But children do not exactly own themselves in the present situation: the government has claims on their future earnings, through taxation and other mandatory payments (and, increasingly, education loans). In essence, mass education is a communist transformation: individually-owned “goods” (children) are brought under national ownership, and returns from children flow to the country as a whole (through tax-based entitlement programs), rather than individually to their previous “owners.” When farms are communally owned, production suffers and famine results; when children are communally “owned,” fertility decline results. Social Security programs likely reflect this: the government provides (often poor quality) assistance to old people in place of their children, while undermining their direct claims on their children for assistance in old age.
There is another, related shift in the direction of resource flow during this time: resources (including labor) stop flowing from wives to husbands, and instead flow from husbands to wives, as a result of Western-style female liberation. This trend is also a result of education, and amplifies the trend toward low fertility. Since the emancipation of women frequently lags the child-parent economic transformation, it does not seem to be the first cause; Japan’s fertility decline occurred in the post-war 1940s, tracking the forced implementation of Western-style mass education, but women’s opportunities for education, professional employment, and political participation continue to be limited and were much more so in the 1940s, despite American-imposed female suffrage. Few would describe Japan in the 1940s as a hotbed of feminism and licentiousness, yet its fertility declined steeply and has not recovered since. 1
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