Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She recently edited and contributed to “For Love and Money: Care Provision in the United States.”

Now that the birthrate in the United States has fallen below replacement level (by at least one measure), more journalists are reporting on the costs of children. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat laments the “cultural decadence” of such economic considerations even as he acknowledges their relevance.

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Cultural change – what Mr. Douthat refers to as modernity and others refer to as post-familialism – is surely a part of the story. But the growth of capitalism itself – the expansion of wage employment at the expense of family-based enterprise – accounts for most of the pressures driving a process of fertility decline that has been under way for more than 200 years.

Public policies intended to buffer the impact of capitalist labor markets on family life are a central feature of our social history.

Capitalism is not the villain of some simple morality tale. It did not intrude into an idyllic world of reciprocity and commitment. The traditional family-based economy was based on distinctly patriarchal principles. Male heads of household wielded legal and economic power over their wives and children. More children meant more labor for the family enterprise.

The growth of wage employment gradually disrupted that patriarchal regime, giving women and youth more opportunities outside the home and more bargaining power within it. The growing demand for skilled labor helped induce a shift toward smaller families, with better-educated, more costly offspring. This shift began long before modern contraceptive technologies could be had.

Women mobilized a collective effort to demand the same rights that men enjoyed and gradually began to prevail against those who claimed that feminism would destroy family life. Both women’s empowerment and fertility decline accelerated the process of capitalist development that had set them into motion.

But the very structure of a new system based on competitive labor markets imposed penalties on parents, who lost the ability to capture many of the potential economic benefits of their child-rearing efforts. Prolonged school attendance raised the age at which young people began to work and the search for jobs often took them away from home.

As more single men and women flooded into the labor market, willing to work for lower wages than those with children to support, working-class advocates began to insist on the need for a “family wage” sufficient to care for dependents. Early campaigns for minimum-wage legislation warned that, without it, working-class families would not be able to successfully raise the next generation.

The movement to provide old-age pensions (first on the state, then on the federal level) emphasized the benefits of taxing the younger generation as a whole to support the elderly rather than expecting parents to recoup expenses from their own children.

The expansion of public health and education services represented a form of social investment in which taxpayer investments in children would be repaid by the future revenues that a more productive labor force would generate.

Policies offering many parents tax deductions and credits, the protections of a social safety net and the right to unpaid leaves from employment all represent explicit efforts to revalorize family commitments.

In short, many programs of the so-called welfare state, often derogated by conservatives as undermining family life, have rather proved a substantial – if not always successful – source of support for child-rearing.

Unfortunately, we have socialized the benefits of child-rearing more thoroughly than we have socialized the costs, taxing the working-age population to provide benefits to the elderly through Social Security and Medicare but providing uneven and somewhat unpredictable public support to parents. Single mothers in particular remain far more susceptible to poverty in the United States than in similarly affluent countries.

As a result, public policies have had the effect of slowing but not halting fertility decline in the United States. The resulting aging of our population is contributing to both fiscal and political stress.

A more serious problem is our failure to adequately improve adequately improve our children’s capabilities, cramping their hopes for upward mobility. In a report echoing the family-wage advocates of the early 1900s, Lisa Dodson and Randy Albelda document the negative impact of parents’ low-wage employment on child outcomes.

Today, in an era of serious economic stress, in which the best promises of capitalism have been broken, low-income mothers and children are threatened with major cuts to public assistance. Yet conservatives staunchly defend the unprecedented riches of the top 1 percent, resisting even small increases in marginal tax rates.

Yes, Mr. Douthat, cultural decadence is definitely in evidence.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/capitalism-and-the-kids/?partner=rss&emc=rss