When families make decisions about having a child ex ante, they calculate with steeply decreasing marginal utilities. In other words, the 1st baby brings a huge amount of pleasure (utility), while the 2nd and further babies bring less and less utilities. Historically, it hasn't always been this way: in poor societies, the main motive for having children was that children were able to work from a young age. Therefore, marginal utility decreased only slightly, to the point around the average utility. The social utility of having children only has a slight influence on families; however, every new child's social utility is almost the same. This explains politicians' intentions to encourage families to have more children. The final conclusion is that within the factors taken into consideration in the study, there is no equilibrium, and the observable trends will not result in a social optimum. Decreasing population and the aging of the society cannot be eliminated or significantly alleviated on national level, no matter the amount of money the government is willing to spend to take over some of the costs parents bear to have children. 1

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This essay attempts to refute the practicality of the main policy propositions of the book by Joseph Stiglitz and Bruce Greenwald (S&G) entitled Creating a Learning Society. More specifically, it looks at the 700-page scholarly work from the perspective of countries struggling to catch up with the advanced Western countries. In the opinion of the author, S&G use the term "learning" in such a broad sense that it becomes almost meaningless as an explanatory factor and/or an objectively verifiable indicator. Equally important, by using such a value-loaded, entirely positive term like "learning", S&G create a misleading feeling in the readers: catching-up is easy (win-win). As history has shown, it is not easy. In the paper, the model of a lesser known Hungarian economist, Ferenc Jánossy (1914-1997), is presented as a more convincing explanation of endogenous economic growth.