, when the most important thing is money.

I sit here trying to get some rest after having 5 days of rotating sick kids. When the baby was sick, he would wake up literally every hour; last night was the first in 5 days where I had any sleep stretch longer than an hour. (This also pales in comparison with the newborn phase, which is like this but lasts for about 4 months.) How much would you have to get paid to go without sleep for months on end? I was at a party a few months ago where someone asked "How many of you have caught vomit in your hands?" Every single parent raised their hand while every single non-parent looked on disgusted. How much would you have to get paid to catch vomit? I've been reliably sick about twice a week every winter for the last 7 years. How much would you pay to let a little germ-factory infect you all the time? (When governments have done medical experiments on this basis, it's been called abusive.)

When you have a realistic picture of what parenting actually entails, it starts to look a lot more like the economics of pricelessness [1]. There is usually no price at which people will be willing to compromise everything you give up by being a parent (usually things like liberty, experiences, security, peace) for parenthood if you don't want it. And conversely, there is usually no price at which people will give up the experience of parenthood for more money, if that's what they really want.

[1] https://ribbonfarm.com/2014/08/12/the-economics-of-priceless...

A better, cleaner solution is to remove old age benefits (Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid). A tax credit sufficient to incentivize attaining TFR would probably blow up the budget, and it would be hard to pin down the exact number, subject to tons of politics.

People think money is enough because they look at their lives and think 'how could I afford kids? Clearly I need money to do that.' and they don't think 'if I had extra money, would I spend it on someone else or on myself?' and the majority of people choose spending it on themselves instead of that potential child someone else.

Those people often don't even consider the time cost either. Which makes sense, if reason A is sufficient to say 'no' then why continue dwelling on other reasons? But even if there was more money and they were willing to not spend it on themselves, they now need to accept giving up roughly 90% of their non sleep/work time to someone else as well. That's not giving away something new you didn't have, that's giving up something you've been using and are accustomed to having.

It only takes a few percent of women to decide they don't want kids for career reasons for the replacement rate to drop below parity.

When you add those who don't want kids or can't have them for other reasons - not straight, asexual, emotional trauma, physically unable, others - getting to parity is even harder.

It's not stress. For a lot of history life was far more challenging, uncertain, and dangerous than life today.

Humans kept reproducing, aggressively enough to compensate for infant mortality, wars, and pandemics.

The big change is that the primary role of women doesn't have to be motherhood, where for most of recent-ish history it was.

I'm not saying a return to that is desirable. But I am pointing out that the causes of low birth rates aren't mysterious.

Women who do choose motherhood are more likely to have kids younger.

But if given a choice, a significant proportion of women will either not choose motherhood at all, or will delay it significantly, which lowers fertility and raises infant mortality.

It doesn't need to be a majority of women. A fairly small percentage is enough to shift the numbers.

> not even up to $111k is enough to convince enough women to have more children to maintain replacement rates (and I don't blame them)

What is the lifetime private cost of raising a child in Norway? The $111k sounds like it's just offsetting the opportunity cost of birth, not the opportunity cost nor direct costs of raising a kid.

So basically they probably don't lose their wage for the duration of their absence but it's likely still a net negative to them (financially aside from the physical and time burdens) and in line with societal expectations created over decades?

I say crank up the numbers then. Give them a bigger tax credit too. Hold it long enough for societal expectations to slowly adjust.

If you want to reach the ground floor in a tall building, it makes a lot of difference if reaching it by elevator, or jumping from the window. Speed matters! A _very_ slow transition probably could be managed without disruptive impacts on the individual level. But we slam the brakes in ~2 generations, such a way a large share of people alive today will be still be alive to become destitute and unsupported by lack of replacements, both on macroeconomic level, and in the micro level. If a single kid today go childless itself, he/she is very likely to become a lone senior with no close family, eventually.

A constant stream of young workers is required for a sustainable economy.

In order to pay for pensions, the government borrows money from young, working adults. This is effectively what happens in pay-as-you-go public pension systems (which is most of them, to my knowledge, apart from the US, I'm not 100% sure how pensions work in the US). The money you put in actually goes to pay for another person, with the government guaranteeing that they will do the same for you.

If the percentage of retired people increases, the percentage of working adults naturally decreases. Eventually, you'll hit a turning point where the government can no longer borrow from working adults. The government is now in a debt crisis and has to loan money from banks or foreign investors at a significantly higher interest rate, which becomes even more unsustainable if the percentage of retired people increases even more.

This is what is happening in e.g. South Korea and Japan. There are too many old people, and too few working adults. This is caused ny low birth rates over a long period of time.