Comment by keybored

I don’t understand why this isn’t framed as an Economics problem? If a large group of people stop doing something that someone else depends on then that’s an Economic problem. No?

I don’t mean in the narrow of sense of exchanging things for money. If society wants some undefined group of any kind of people to do something but they are not (or they are about to quit) then that’s a resource allocation problem of sorts. That’s the bare problem. This problem does not immediately prescribe a solution like paying someone in dollars and cents. That’s only one solution.

Same if a country is having a fertility issue. The problem is sort of an economic one. But the answer doesn’t have to be paying would-be fathers and mothers. It could for example be to provide more free services that parents benefit from. Or it could mean reducing the hours in the “standard work week”. Or it could be to improve the pension of part-time workers (mothers are often part-time workers). Or it could be to more child-friendly urban planning. Or it could be to improve the public transportation and road infrastructure for households where the two partners work in different parts of the city/municipality/county.

Are professional economists working on this problem? If not, why aren’t they? This seems like it should be their domain. Am I being totally naive here?