Childlessness and parenthood: a feminist macro-model - PEGFA Seminar

Greenwich Campus

SL007

This event is part of PEGFA’s seminar series where current research papers are presented and discussed. It will be split into two sessions. In the first talk we will hear Ines Heck present their paper on 'Childlessness and parenthood: a feminist macro-model', which is described in the abstract below. 

More details on the second talk and other PEGFA seminars

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Building on the influential work of Folbre, 1994, England and Folbre, 1999 and Braunstein, Staveren, and Tavani, 2011, we propose a Post-Keynesian feminist macroeconomic model. We start on the premise that children generate societal benefits extending beyond their immediate families. For a variety of reasons, not all members of a society end up reproducing and raising children; however, childfree members inevitably benefit from parents investing increased household expenditure, foregone income (Blau and Kahn, 2017) and unpaid labour into child-rearing regardless of the cause for their child-free lifestyle. The costs for raising children are mostly borne by parents, particularly mothers, who disproportionately experience lifetime income losses and other disadvantages due to gendered care work distribution (OECD, 2017). Benefits include present-day and future demand effects as well as future supply effects: children are future workforce participants and taxpayers; they generate through positive externalities and are pertinent for intergenerational support systems that maintain social stability. Many net benefits of child-rearing are non-excludable and – to an extent – non-rivalrous, i.e. they feature certain characteristics of public goods. We frame the question of childlessness as a distributional question between parents and non-parents. The distribution of income, foregone income and unpaid labour is a direct result of the number of children parents choose to have. These findings raise important questions regarding social justice and policy design. Following from our work, we propose reducing the paid working time of all members of society to allow time for reproductive activities. Currently, women bear the personal economic consequences of these activities. By redistributing the time allocated to paid and unpaid labour, existing inequities in the distribution of child-rearing costs and benefits are addressed, and a crucial step is taken towards creating societies in which parenthood does not entail disproportionate financial penalties.

Presenter:
Ines Heck

Co-authors:
Theresa Hager

Location:
University of Greenwich, Stephen Lawrence Building, SL007

Teams (Online) details:

Meeting ID: 319 421 430 872 5
Passcode: N9eW6W66

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