Trego's Mountain Ear

An article in the Washington Examiner led me to Stockholm Research Reports in Demography.  Now demography interests me – and Miska Simanainen also wrote an article contrasting Putnam’s views on Social Capital with Bourdieu’s that matched my thoughts – and he’s working on his dissertation at Stockholm. 

His paper is available here – and I hope I’m not the only one to click the link and read it.  The Finnish government funds some intriguing social studies, and this is one of them.  I’ve lived my professional career in a world of work where treating women fairly has been a priority (and having both a wife and daughter that seems a good idea to me).

Simanainen’s study deals with birth rates – and demographic transition theory pretty much calls for birth rates to drop as societies move into modernity – which the Finns definitely have done.

The abstract reads: “The study analyzes how a guaranteed income program that significantly increases work incentives affects childbearing among previously unemployed women. Results from previous research indicate that improving individuals’ financial circumstances could increase fertility by compensating for the costs of childbearing. However, overall changes in cash incentive structures may create causal mechanisms with opposite effects. The study provides new empirical evidence on the effect of cash transfers on childbearing by using register data from the Finnish basic income experiment conducted in 2017–2018. The intervention aimed to increase returns from employment relative to unemployment but, at the same time, disincentivized childbearing in relation to competing activities, such as employment and studying. The experiment offers a unique opportunity to study the causal effect of changes in income and cash incentives on childbearing decisions. The results of the study indicate that the experiment had a negative effect on the probability of having children among women who received basic income and a positive effect among women whose spouses received basic income. The findings emphasize the importance of considering the overall changes in the cash incentives when reforming tax-benefit policies to avoid potentially undesired social consequences.”

Obviously, I highlighted the important part of the study – if you’re a government official wanting to increase the birth rate, the right approach is to provide men with more cash, not women. 

You can read the whole study at the link.  It reminded me to review Merton’s great paper “Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action.”