East better than West for pro-natalist engineering

This is the second installment of a two-part essay.

The first part of this essay argued that for any pro-natalist policy to be cost-effective in its use of public funds, it must recapture lost efficiencies of labor specialization, including economies of scale, that the large families of past centuries captured.

It also pointed out that no pro-natalist policy has tried to do this and suggested that this failure may largely account for the paucity of success achieved by prior pro-natalist policies.

Of the diverse institutional arrangements that might recapture the lost benefits of specialization in child-raising, some seem likely to encounter greater cultural resistance than others.

There is no size limit on orphanage-like institutions in which large numbers of children are raised by child-raising specialists to whom the children are not related biologically. Such institutions can achieve greater economies of scale in child-raising than can even the largest family.

However, orphanages have always and everywhere been considered inferior to families as child-raising institutions. They have been used only when both the nuclear and the extended family have failed.

In the West, adoption of children from orphanages into families has long been encouraged by society through diverse institutions, including orphanages themselves.

Consequently, to advocate the use of orphanage-like institutions to implement pro-natalist policy – which presumably would entail paying women to bear children to be raised by such institutions – might encounter substantial resistance and occasion disparagement as advocacy of “baby mills” or “kiddie farms.”

By contrast, to promote and fund a limited number of large families in which children are raised by