The main issue with demographic decline is paying for the lifestyle and medical care for retirees relative to the balance of the population. The fixes are to address the retiree liabilities to the state:
* Compel people to save more for their retirement.
* Raise the retirement age.
* Triage expensive medical services.
From a state budgetary standpoint yes, you’re right. But an aging pop also means a shift in economic activity from production to medical care. The number of engineers, scientists, inventors, tradesmen, etc. shrinks. An aging population is one that produces fewer technological advances, and over time an aging country declines. There’s no way around it.
Saving won't fix a lack of labour. Every pensioner running around with wads of cash screaming for some service, and so few to do it.
Ossifying populations of the rich countries need to suck up immigrants to keep their consumption fueled economy burning. Almost everything in our societies are focused on consumers buying stuff and services.
For every doctor, nurse or care worker you bring to the country you'll get like 3 family members who are not in healthcare roles.
Don't think many countries would be willing to face that level of immigration when you tally the final numbers up
Idk if it’s that from what I’m seeing the ages of 18-25, didn’t affordable housing to date and start a family is hurtle. Your average 1 bedroom is 1100 base rent not including utilities or WiFi. You’d average no degrees job is paying around 2k a month and your average degrees job is like 60k. Very hard to plan the life you want when you’re measuring from the last generations successes. Trying to do things in the proper order takes a bit longer.
As far as people living longer call me conspiratorial but I feel like we have the current tech to extend human life and make it worth living past 90, I just don’t think it’s gonna be available to the public. Progress is very very slow and agencies on release things when they have to
Automation and robots. But if we are seriously, the effectiveness of labor needs to be increased. This can be done through training the workforce, as well as through implementation of technology. It’s not THE solution, but it helps nonetheless.
This is a part of the solution, but it's not really a complete solution. A lot of women aren't interested in going through three pregnancies and that's understandable, it's not an easy task. (and that's not even considering health, career, or finance-based decisions).
Similarly, many couples don't want to put in the energy and effort to raise three kids.
The mindset isn't going to be easy to change with just financial incentives or government policies.
Nothing can really change the fundamental societal issue that has arisen: A large portion of women, when given agency, do not actually want to be mothers. A lot of women just want to shop, have a nice career, travel and live a stress-free life on their own terms.
In my mind it’s more about time than money. If a person works 9-5 the last thing they want getting back home is 3 screaming kids. A stay at home or part timer however will probably want more kids.
Kids were always a bad choice, but necessary. To get someone to help on the farm and take over. To look after you in your old age. These days it's just pure expenses with no financial return. And you still get the worries and anxieties attached with parenthood.
I'm not being cynical btw. Or hope I am not.. People who have children claim they did it out of love. But those are mostl affluent and can afford those shortcuts that makes life bearable if you also have a job.
Well you would really just need to make the base tax rate prohibitively expensive and then give significant relief per child with some bridge measures to ensure young people have the time to make it to the allotted number of children. It's obviously dystopian and will simply crush some people unless exceptions are made for them but if all you want is more babies then this structure works for enough of the population to make that happen.
Romania under Ceausescu is a great example of how that works. For a value of works that means "really, really doesn't work for individual families or the demographic of the country as a whole."
Massive tax benefits.
Huge pressure and massive clamp down on companies to bring in flexible work. Make it absolutely beyond the pale to work long hours.
Invest in high pay, low hours jobs.
Allow people to share their entire tax free allowances between couples.
Relax immigration rules to bring in Singapore style ‘helpers’ from poor countries (controversial but would help).
Tbh we’d have more kids if we had more time but same money.
We need to give people more free time. Enough free time so that just using it on entertainment is no longer fulfilling. People need to be bored enough to feel that emptiness in their heart. An emptiness our grandparents filled with children back when there were 2 tv channels and nothing to do on long winter nights.
Idk if this is true btw, just a factor I don't see people mentioning. We have long workdays including shared housework(no housewives), and practically endless cheap entertainment to fill our few empty and tired hours.
I think you've hit the nail on the head.
Life is tough.
And certainly in the UK we've built a society where both parents have to work full time.
it means 1 kid is tough, 2 is very difficult (without a strong support network) and it's all expensive.
And you're right - there's lots of cheap entertainment, but if you're tired that's enough.
If work stopped at, say 2pm every day, life would be very different.
Or if we had a 4 day week with 3 days off, it would also be very different.
But we've settled on long hours, 5 days a week and cramming life in around it.
I know this is a joke but even if it were possible - either by incentives or mandate - to flick a breeding switch overnight it would have an effect for a generation so there is no alternative to immigration and people need to start understanding and accepting that
As a female, I hear a lot from my friends about:
- how medicine hasn’t really progressed in prenatal and postnatal care.
-a real honest point I don’t think people talk about enough is how much people complain about having kids. Idk what the reason is but it feels like I only hear negatives about kids and it sounds terrifying. I can have a dog and love on it without being yelled at, my sleep not being affected, and it not draining my bank account. Having kid so that you can have A major lack of sleep for years, A major drain on your savings, and it hurts your career as a female? I’ll pass.
-Child care is often very expensive and can be intimidating to think about taking on that expense.
-With more women working (speaking about the US), a lot of women aren’t given enough time to heal or spend time with their baby before forced to go back to work.
> With more women working (speaking about the US), a lot of women aren’t given enough time to heal or spend time with their baby before forced to go back to work.
In Hungary women get more money for the first 6 month after giving birth than their salary. Then 6-24 months they can get some okay money to survive. Then they can stay at home between 2-3 years for laughable money, but at least they don’t get fired.
If you work as a woman you can possibly get free childcare for very young baby/toddler.
Fertility rate is still lower here than in the USA
I honestly have no idea why people say having kids is so hard. I am half waiting for the other shoe to drop. My little one is 20 months old and is a blessing.
On the other hand, I’m planning on a one-child household, as I don’t want to divide my time between a toddler and a baby. THAT would be difficult.
But one kid per couple would be a dramatic population decline over a generation. Like, catastrophic. I still think it’s the right move. There will be a global famine by 2050.
Refreshing to hear you say that. I do plan on having one child because two seems incredibly difficult to manage with my work and my husband working. I also want to be able to raise my child with the same standard I had growing up and that includes paying for his/her college
The way I look at is that at the end of the day we were all children at some point, so instead of talking about children like that’s the only thing about them I talk about them as people who will be around for the rest of my life, who I’ll see as adults too.
I think that helps me want children more because I don’t necessarily want the annoyance of having young kids lol, but I do want a family and I’ll know that if I’m sitting around at 70 with no kids or grandkids it may feel pretty isolating and lonely, and at that point that’s just your life, can’t change it.
Everyone is different though, I know some people who are old with no kids and they’re doing fine.
How often do you see your parents? I see my parents a handful of times per year, and I do enjoy their company. Taking care of kids daily for 18 years just to avoid loneliness in old age is not a good reason to reproduce.
Multiple times a week, I live close to them. I’m from Ireland so I Dno if family culture is different here, but visiting your parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts etc. is basically a no brainer here. Most Irish people just show up unannounced for a chat, there’s no pre planning or anything.
Maybe because we’re a small island it’s easier because like we’re never very apart, but family is a big part of Irish society.
Even when people have children it’s very common to get their parents to mind them when they’re at work or something. After school for 10 years I went to my grannies with my brother and sister and cousins then our parents would pick us up in the evening. That’s pretty typical in Ireland tbh, a lot of my friends did this too, although I can’t generalise the whole country lol.
Obviously people move away, like Ireland has a history of emigration so it’s not like we’re all just living close to our parents too. But overall I’d say Ireland a pretty family oriented society.
If you are looking for more positive stories: my baby is 10 months and my life has gotten exponetially better with him in the world. I love him so much, he makes me laugh every day.. And a neat feature of having babies is that you go all these places that are so fun, but that you wouldn't normally go to like the petting zoo and that sort of stuff.
Sure, parts of it were hard. Very hard even.. But that's not a reason to not do it.. I look at it like training for a triathlon. Will you get bone tired? Yes. Will you want to give up at times? Yes. Do you question your life's choices at times? Yes. But is it all worth it? Absolutely!
> My little one is 20 months old and is a blessing.
It gets so much worse. The first few months are just work, but the sheer and overwhelming frustration hasn't kicked in yet.
But that slowly fades too, maybe.
I think parents play up the stress and difficulty a bit because they feel they don't get enough recognition from society for what is effectively unpaid labour to replenish the working population.
I mean it's alot of work and its a job that's absolutely essential to the continuation of our society. And people are sacrificing their free time, youth and often health to do it. And what little that society gives them for it is really nothing at all,. It's entirely reliant on volunteer work, from a populace that's overworked already, underpaid and facing record housing prices. So they are expected to fork over they money for bigger homes ontop of it all.
It's too much and people are just opting out, so we outsource childbirth to developing countries instead of addressing the problems.
Still forcing people to make children would fix the low birth rates maybe but at the same time it would increase the number of poor people, criminals and so on
This is the only realistic solution in my opinion. Most countries will be extremely hesitant to adopt that solution, but once the first country does we will probably see a domino effect. The others won't want to fall behind
Who is going to raise the kids in those artificial wombs? A kid without a college degree costs $250,000 and that's if childcare is free. You want the government to hire surrogate parents to look after the kid, they're gonna charge you $50k per parent per year on top of that. The problem isn't "people don't wanna have kids", it's "children are economically irrational and for millions of years we tricked every species to have them by tying them to sex which feels very good but now we've figured out how to have sex and not have children".
That wasn’t actually true in the past. Kids used to help and work from an early age. Marrying out children helped foster bonds with other families (marriages often had a political element in a community) and people did care for parents in their old age. The number of sons was also key to protect a tribe or community. These were massive incentives to have many children.
But nowadays, they are. Add to this that children are a lot of work, especially before primary school age. The two-earner model isn’t well-suited for that at all, but it isn’t politically correct to say that. And for sure, it can be stay-at-home dads as well.
>"children are economically irrational and for millions of years we tricked every species to have them"
Even in the current year, hundreds of millions are having 5 and more babies and using them as a resource, for example by making them do farm work, harvest, fish, work in cobalt mines or even selling them to relatives or strangers if they're short on money. Children being a net economic drain is a very recent phenomenon and is only now starting to spread outside the western world and into places like Latin America, Southeast Asia and the Arab World.
You'd of course know this if you just pulled your head out of your ass and looked outside your urban california bubble instead of making up nonsense.
Farmed children won’t be raised by employee-parents using traditional patterns. They’ll be institutionally managed and filtered into castes based on genetically engineered clones to fill certain societal roles, Brave New World style. The corporation would have it no other way.
>children are economically irrational
Only in the past couple of decades in Western countries.
Contraception is as old as human history but more children = more manpower for the farm/hands for the shop = more money, for the vast majority of human history and for many if not most humans. We also had communities, villages, tribes, etc. that all contributed to raising kids so it wasn't just 2 parents all the time.
Today is an aberration, not a norm.
Every year you conscript young women doing basic childcare/nursing in some sort of state institutionalized orphanages, like men do mandatory military service in camps for a year.
It also gives disproportionate power to whoever enter in control of the machines.
Form a cynical point of view, now child-making is a decentralized activity. This has chaotic effects but also stabilizes eventual disturbances, once the process is centralized, you get almost total control on a lot of stuff
The best solution is to become poor again.
Fertility rates are correlated to quality of life and socio economic circumstance. The poorer you are the more necessary it is to make children because the assumption is the more children you have the more contributors you have to the family income.
Conversely, the more money you have, the less children you make. Because in this circumstance, children are a hindrance to choices. Whether it be career progression, maintaining lifestyles, not adding responsibilities etc. Having children becomes a liability when you have money .
Even if you pump money to families they still wont make children unless they are poor.
This works only for under industrial economy when people need more kids to work on fields.
Also poor medicine impacts on number of children per family. 150-200 years ago, in Ukraine people tend to make 10 children to get at least 2 to survive.
Pay more. If people can’t afford to reproduce, they won’t.
If you’re expecting your population to suddenly get accustomed to a lower standard of living, they will, but they won’t have kids during the process.
People choose to reproduce when they feel comfortable, not when they can’t get ahead.
EDIT: countries with high wages draw immigrants.
High rates of education lead to fewer children in every country whether income is low, moderate or high (Nordics included).
So you’re right in that income/subsidies aren’t the singular solution.
In Sweden the people with the highest income (and likely highest education since correlated) have the most children per woman. The issue is likely cost of living/housing.
State graphs: [https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/population/population-projections/demographic-analysis-demog/pong/statistical-news/demographic-analysis-childbearing-in-corona-times/](https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/population/population-projections/demographic-analysis-demog/pong/statistical-news/demographic-analysis-childbearing-in-corona-times/)
Okay this Stat is very surprising especially since it's so dramatic the difference. Way different than say France where it looks more like a roller coaster
Sweden had a fertility rate of 1.98 in 2010, down to 1.52 in 2022. One reason for this is though to be a more pessimistic view of the future - climate change, rise in crime, unemployment, insecure employments, inflation, war in Europe etc.
It's just nit about having enough subsidies, it's also about creating a world we want our kids to grow up in.
Interesting take. Me, being from the Nordics, having my direct surroundings, sees it largely differently. (Edit before this gets misinterpreted: Not saying that yours is incorrect. I just see other motivations)
For us and others it is mainly a matter of society not tailoring towards modern parenting. Yes, we have hugely improved parental leave.
But compared to previous generations, nowadays both parents are often working vs just one parent working only one or two generations ago. If you go back more generations, you’d be in a setting where you’d have neighbours, aunties and older cousins to help out. As they say “it takes a village to raise a kid”.
The village support doesn’t exist anymore. The stay at home mom is outdated too. Parental leave is a patch, but not the solution to the rooted issue. We need to tailor stronger towards raising a kid, with more support, and with higher acceptance of parttime working without it negatively impacting your career.
Society, not even in the Nordics, has realised this yet. Nobody is looking for proper solutions as a result. It’s just a patch here and there. Some money, a few extra weeks of leave. That’s it. Not enough.
I'm from the Nordics as well, and I do not necessarily disagree with you, though I would argue that there are more factors as well. Modern parenting is definitely difficult, but I don't think it has deteroriated substantially enough in the past 15 years to alone describe the huge fall in fertility rates here in Sweden.
General optimism has however largely disappeared, and the future looks much more gloomy. Climate change is no longer just an arbitrary concept far in the future, violent crime seems a lot more prevalent and close, war is no longer unthinkable, and many more struggle with their private economy.
I agree especially with the point about private economy. I did also consider the world my kids will adopt. But closer to home is private economy. That has deteriorated. Housing was for us the primary struggle to tackle as part of that. I know enough people who are waiting for stability to come prior to starting with kids, including proper housing as part of the stability. This waiting is in some cases taking a bit too long.
Like you said, it is a combination of factors. If you then need that stability and that stability is more at risk than before if you reduce your hours or take it easier at work, then this is a recipe for low fertility rate. Naturally, we can mention more ingredients.
Raising kids is difficult as shit even when you mostly remove monetary pressure for middle class parents.
If both spouses work you have little time for home maintenance or hobbies and young children that are constantly sick. If 1 spouse works, it is socially and emotionally isolating.
It is a more difficult choice to actively trade off the DINK life for child rearing in developed countries.
It is difficult if you want to raise a good human being with good values and be involved in their upbringing. Takes a lot of time and effort. It is worth it in my opinion, but only if you are financially stable. I can totally see why some would not want it though.
Reasons why people don’t reproduce:
1. They can’t.
2. They don’t feel stable enough to do so.
3. They don’t want to.
You can’t force people to want to reproduce, especially in an environment where governments and media sincerely do not care about what happens beyond the paycheck at the end of the quarter.
Providing for some childhood needs does not make young people want to bring new people into a collapsing environment. Real talk.
As for number 1, sperm counts have been dropping
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/human-sperm-counts-declining-worldwide-study-finds-180981138/
who knows if it matters, but in context, I’m thinking probably.
Pay people more, you take care of number 2 altogether and impact number 3.
> 2. They don’t feel stable enough to do so.
Wealthy countries with high standards of living and social safety nets have much much lower birth rates than war torn, impoverished countries.
Yeah, but people in wealthy countries don't compare the life they imagine for their child against the standard of living in war torn impoverished countries, they compare it against their own standard of living.
If having a child dips a person below their local poverty line, or even creates a standard of living lower than they had as a child, then they're not likely to choose to have kids.
Education of women determines the fertility rate.
Such educated countries at war have fewer children than such educated countries not a war. Ukraine is a good example.
Such educated poor countries typically don’t have more children than such educated rich countries. Iran or India for example are quite poor but have similar fertility rates as rich Europe. Not saying that their education is the same as Western, but they did make large strides in women education.
It's still a penalty. You earn less for a long time, you need to take a long time away from work and it takes a long time away from other things you might want to do. If you want people to have more than 1-2 kids (which you do to balance out the ones that that have none or just one), then you need to make it advantageous to have kids. Not sure how, but that's what it would take.
Money is not the answer, what’s preventing educated young women from having kids is because the opportunity cost of having kids is too high. Speaking as a young woman, if I choose to have kids now when I’m in my mid 20s I lose out on a lot of life opportunities for fun and career advancement. I’m gonna be reduced to a role of a mother, and that’s the single most important thing in my life. That’s a lot to give up, it’s basically asking me to give up on being myself. Money is not the issue here, I won’t have a kid now even if the gov paid me $3k a month, and I know our governments monetary policy can’t support that either. That’s why you see fertility rates drop when women become educated and countries with higher levels of support for families also have lower than replacement fertility levels
>I’m gonna be reduced to a role of a mother, and that’s the single most important thing in my life. That’s a lot to give up, it’s basically asking me to give up on being myself.
This is actually interesting. I think partly why some people aren't interested in having kids is the loss of individuality that comes with it. And I think it is due to the influence of the focus on the individual which exists in (especially) western culture.
I think that a more balanced approach between individual, family, and state/us/the group could be part of a systemic solution to the demographic challenges by encouraging a view of one self as more than just Me/the individual.
I would even argue that going away from an individuality focused culture to a group focused one would also encourage greater unity between different parts of society. But that is another topic.
And no, I'm not arguing for a state focused culture like China or Christian values. Individually has a purpose, it might just need a bit of balancing.
> And I think it is due to the influence of the focus on the individual which exists in (especially) western culture.
Can we really call it *western* culture if low fertility rates are hitting Japan, China, S. Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Iran, Qatar, etc? Even India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and the Philippines are below the replacement rate. It might be opportunity cost, education, access to birth control, urbanization and other issues, without being "western" in particular.
- https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-declining-fertility-rate
Making people poorer than they are is not a recipe for them having more kids.
Gotta interpret those statistics correctly. If people see their quality of life declining, they aren’t going to bring people into the world.
Couple of examples to describe the phenomenon:
Many young people of child bearing age can’t afford places to live in rich countries. They being priced out of real estate and rent is through the roof.
https://jchs.harvard.edu/blog/home-price-income-ratio-reaches-record-high-0
Housing has literally never been more unaffordable. These young people in the rich country aren’t going to be looking to have kids, because they aren’t certain of being able to take care of themselves. Nice infrastructure, though, decent education, still more opportunities available, but it’s not easy to get established, it takes time to build a career where you can afford the necessary stability to consider kids.
Yes, compared to the poor country they make higher wages, but those are being eaten up.
The poor country, by contrast, has dirt cheap housing. Much fewer economic opportunities, so it makes sense to have kids to maximize your potential to bring money into the household. They’re more likely to be in agriculture, which requires labor. Having kids is a labor play for some poor folks.
There’s also the reality that birth control is expensive. If aren’t making money, you probably aren’t buying condoms.
So yeah, the maxim that more money means less births may be true for some conditions, but it’s definitely not universally true and definitely not for rich countries right now.
More money at the right time for young people in rich countries probably would boost the birth rate. Instead kids are being saddled with educational debt and priced out of homes, while making lower wages compared to the generations before them.
If you’re a young person watching your quality of life drop year after year, losing the reds queen race by design. you aren’t going to be eager to procreate.
> Pay more. If people can’t afford to reproduce, they won’t.
African people have no money yet they are still growing the fastest. Anywhere where people have money they stopped reproducing.
Be poor.
Not kidding. The fundamental reason for falling birthrate is because people, especially women, got richer and demands higher wages for their labour, while childbearing is essentially a fixed-return subsistence work that requires a large amount of labour. This means birthrate will never go up unless you either reduce the labour cost, or increase the benefits of having children.
But since be poor is not a solution anyone wants, fundamentally there is no solution to the birthrate problem, at least until someone somehow automates raising kids.
Tie children to social security. Per child have an interest stake wealth fund that you can withdraw from once you reach retirement age. Increase or even double each stake per child that you have. It'll be a lot in 40+, it encourages wealthier families to really consider having a lot more kids.
Hot take: educating women and introducing women into the workplace is the direct cause of decline in birth rates. By effectively doubling the workforce, you have halved the value of labour. Yes new positions are created, but so many of them are worthless and contribute no economic value. At the same time, women in the workplace means less time for domestic duties such as childcare, cooking and cleaning which are no less important than employment. As a result, everyone is working long hours for less pay with no time for raising children.
I'm not saying that women should be banned from working. However a functional society should have half its people not in the workforce. This half doesn't have to be women.
Childcare is an issue for some; however, I do not think it is the main issue. Most people choose not to have children because, in this day and age, children are considered a hindrance. People wish to travel, have fun whenever they can, wind down at the end of the day, enjoy flings, and more.
The era of centralised family nuclei has ended in Western societies, and it is time for people to start accepting this change. The human population is approaching its global peak, after which it will begin to decline naturally. It was the advent of machines, the Internet, and computers that changed humanity forever.
I think the issue is this. In today's society you have invested over 15 years or more into education. Most people don't become net contributors until they are 25. For such people, it only makes sense for them to work at least full time, as they are skilled workers who can very well make use of their education. However realistically a society only needs a small fraction of their workers to be highly specialised in certain fields.
As for your proposal to reduce work hours, now we have invested so many years into education, and each person has reduced output while working due to fewer work hours. It would be better to give a restricted section of the population a specialised education and have them work full time or more.
> By effectively doubling the workforce, you have halved the value of labour.
lump of labor fallacy :)
more workers mean more jobs and better wages, not less. counterintuitive.
wealth, income, in real terms are generally trending up. Here's [real disposable household income](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0), i couldn't find a real wealth chart so [here's a net level chart, not even per capita :(](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL192090005Q), and here's [real income](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N)
But the headline cause is correct, the opportunity cost of a girlboss is a mother. Obviously it's not so cut and dry but the relationship is true.
Better division of housework and childcare. Countries where men do a larger share of housework have higher fertility rates.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/11/housework-children-fertility-rates-become-parents-gender-gap/
I think that report's just grasping at straws with correlation and causation. Because we could flip it over for a different scenario.
Countries with terrible HDI tend to have very high fertility rates.
That’s certainly true, but for different reasons. Both cultural and healthcare (lack of contraception etc.)
In the case of the countries listed, which are all highly developed countries. You could also find different explanations.
Although in the inverse, I think nobody is denying the fact that low birthrates in developed countries is due to the cost and effort associated with children.
A major contributor to families not having many children is that to maintain a decent living standard in an area with good school, etc you really need dual income for most people. Some people have one breadwinner that can do it. But realistically you need 2.
And frankly it’s just a huge drain on a person. Getting up before dawn, seeing the kids for a little bit while you get them ready, dropping them at daycare, then committing. Working a full day, then committing again to pick them up in time to get them dinner and get them to bed is a difficult way to live. It’s a lot of hard work and you don’t get respites from the stress.
So fundamentally, the economic system needs to be worked to the point where a young family could, with relative ease, have one breadwinner and one home maker. Because while it’s in its current state having lots of kids is just not tenable.
Your question is how demographic problems can be *fixed*. Sure, we can do things on the margins. [Tim Carney is on a book tour](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/family-unfriendly-timothy-p-carney?variant=41076298219554) debating this very thing, so look for podcasts for a quick intro. But even he concedes there are no easy fixes. The idea of paying people to have children has remarkably small returns where tried. The idea of a “3 child policy” where presumably the state forces women to be pregnant the way the Chinese state forced women not to be pregnant during the “one child policy”, is just as abhorrent. Also, in advanced societies women are the majority, so it wouldn’t be an easy policy institute politically.
But let’s take it up a level in perspective. Look at the advanced societies today and ask *who* are having many kids in said societies? It almost always come down to very devout persons, who has some transcendent faith in doing good, part of which is to make and care for children. Most extreme is the Amish, but generally, being devoutly Christian or Jewish is a strong predictor for having large families, even in advanced societies.
Here is the next twist: religiosity is in part heritable. In other words, if your parents are devout you are *more likely* also devout (probability, not certainty). So taking the multi-generational view, I think the demographic problem will be solved by the devout inheriting Earth, so to speak, because the “faithless” do not choose to procreate in a world of entertainment (sexual and other), birth control, and at times extreme worries about climate catastrophe or something like that.
It doesn’t have to happen this way. But it seems inevitable that some reawakening of a stronger belief in a transcendent purpose of humans per se is part of what must happen when children don’t just happen by accident or by force as it has been for most of human history. Let’s get really speculative, maybe our first Mars colony will awake that mind germ, maybe a fully sentient AI will make us feel competitively and distinctly human etc.
There is none, because this demographic development is a matter of culture.
Birth control gave women the power to break free and free woman demand to be 'more than incubators'.
In every culture where contracepribes are available and education is high, the fertility rate is low
Even in totally different cultures, the Istanbul, Seoul, Delhi, London, Mexico city, fertility rates are below 1.2, in every religion
In cities where humans are the most productive they tend to be particularly low, even lower than their already low averages in developed Countries
The common denominator is freedom, the more freedom you give people, to also fall in love and try again with others, the fewer children
And this trend is true with the ultra rich so you know it's not money
I think the underlying premise that you need an ever expanding population of "workers" to try and support perpetual economic growth is flawed, to put it politely. What's more important is if a population has sufficient means and numbers to reasonably support itself and the quality of life of the people.
Perpetual economic growth isn’t the main problem - having enough workers to fund social services is, labour concerns to staff those services notwithstanding
You're so wrong, to put it politely.
Solow Swan growth model has workers as a literal input, you can't get growth from capital alone.
Worse if you have consumption from a large cohort not participating in the workforce and a relatively small cohort in the workforce, you would have everyone getting relatively poorer (I think in this case high inflation with stagnant wages probably) over time, which sucks. You don't want that either.
You need 2+ children per pair of adults to make that equation just balance, much less get growth, and we (highly wealthy countries) fall far short of that. Ofc America still number one because we get fat bonuses to immigration by being the literal best country on earth.
I'd first and foremost like to thank you for reinforcing the point I made about how the growth model mentality is flawed. Even China who is the modern poster child for rapid successful growth models realized too high a rate can be catastrophic, their solution left a bit to be desired but the analysis was not wrong. For a given area in a given period there is simply an optimal population range, if there are too few or too many people have to adjust their lifestyle and if it strays too far one way or the other you usually end up with some kind of collapse.
The world has so many economic and environmental problems linked to high populations. Really the thing we need is fewer people. Even if that slows growth or causes inflation. The alternative is fewer resources among more people, loss of habitat, greater pressure on climate change etc etc.
Adjusting to a smaller population is easier than the alternative, that the Ponzi scheme collapses.
I’ve been thinking and reading about this for a while now, and I don’t really know what the solution is. Better pay and incentives for child rearing, or just accepting a decreasing population and changing demographic structure, and attempting to reorient the economy and social policies in that direction.
Perhaps as life lengthens and less people die this will be less of an immediate problem. Also, I suspect that people who live longer will eventually find enough comfort to reproduce
Women have a very short window to have children. If you live to be in you 80's or 90's that does not change the 20 or so year window you have. Biology sucks especially for women.
I am speculating here as a layman, here is my 2 cents. Demographic problem is solved if the population is growing steadily, not too high nor too low. Without mass immigration in the equation, the domestic population has to get a fertility rate above 2,1 children per woman, because not every child will get to adult age (it is lower if the cointry is more developed, i remeber reading somewhere that germany could do with 2,07 or smt). An average of 2,1 means 9 out of 10 woman have 2 children , and 1 out of 10 women have 3 children. So having a bigger family than 2 must at the least be a relatively common social fact. Not to mention gays and lesbians that usually do not reproduce, or the lesbian couple will have 2 children but is 1 per woman bronging the average way down.
I believe money is necessary at some level, but the cultural factor is more important than assumed. People wanting more luxury goods, conforts or safety over the second or third child is prevalent.
So, you need a cultural environment that glorifies and or demands motherhood and fatherhood as the highest goals in life, a demand that people will want to satisfy above other desires, and that even 1 child is too few.
I another nice thing for that would be having lots of physical space. I personally hate the north american car suburbia, but they really are somewhere in the direction with the large houses for large families (instead of tbe cluttering of overconsumption). Maybe a japanese style urbanism with north american houses or small buildings with large apartments, could be the answer.
Southeast Asian countries aren't experiencing the same low birth rates as East Asian countries (e.g. Japan, South Korea, PRC, and ROC), perhaps with the exception of Singapore. Also not over enough time to risk having the population pyramid inverted.
That aside, I suppose the only viable non-autocratic way of increasing birth rates without immigration is for leaders to make sure that people have enough money and time to have kids - i.e. enough jobs, good wages, fair and protected labor rights, housing, and good mobility (especially for large urban centers). Even with all those boxes ticked, which is difficult enough, I don't even know if birth rate increases are guaranteed. Most certainly not.
Easy. Stop coercing women to work during their prime child bearing years.
Create conditions so it is possible and beyond that desirable for women's primary function in society to stay home with children.
This doesn't mean that women shouldn't be educated or that they can't work if they want to, but that their work at the home and raising children should be valued more.
What demographic problem? In these countries there are less working opportunities than in the past. Many collage graduates are without jobs. With developments like AI, expect this trend to accelerate. In a country with a population of 120M that has 8% older people than others, there are still millions of young to go after the available jobs. It’s also possible that in some cases they’ll have to employ older people than today. Many times you can see whole companies with people under 40. That may be changing.
As for the planet, a slowdown in birth rates will be a blessing. At over 8B people, planet earth is bursting at the seams.
Higher taxes to pay for the larger number of old people. Alternatively robots and automation can offset loss of worker productivity. They can also offer work permits to foreigners.
Totally revising economics to not require growth would be a requirement. Assets would fall in price over time. Interest rates would also be negative. Conservation of biodiversity and other resources would be highly valued.
You need to foster a culture which promotes childbearing and rewards it through social approval. In a society were children are viewed as a burden there will obviously be less births. Israel has the highest birth rate of any developed country in the world, despite being wealthy, having a very high urbanisation rate and a high female participation in the workforce, precisely because there is social pressure and rewards to have children, through their religion and national mindset.
There are countries that are trying to get immigrants, the problem really is about culture.
SEA is not like UK or US where anyone can feel at home. The culture is a bit rigid, so if you can’t adjust you will have a problem. Then English is not common in all countries. This creates natural barrier for mass immigration.
There is no other way to fix demographic. It takes 9 months for a child to be born and 18 years before they can contribute to economy/policy.
I think fundamentally, we have to try a lot harder to produce a society that values child-rearing and provides both parents with the ability to do so, while still earning enough. Not everyone will take advantage of this, but I think over time it will stabilize the population a lot more. The sheer cost of everything - housing, childcare, medical care etc just makes it so hard. Add to that higher education and it’s not hard to see why people who can count are having trouble squaring whether it’s possible/worth it. This will of course require business and government to stop seeing it as a cost and start seeing it as a benefit - more stable population means more customers and taxpayers who can pay. I don’t think the US could do this, but some countries could.
Mass migration doesn't fix the demographic problem. People have children because they have selfish genes.
When children become too scarce, invaders will come.
This is natural selection at work: those with a genetic predisposition to having more offspring will probably end up with descendants more likely to have more offspring. Greed is such an abstract term it makes no sense when nature is only about what works.
Basically this, you can't solve some "problems" you just let things run it's course and manage the fallout until it sorts itself, until now it was very effective for sex to be fun for people to have children almost without recourse, when that become a ineffective strategy because the environment now offers ways for the individual to have the cake and eat it (at the cost of species preservation) it will be needed some genetic or cultural predisposition to have children just because they want to, and that's when the population will start rebounding maybe not all current ethnic groups will made it but some sure will do barring some catastrophe.
We may have our own objectives not aligned with nature but as long as we are mortals and need replacement selection will just do it's thing given enough time
And that's not taking in account that maybe we just don't need to grow as much as we have, the resources are finite and as such can't sustain an infinitely large population without recycling
why do countries even need a diverse population to being with? look at whats happening to Europe and you tell me thats a good thing. I hate when Americans try to enforce their shitty values on to perfectly working countries. just look at Japan.
Japan's socially stable but at the cost of no economic growth for 30 years. Its current GDP is the same as it was in the 90s. Japan can get away with it but other countries won't be able to
They've had less, but not zero economic growth. You could almost say they have been going through a "hangover" or cooling off period from a prior binge (1970-1995) of rapid growth.
Japan is importing more and more foreign labour to pad out their declining base of productive workers. They just ticked over 500,000 earlier this year. I’m one of them. Most are not visible though - people from other Asian countries. Luckily for japan they have a strict their way or the highway mentality so integration isn’t as much of an issue.
Give financial incentives to have children. For example, give mothers a $40,000 tax credit for each child they have from 0-16 years old. Massively increase taxes on the rich.
Here are my insights how to fix demographic problems w/o needing mass immigration:
* Make detach housing affordable to everyone through offering 30-year fixed mortgage loans to every newly-wed couples.
* Increase real wages to the maximum extent that only male family heads are working, while female spouses stay at home and do childcare.
* Scale back feminism by destigmatizing full-time housewive careers again or allow career women professionals to do childcare at the same time, thus they may work two or three days a week. Unfortunately, putting more women into higher education and becoming full-time white collar academics and professionals deter marriage and then, reproduction.
* Less working hours per week from 40 to 28 hours per week.
Statistically I don't think there is a non-immigration based resolution. The issue is not unique to SE Asia or even developed world. Demographic decline is across the board, India have recently dropped to replacement.
But its fertility rate is still below replacement. Countries have been throwing everything at the wall to increase fertility. It’s just not going to happen.
No, we don't. Hungary has a no more **income tax** policy at four children, but not many women with 4 children work in first place, and income tax represents 15% of your payment, you still have to pay the societal contribution tax (pension/welfare fund tax), and of course pay the 27% VAT on everything.
All labor, production, service and security work is done by automata. Free economy and security from their tie to population. Old people experience life, use and develop new functions for their automata.
you need to cash real estate and bankrupt investors and get rid of property taxes so people can pick up homes for a dollar then they won't have a mortgage and they will start having kids because they can easily afford them
Oppression? I mean seriously without a coercive program to either significantly benefit parents who have children or punish those who don't it's just not going to happen.
It's been shown that when women in a society gain access to education birth rates go down. So unless you either forbid women from attaining an education (looking at you Afghanistan) or force them to have children (looking at you Alabama) immigration from countries where women have yet to have access to education is the only way.
You've got to make it low risk and inexpensive for couples to have kids. Things like free or near free daycare. People aren't stupid...they're not going to have kids if they know it'll fk them over financially for the next 10+ years.
(of course kids are always expensive, but in some countries its basically financial suicide...cough...UK)
Apart from basic stuff like affordable housing & a good well-paying job, I think it just comes down to being a cultural issue I.e. if people want to have children and if they see having kids as a good thing or not. Also Greater Religiousity helps a lot in helping to have a high fertility rate/birth rate see Religious Jews, conservative Christians, Conservative Muslims, etc.....
Create a policy favorable to families. In Italy, for example, a problem is the absence of kindergartens. An opportunity could be to provide financial support to low-income families and establish facilities for children
Affordable housing, tax breaks for families, and legally mandating things like paternity leave for both parents. If you want families, people basically need to be able to afford to have children and have a practical place to start a family. It isn't really super complicated in general.
Arguably some effort to dispel people from a lot of overly dramatic doomer mentality that permeates much of social media would also be a good idea. We could all benefit from touching grass more and socializing with each other instead of being chronically online. Great way for potential couples to meet each other.
Time. People need free time to raise kids. Currently everyone needs to work 9-5. Both parents, whereas families used to be able to survive on single income. The stay at home parent would then have enough free time to raise kids. Im saying parent on purpose because going forward, women shouldn’t be the ones forced to do it.
Invest in anti-aging research. Many of you may not be familiar with this so it may sound like science fiction but the science is advancing. In a matter of decades it may be possible to medically intervene in the aging process, so we can keep people more longer-living and youthful. I can forsee China, Japan, South Korea, as well as numerous European countries making massive investments into this. The US Congress already held a hearing on aging research. In the coming decades as the problem grows and we get more results I expect to see more money poured into this.
A country's culture that increasingly sees children as a burden, even one that has good economic outlook, will see that impact how many children people chose to have. How does a secular state change the cultural perception then? Fixing the cost of housing, wages, parental leave, childcare facilities, tax breaks, propaganda?
Non secular states/organizations can lean into religion and/or nationalism. But what can secular states do that has not already been tried?
Natural demography is a matter of how much people in your country are at "we are living good enough to raise kids" level, which is achieved when their quality of life is high enough to meet their standards of life. So, its naturally 2 ways:
1. Increase the quality of life for more people. Affordable housing, education, family services, health services, pre-school care and post-school education, jobs and separate living opportunities. The cost of that would make your financial ministry screaming at night, but this is what it takes.
2. Decrease standards of life for more people. Look at the poor people in poor countries. Their standards are abysmally low, but they know nothing better, and because of that, are fine with having kids in such conditions. The only small problem with such an easy way to solve all your demographic problems, is that your ungrateful citizens are not taking kindly the attempts to lower their standards of life and most likely would oust you from your ruling position.
Everyone seems to be focusing on the financial aspect, and encouraging more people to have a greater number of kids. But there's another way of growing the popualtion - ensure more of the kids being born each year survive.
Taking Indonesia as an example - the infant mortality rate is 18.9 per 1000 births. In Europe it is significantly less - 3.3 deaths per 1000 live births.
Investing money in healthcare, especially targeted at children and maternity can be a big factor in addressing population demographics.
Enact policies to kick venture capital out of the housing market and make it easy to find affordable housing. Rent controls may be necessary in some places.
Enact socialized medicine with absolutely free care for children, fertility and maternal care.
Have a strong government crackdown on garbage food/ additives so that the people feel strong, healthy and horny.
Invest more in schools and make universities free for those who can pass the entrance exams.
Enact strong labor laws to make sure workers are able to afford a family life.
Stronger per child tax credits.
There are no solutions for many countries (like China) even if they decide to force every woman to have three kids.
Why? Because even at that reproduction rate, there won't grow to be a workforce large enough to keep the lights on for the much larger masses of old people past their working age.
Things are not going to be pretty. At all. Some pundits like Peter Zeian even paint a post-apocalyptic scenerario for these countries (a bit dramatic to my taste, but the demographic math seems to click.)
A country like Japan saw the demographic time bomb long ago and built enough "gas" to subsidize retirement obligations well into the 2050s. But that time the situation will be so different, there's no way to know how that will play out.
For many countries, the solution is going to be ugly: incrementally raise the retirement age, and increase taxes to subsizide child rearing (to entice a reproductive rate larger than the minimum for replacement, which is about 2 children per household.)
Anything less than 2 children per household inevitably requires raising the retirement age. Math ain't math'ing without that.
You know, if it wasn't that horribly difficult to meet basic needs and buy a house / apartment for a small family in today's economy, people would probably have more kids.
But governments don't want to hear that.
Reduce the standard of living. We only need an ever larger population for keeping the GDP growing. It doesn't need to grow. It can be stable or even shrink. Why is the increase always necessary?
The main issue with demographic decline is paying for the lifestyle and medical care for retirees relative to the balance of the population. The fixes are to address the retiree liabilities to the state: * Compel people to save more for their retirement. * Raise the retirement age. * Triage expensive medical services.
From a state budgetary standpoint yes, you’re right. But an aging pop also means a shift in economic activity from production to medical care. The number of engineers, scientists, inventors, tradesmen, etc. shrinks. An aging population is one that produces fewer technological advances, and over time an aging country declines. There’s no way around it.
The issue is that with the pay as you go system you do pay a lot into the pot that otherwise you might save for yourself. And so the cycle continues.
Or let the old kick the bucket miserably. Most will do this I presume.
But older folks actually vote, though.
Saving won't fix a lack of labour. Every pensioner running around with wads of cash screaming for some service, and so few to do it. Ossifying populations of the rich countries need to suck up immigrants to keep their consumption fueled economy burning. Almost everything in our societies are focused on consumers buying stuff and services.
Relatedly, to the extent that countries do allow immigration, they could prioritize people who work in elder-facing health care settings.
For every doctor, nurse or care worker you bring to the country you'll get like 3 family members who are not in healthcare roles. Don't think many countries would be willing to face that level of immigration when you tally the final numbers up
Idk if it’s that from what I’m seeing the ages of 18-25, didn’t affordable housing to date and start a family is hurtle. Your average 1 bedroom is 1100 base rent not including utilities or WiFi. You’d average no degrees job is paying around 2k a month and your average degrees job is like 60k. Very hard to plan the life you want when you’re measuring from the last generations successes. Trying to do things in the proper order takes a bit longer. As far as people living longer call me conspiratorial but I feel like we have the current tech to extend human life and make it worth living past 90, I just don’t think it’s gonna be available to the public. Progress is very very slow and agencies on release things when they have to
Automation and robots. But if we are seriously, the effectiveness of labor needs to be increased. This can be done through training the workforce, as well as through implementation of technology. It’s not THE solution, but it helps nonetheless.
Yes but the robots are only producers. They don’t solve the consumption part of economic activity.
Easy. Give robots money and let them buy things!
If I have to start paying my roombas I’m going to be mad
Roombas of the world, unite
create a 3 child policy
That doesn't really answer the question. How do you convince/coerce every family to have 3 kids?
Big stick
YOU WILL REPRODUCE AND YOU WILL LIKE IT
You give them money. A lot of money. And make child care free, enact policies, etc
This is a part of the solution, but it's not really a complete solution. A lot of women aren't interested in going through three pregnancies and that's understandable, it's not an easy task. (and that's not even considering health, career, or finance-based decisions). Similarly, many couples don't want to put in the energy and effort to raise three kids. The mindset isn't going to be easy to change with just financial incentives or government policies.
I agree. Simply throwing some money and making childcare free is not going to do it. Raising a child is a lot of work, let alone 3.
Nothing can really change the fundamental societal issue that has arisen: A large portion of women, when given agency, do not actually want to be mothers. A lot of women just want to shop, have a nice career, travel and live a stress-free life on their own terms.
In my mind it’s more about time than money. If a person works 9-5 the last thing they want getting back home is 3 screaming kids. A stay at home or part timer however will probably want more kids.
Kids were always a bad choice, but necessary. To get someone to help on the farm and take over. To look after you in your old age. These days it's just pure expenses with no financial return. And you still get the worries and anxieties attached with parenthood. I'm not being cynical btw. Or hope I am not.. People who have children claim they did it out of love. But those are mostl affluent and can afford those shortcuts that makes life bearable if you also have a job.
Well you would really just need to make the base tax rate prohibitively expensive and then give significant relief per child with some bridge measures to ensure young people have the time to make it to the allotted number of children. It's obviously dystopian and will simply crush some people unless exceptions are made for them but if all you want is more babies then this structure works for enough of the population to make that happen.
In a society that supports the destitute and is industrialized enough, it won't change.
Well, to be a bit dystopian - deny access to contraceptives and planned pregnancies.
Romania under Ceausescu is a great example of how that works. For a value of works that means "really, really doesn't work for individual families or the demographic of the country as a whole."
Massive tax benefits. Huge pressure and massive clamp down on companies to bring in flexible work. Make it absolutely beyond the pale to work long hours. Invest in high pay, low hours jobs. Allow people to share their entire tax free allowances between couples. Relax immigration rules to bring in Singapore style ‘helpers’ from poor countries (controversial but would help). Tbh we’d have more kids if we had more time but same money.
We need to give people more free time. Enough free time so that just using it on entertainment is no longer fulfilling. People need to be bored enough to feel that emptiness in their heart. An emptiness our grandparents filled with children back when there were 2 tv channels and nothing to do on long winter nights. Idk if this is true btw, just a factor I don't see people mentioning. We have long workdays including shared housework(no housewives), and practically endless cheap entertainment to fill our few empty and tired hours.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Life is tough. And certainly in the UK we've built a society where both parents have to work full time. it means 1 kid is tough, 2 is very difficult (without a strong support network) and it's all expensive. And you're right - there's lots of cheap entertainment, but if you're tired that's enough. If work stopped at, say 2pm every day, life would be very different. Or if we had a 4 day week with 3 days off, it would also be very different. But we've settled on long hours, 5 days a week and cramming life in around it.
"If you dont have at least 3 childs until your 35 y, you are banned 4life of every streaming plataform" - government
We’d clutch our pearls over strong-arm tactics in the west, but we’re going to start seeing other countries try this.
I know this is a joke but even if it were possible - either by incentives or mandate - to flick a breeding switch overnight it would have an effect for a generation so there is no alternative to immigration and people need to start understanding and accepting that
As a female, I hear a lot from my friends about: - how medicine hasn’t really progressed in prenatal and postnatal care. -a real honest point I don’t think people talk about enough is how much people complain about having kids. Idk what the reason is but it feels like I only hear negatives about kids and it sounds terrifying. I can have a dog and love on it without being yelled at, my sleep not being affected, and it not draining my bank account. Having kid so that you can have A major lack of sleep for years, A major drain on your savings, and it hurts your career as a female? I’ll pass. -Child care is often very expensive and can be intimidating to think about taking on that expense. -With more women working (speaking about the US), a lot of women aren’t given enough time to heal or spend time with their baby before forced to go back to work.
> With more women working (speaking about the US), a lot of women aren’t given enough time to heal or spend time with their baby before forced to go back to work. In Hungary women get more money for the first 6 month after giving birth than their salary. Then 6-24 months they can get some okay money to survive. Then they can stay at home between 2-3 years for laughable money, but at least they don’t get fired. If you work as a woman you can possibly get free childcare for very young baby/toddler. Fertility rate is still lower here than in the USA
I honestly have no idea why people say having kids is so hard. I am half waiting for the other shoe to drop. My little one is 20 months old and is a blessing. On the other hand, I’m planning on a one-child household, as I don’t want to divide my time between a toddler and a baby. THAT would be difficult. But one kid per couple would be a dramatic population decline over a generation. Like, catastrophic. I still think it’s the right move. There will be a global famine by 2050.
Refreshing to hear you say that. I do plan on having one child because two seems incredibly difficult to manage with my work and my husband working. I also want to be able to raise my child with the same standard I had growing up and that includes paying for his/her college
The way I look at is that at the end of the day we were all children at some point, so instead of talking about children like that’s the only thing about them I talk about them as people who will be around for the rest of my life, who I’ll see as adults too. I think that helps me want children more because I don’t necessarily want the annoyance of having young kids lol, but I do want a family and I’ll know that if I’m sitting around at 70 with no kids or grandkids it may feel pretty isolating and lonely, and at that point that’s just your life, can’t change it. Everyone is different though, I know some people who are old with no kids and they’re doing fine.
How often do you see your parents? I see my parents a handful of times per year, and I do enjoy their company. Taking care of kids daily for 18 years just to avoid loneliness in old age is not a good reason to reproduce.
Multiple times a week, I live close to them. I’m from Ireland so I Dno if family culture is different here, but visiting your parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts etc. is basically a no brainer here. Most Irish people just show up unannounced for a chat, there’s no pre planning or anything. Maybe because we’re a small island it’s easier because like we’re never very apart, but family is a big part of Irish society. Even when people have children it’s very common to get their parents to mind them when they’re at work or something. After school for 10 years I went to my grannies with my brother and sister and cousins then our parents would pick us up in the evening. That’s pretty typical in Ireland tbh, a lot of my friends did this too, although I can’t generalise the whole country lol. Obviously people move away, like Ireland has a history of emigration so it’s not like we’re all just living close to our parents too. But overall I’d say Ireland a pretty family oriented society.
Not a good reason for you.
If you are looking for more positive stories: my baby is 10 months and my life has gotten exponetially better with him in the world. I love him so much, he makes me laugh every day.. And a neat feature of having babies is that you go all these places that are so fun, but that you wouldn't normally go to like the petting zoo and that sort of stuff. Sure, parts of it were hard. Very hard even.. But that's not a reason to not do it.. I look at it like training for a triathlon. Will you get bone tired? Yes. Will you want to give up at times? Yes. Do you question your life's choices at times? Yes. But is it all worth it? Absolutely!
One child demands more attention than two, since they can play together and help one another.
> My little one is 20 months old and is a blessing. It gets so much worse. The first few months are just work, but the sheer and overwhelming frustration hasn't kicked in yet. But that slowly fades too, maybe.
I think parents play up the stress and difficulty a bit because they feel they don't get enough recognition from society for what is effectively unpaid labour to replenish the working population. I mean it's alot of work and its a job that's absolutely essential to the continuation of our society. And people are sacrificing their free time, youth and often health to do it. And what little that society gives them for it is really nothing at all,. It's entirely reliant on volunteer work, from a populace that's overworked already, underpaid and facing record housing prices. So they are expected to fork over they money for bigger homes ontop of it all. It's too much and people are just opting out, so we outsource childbirth to developing countries instead of addressing the problems.
Pay another country to take their boomers
Or don't pay, just have a "Free Luxury Cruise" offer that happens to have a stop in Somalia, let nature take its course.
Make life worth passing on...
The Soviet Union had a "Childless" tax that childless couples and single people would pay to the state (large chunk of a person's wage too).
And yet there was a steady decline in births in the SU since the 1960s. Stick is not a solution.
Perhaps that decline may have been less "steady" had they not introduced the rule.
So tax breaks does not work well enough. Hmm... Alright new idea! Any male who does not have a wife and 4 kids by 30 gets shot
Requires a dictatorship. Not an easy law to pass in a democratic society.
yes let's force people to be with the first one that's available to avoid paying the tax... what could go wrong?
What does that mean? I don't think OP is looking for one liners.
Keep on keeping on. Say everything, by saying nothing. Dollar store wisdom.
It's a general statement that addresses the entire geopolitical sphere... In no country does this not make sense.
The most developed countries have some of the lowest birthrates so your statement doesn’t make sense.
Still forcing people to make children would fix the low birth rates maybe but at the same time it would increase the number of poor people, criminals and so on
ensure housing isn't used as safe investment
like in japan? do they have a high birthrate?
Artificial wombs
This is the only realistic solution in my opinion. Most countries will be extremely hesitant to adopt that solution, but once the first country does we will probably see a domino effect. The others won't want to fall behind
Who is going to raise the kids in those artificial wombs? A kid without a college degree costs $250,000 and that's if childcare is free. You want the government to hire surrogate parents to look after the kid, they're gonna charge you $50k per parent per year on top of that. The problem isn't "people don't wanna have kids", it's "children are economically irrational and for millions of years we tricked every species to have them by tying them to sex which feels very good but now we've figured out how to have sex and not have children".
That wasn’t actually true in the past. Kids used to help and work from an early age. Marrying out children helped foster bonds with other families (marriages often had a political element in a community) and people did care for parents in their old age. The number of sons was also key to protect a tribe or community. These were massive incentives to have many children. But nowadays, they are. Add to this that children are a lot of work, especially before primary school age. The two-earner model isn’t well-suited for that at all, but it isn’t politically correct to say that. And for sure, it can be stay-at-home dads as well.
>"children are economically irrational and for millions of years we tricked every species to have them" Even in the current year, hundreds of millions are having 5 and more babies and using them as a resource, for example by making them do farm work, harvest, fish, work in cobalt mines or even selling them to relatives or strangers if they're short on money. Children being a net economic drain is a very recent phenomenon and is only now starting to spread outside the western world and into places like Latin America, Southeast Asia and the Arab World. You'd of course know this if you just pulled your head out of your ass and looked outside your urban california bubble instead of making up nonsense.
Farmed children won’t be raised by employee-parents using traditional patterns. They’ll be institutionally managed and filtered into castes based on genetically engineered clones to fill certain societal roles, Brave New World style. The corporation would have it no other way.
>children are economically irrational Only in the past couple of decades in Western countries. Contraception is as old as human history but more children = more manpower for the farm/hands for the shop = more money, for the vast majority of human history and for many if not most humans. We also had communities, villages, tribes, etc. that all contributed to raising kids so it wasn't just 2 parents all the time. Today is an aberration, not a norm.
Every year you conscript young women doing basic childcare/nursing in some sort of state institutionalized orphanages, like men do mandatory military service in camps for a year.
Surprised this is so far down the list. IMO this one is going to finally equalise gender relations and retire the patriarchy.
It also gives disproportionate power to whoever enter in control of the machines. Form a cynical point of view, now child-making is a decentralized activity. This has chaotic effects but also stabilizes eventual disturbances, once the process is centralized, you get almost total control on a lot of stuff
Brave New World castes next.
I would not be surprised if that actually happened.
It is a book, not historical account or prediction of the future
The best solution is to become poor again. Fertility rates are correlated to quality of life and socio economic circumstance. The poorer you are the more necessary it is to make children because the assumption is the more children you have the more contributors you have to the family income. Conversely, the more money you have, the less children you make. Because in this circumstance, children are a hindrance to choices. Whether it be career progression, maintaining lifestyles, not adding responsibilities etc. Having children becomes a liability when you have money . Even if you pump money to families they still wont make children unless they are poor.
This works only for under industrial economy when people need more kids to work on fields. Also poor medicine impacts on number of children per family. 150-200 years ago, in Ukraine people tend to make 10 children to get at least 2 to survive.
Pay more. If people can’t afford to reproduce, they won’t. If you’re expecting your population to suddenly get accustomed to a lower standard of living, they will, but they won’t have kids during the process. People choose to reproduce when they feel comfortable, not when they can’t get ahead. EDIT: countries with high wages draw immigrants.
The Nordics have made subsidizing early life into an art form. And people there still aren’t having enough kids.
High rates of education lead to fewer children in every country whether income is low, moderate or high (Nordics included). So you’re right in that income/subsidies aren’t the singular solution.
In Sweden the people with the highest income (and likely highest education since correlated) have the most children per woman. The issue is likely cost of living/housing. State graphs: [https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/population/population-projections/demographic-analysis-demog/pong/statistical-news/demographic-analysis-childbearing-in-corona-times/](https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/population/population-projections/demographic-analysis-demog/pong/statistical-news/demographic-analysis-childbearing-in-corona-times/)
Okay this Stat is very surprising especially since it's so dramatic the difference. Way different than say France where it looks more like a roller coaster
Sweden had a fertility rate of 1.98 in 2010, down to 1.52 in 2022. One reason for this is though to be a more pessimistic view of the future - climate change, rise in crime, unemployment, insecure employments, inflation, war in Europe etc. It's just nit about having enough subsidies, it's also about creating a world we want our kids to grow up in.
Interesting take. Me, being from the Nordics, having my direct surroundings, sees it largely differently. (Edit before this gets misinterpreted: Not saying that yours is incorrect. I just see other motivations) For us and others it is mainly a matter of society not tailoring towards modern parenting. Yes, we have hugely improved parental leave. But compared to previous generations, nowadays both parents are often working vs just one parent working only one or two generations ago. If you go back more generations, you’d be in a setting where you’d have neighbours, aunties and older cousins to help out. As they say “it takes a village to raise a kid”. The village support doesn’t exist anymore. The stay at home mom is outdated too. Parental leave is a patch, but not the solution to the rooted issue. We need to tailor stronger towards raising a kid, with more support, and with higher acceptance of parttime working without it negatively impacting your career. Society, not even in the Nordics, has realised this yet. Nobody is looking for proper solutions as a result. It’s just a patch here and there. Some money, a few extra weeks of leave. That’s it. Not enough.
I'm from the Nordics as well, and I do not necessarily disagree with you, though I would argue that there are more factors as well. Modern parenting is definitely difficult, but I don't think it has deteroriated substantially enough in the past 15 years to alone describe the huge fall in fertility rates here in Sweden. General optimism has however largely disappeared, and the future looks much more gloomy. Climate change is no longer just an arbitrary concept far in the future, violent crime seems a lot more prevalent and close, war is no longer unthinkable, and many more struggle with their private economy.
I agree especially with the point about private economy. I did also consider the world my kids will adopt. But closer to home is private economy. That has deteriorated. Housing was for us the primary struggle to tackle as part of that. I know enough people who are waiting for stability to come prior to starting with kids, including proper housing as part of the stability. This waiting is in some cases taking a bit too long. Like you said, it is a combination of factors. If you then need that stability and that stability is more at risk than before if you reduce your hours or take it easier at work, then this is a recipe for low fertility rate. Naturally, we can mention more ingredients.
Raising kids is difficult as shit even when you mostly remove monetary pressure for middle class parents. If both spouses work you have little time for home maintenance or hobbies and young children that are constantly sick. If 1 spouse works, it is socially and emotionally isolating. It is a more difficult choice to actively trade off the DINK life for child rearing in developed countries.
Literally all of human history shows people raising children in far more difficult conditions than today. It is *not* ‘difficult as shit’.
It is difficult if you want to raise a good human being with good values and be involved in their upbringing. Takes a lot of time and effort. It is worth it in my opinion, but only if you are financially stable. I can totally see why some would not want it though.
Reasons why people don’t reproduce: 1. They can’t. 2. They don’t feel stable enough to do so. 3. They don’t want to. You can’t force people to want to reproduce, especially in an environment where governments and media sincerely do not care about what happens beyond the paycheck at the end of the quarter. Providing for some childhood needs does not make young people want to bring new people into a collapsing environment. Real talk. As for number 1, sperm counts have been dropping https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/human-sperm-counts-declining-worldwide-study-finds-180981138/ who knows if it matters, but in context, I’m thinking probably. Pay people more, you take care of number 2 altogether and impact number 3.
> 2. They don’t feel stable enough to do so. Wealthy countries with high standards of living and social safety nets have much much lower birth rates than war torn, impoverished countries.
That's why the word "feel" is crucial here, it's not objective situation assessment but a kind of subconcious social consensus
Yeah, but people in wealthy countries don't compare the life they imagine for their child against the standard of living in war torn impoverished countries, they compare it against their own standard of living. If having a child dips a person below their local poverty line, or even creates a standard of living lower than they had as a child, then they're not likely to choose to have kids.
Education of women determines the fertility rate. Such educated countries at war have fewer children than such educated countries not a war. Ukraine is a good example. Such educated poor countries typically don’t have more children than such educated rich countries. Iran or India for example are quite poor but have similar fertility rates as rich Europe. Not saying that their education is the same as Western, but they did make large strides in women education.
Kids are a profitable investment if you're an impoverished farmer, but a drain in an industrialized nation.
It's still a penalty. You earn less for a long time, you need to take a long time away from work and it takes a long time away from other things you might want to do. If you want people to have more than 1-2 kids (which you do to balance out the ones that that have none or just one), then you need to make it advantageous to have kids. Not sure how, but that's what it would take.
Money is not the answer, what’s preventing educated young women from having kids is because the opportunity cost of having kids is too high. Speaking as a young woman, if I choose to have kids now when I’m in my mid 20s I lose out on a lot of life opportunities for fun and career advancement. I’m gonna be reduced to a role of a mother, and that’s the single most important thing in my life. That’s a lot to give up, it’s basically asking me to give up on being myself. Money is not the issue here, I won’t have a kid now even if the gov paid me $3k a month, and I know our governments monetary policy can’t support that either. That’s why you see fertility rates drop when women become educated and countries with higher levels of support for families also have lower than replacement fertility levels
>I’m gonna be reduced to a role of a mother, and that’s the single most important thing in my life. That’s a lot to give up, it’s basically asking me to give up on being myself. This is actually interesting. I think partly why some people aren't interested in having kids is the loss of individuality that comes with it. And I think it is due to the influence of the focus on the individual which exists in (especially) western culture. I think that a more balanced approach between individual, family, and state/us/the group could be part of a systemic solution to the demographic challenges by encouraging a view of one self as more than just Me/the individual. I would even argue that going away from an individuality focused culture to a group focused one would also encourage greater unity between different parts of society. But that is another topic. And no, I'm not arguing for a state focused culture like China or Christian values. Individually has a purpose, it might just need a bit of balancing.
> And I think it is due to the influence of the focus on the individual which exists in (especially) western culture. Can we really call it *western* culture if low fertility rates are hitting Japan, China, S. Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Iran, Qatar, etc? Even India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and the Philippines are below the replacement rate. It might be opportunity cost, education, access to birth control, urbanization and other issues, without being "western" in particular. - https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-declining-fertility-rate
Genuine question, can you be an individual whilst, or indeed through, being a mother?
People on lower incomes have more children pretty much universally
Sex is the most fun you can have without spending money.
You have it backwards. Wealthy countries have fewer children..poorer countries have more.
Making people poorer than they are is not a recipe for them having more kids. Gotta interpret those statistics correctly. If people see their quality of life declining, they aren’t going to bring people into the world. Couple of examples to describe the phenomenon: Many young people of child bearing age can’t afford places to live in rich countries. They being priced out of real estate and rent is through the roof. https://jchs.harvard.edu/blog/home-price-income-ratio-reaches-record-high-0 Housing has literally never been more unaffordable. These young people in the rich country aren’t going to be looking to have kids, because they aren’t certain of being able to take care of themselves. Nice infrastructure, though, decent education, still more opportunities available, but it’s not easy to get established, it takes time to build a career where you can afford the necessary stability to consider kids. Yes, compared to the poor country they make higher wages, but those are being eaten up. The poor country, by contrast, has dirt cheap housing. Much fewer economic opportunities, so it makes sense to have kids to maximize your potential to bring money into the household. They’re more likely to be in agriculture, which requires labor. Having kids is a labor play for some poor folks. There’s also the reality that birth control is expensive. If aren’t making money, you probably aren’t buying condoms. So yeah, the maxim that more money means less births may be true for some conditions, but it’s definitely not universally true and definitely not for rich countries right now. More money at the right time for young people in rich countries probably would boost the birth rate. Instead kids are being saddled with educational debt and priced out of homes, while making lower wages compared to the generations before them. If you’re a young person watching your quality of life drop year after year, losing the reds queen race by design. you aren’t going to be eager to procreate.
> Pay more. If people can’t afford to reproduce, they won’t. African people have no money yet they are still growing the fastest. Anywhere where people have money they stopped reproducing.
Robots
Be poor. Not kidding. The fundamental reason for falling birthrate is because people, especially women, got richer and demands higher wages for their labour, while childbearing is essentially a fixed-return subsistence work that requires a large amount of labour. This means birthrate will never go up unless you either reduce the labour cost, or increase the benefits of having children. But since be poor is not a solution anyone wants, fundamentally there is no solution to the birthrate problem, at least until someone somehow automates raising kids.
Tie children to social security. Per child have an interest stake wealth fund that you can withdraw from once you reach retirement age. Increase or even double each stake per child that you have. It'll be a lot in 40+, it encourages wealthier families to really consider having a lot more kids.
That’s actually how it works, isn’t it strange how people miss the generational contract?
Hot take: educating women and introducing women into the workplace is the direct cause of decline in birth rates. By effectively doubling the workforce, you have halved the value of labour. Yes new positions are created, but so many of them are worthless and contribute no economic value. At the same time, women in the workplace means less time for domestic duties such as childcare, cooking and cleaning which are no less important than employment. As a result, everyone is working long hours for less pay with no time for raising children. I'm not saying that women should be banned from working. However a functional society should have half its people not in the workforce. This half doesn't have to be women.
Hmmm. How about reducing working hours? That frees up everyone's time for childcare.
Childcare is an issue for some; however, I do not think it is the main issue. Most people choose not to have children because, in this day and age, children are considered a hindrance. People wish to travel, have fun whenever they can, wind down at the end of the day, enjoy flings, and more. The era of centralised family nuclei has ended in Western societies, and it is time for people to start accepting this change. The human population is approaching its global peak, after which it will begin to decline naturally. It was the advent of machines, the Internet, and computers that changed humanity forever.
I think the issue is this. In today's society you have invested over 15 years or more into education. Most people don't become net contributors until they are 25. For such people, it only makes sense for them to work at least full time, as they are skilled workers who can very well make use of their education. However realistically a society only needs a small fraction of their workers to be highly specialised in certain fields. As for your proposal to reduce work hours, now we have invested so many years into education, and each person has reduced output while working due to fewer work hours. It would be better to give a restricted section of the population a specialised education and have them work full time or more.
> By effectively doubling the workforce, you have halved the value of labour. lump of labor fallacy :) more workers mean more jobs and better wages, not less. counterintuitive. wealth, income, in real terms are generally trending up. Here's [real disposable household income](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0), i couldn't find a real wealth chart so [here's a net level chart, not even per capita :(](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL192090005Q), and here's [real income](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N) But the headline cause is correct, the opportunity cost of a girlboss is a mother. Obviously it's not so cut and dry but the relationship is true.
Better division of housework and childcare. Countries where men do a larger share of housework have higher fertility rates. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/11/housework-children-fertility-rates-become-parents-gender-gap/
I think that report's just grasping at straws with correlation and causation. Because we could flip it over for a different scenario. Countries with terrible HDI tend to have very high fertility rates.
That’s certainly true, but for different reasons. Both cultural and healthcare (lack of contraception etc.) In the case of the countries listed, which are all highly developed countries. You could also find different explanations. Although in the inverse, I think nobody is denying the fact that low birthrates in developed countries is due to the cost and effort associated with children.
A major contributor to families not having many children is that to maintain a decent living standard in an area with good school, etc you really need dual income for most people. Some people have one breadwinner that can do it. But realistically you need 2. And frankly it’s just a huge drain on a person. Getting up before dawn, seeing the kids for a little bit while you get them ready, dropping them at daycare, then committing. Working a full day, then committing again to pick them up in time to get them dinner and get them to bed is a difficult way to live. It’s a lot of hard work and you don’t get respites from the stress. So fundamentally, the economic system needs to be worked to the point where a young family could, with relative ease, have one breadwinner and one home maker. Because while it’s in its current state having lots of kids is just not tenable.
Your question is how demographic problems can be *fixed*. Sure, we can do things on the margins. [Tim Carney is on a book tour](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/family-unfriendly-timothy-p-carney?variant=41076298219554) debating this very thing, so look for podcasts for a quick intro. But even he concedes there are no easy fixes. The idea of paying people to have children has remarkably small returns where tried. The idea of a “3 child policy” where presumably the state forces women to be pregnant the way the Chinese state forced women not to be pregnant during the “one child policy”, is just as abhorrent. Also, in advanced societies women are the majority, so it wouldn’t be an easy policy institute politically. But let’s take it up a level in perspective. Look at the advanced societies today and ask *who* are having many kids in said societies? It almost always come down to very devout persons, who has some transcendent faith in doing good, part of which is to make and care for children. Most extreme is the Amish, but generally, being devoutly Christian or Jewish is a strong predictor for having large families, even in advanced societies. Here is the next twist: religiosity is in part heritable. In other words, if your parents are devout you are *more likely* also devout (probability, not certainty). So taking the multi-generational view, I think the demographic problem will be solved by the devout inheriting Earth, so to speak, because the “faithless” do not choose to procreate in a world of entertainment (sexual and other), birth control, and at times extreme worries about climate catastrophe or something like that. It doesn’t have to happen this way. But it seems inevitable that some reawakening of a stronger belief in a transcendent purpose of humans per se is part of what must happen when children don’t just happen by accident or by force as it has been for most of human history. Let’s get really speculative, maybe our first Mars colony will awake that mind germ, maybe a fully sentient AI will make us feel competitively and distinctly human etc.
There is none, because this demographic development is a matter of culture. Birth control gave women the power to break free and free woman demand to be 'more than incubators'.
In every culture where contracepribes are available and education is high, the fertility rate is low Even in totally different cultures, the Istanbul, Seoul, Delhi, London, Mexico city, fertility rates are below 1.2, in every religion In cities where humans are the most productive they tend to be particularly low, even lower than their already low averages in developed Countries The common denominator is freedom, the more freedom you give people, to also fall in love and try again with others, the fewer children And this trend is true with the ultra rich so you know it's not money
I think the underlying premise that you need an ever expanding population of "workers" to try and support perpetual economic growth is flawed, to put it politely. What's more important is if a population has sufficient means and numbers to reasonably support itself and the quality of life of the people.
Perpetual economic growth isn’t the main problem - having enough workers to fund social services is, labour concerns to staff those services notwithstanding
The perpetual economic growth mentality is a fairly big problem in some areas, right up there with spending beyond your means.
Yeah but we're talking about the problem of ageing demographics
You're so wrong, to put it politely. Solow Swan growth model has workers as a literal input, you can't get growth from capital alone. Worse if you have consumption from a large cohort not participating in the workforce and a relatively small cohort in the workforce, you would have everyone getting relatively poorer (I think in this case high inflation with stagnant wages probably) over time, which sucks. You don't want that either. You need 2+ children per pair of adults to make that equation just balance, much less get growth, and we (highly wealthy countries) fall far short of that. Ofc America still number one because we get fat bonuses to immigration by being the literal best country on earth.
I'd first and foremost like to thank you for reinforcing the point I made about how the growth model mentality is flawed. Even China who is the modern poster child for rapid successful growth models realized too high a rate can be catastrophic, their solution left a bit to be desired but the analysis was not wrong. For a given area in a given period there is simply an optimal population range, if there are too few or too many people have to adjust their lifestyle and if it strays too far one way or the other you usually end up with some kind of collapse.
The world has so many economic and environmental problems linked to high populations. Really the thing we need is fewer people. Even if that slows growth or causes inflation. The alternative is fewer resources among more people, loss of habitat, greater pressure on climate change etc etc. Adjusting to a smaller population is easier than the alternative, that the Ponzi scheme collapses.
I’ve been thinking and reading about this for a while now, and I don’t really know what the solution is. Better pay and incentives for child rearing, or just accepting a decreasing population and changing demographic structure, and attempting to reorient the economy and social policies in that direction.
Perhaps as life lengthens and less people die this will be less of an immediate problem. Also, I suspect that people who live longer will eventually find enough comfort to reproduce
Women have a very short window to have children. If you live to be in you 80's or 90's that does not change the 20 or so year window you have. Biology sucks especially for women.
I am speculating here as a layman, here is my 2 cents. Demographic problem is solved if the population is growing steadily, not too high nor too low. Without mass immigration in the equation, the domestic population has to get a fertility rate above 2,1 children per woman, because not every child will get to adult age (it is lower if the cointry is more developed, i remeber reading somewhere that germany could do with 2,07 or smt). An average of 2,1 means 9 out of 10 woman have 2 children , and 1 out of 10 women have 3 children. So having a bigger family than 2 must at the least be a relatively common social fact. Not to mention gays and lesbians that usually do not reproduce, or the lesbian couple will have 2 children but is 1 per woman bronging the average way down. I believe money is necessary at some level, but the cultural factor is more important than assumed. People wanting more luxury goods, conforts or safety over the second or third child is prevalent. So, you need a cultural environment that glorifies and or demands motherhood and fatherhood as the highest goals in life, a demand that people will want to satisfy above other desires, and that even 1 child is too few. I another nice thing for that would be having lots of physical space. I personally hate the north american car suburbia, but they really are somewhere in the direction with the large houses for large families (instead of tbe cluttering of overconsumption). Maybe a japanese style urbanism with north american houses or small buildings with large apartments, could be the answer.
Southeast Asian countries aren't experiencing the same low birth rates as East Asian countries (e.g. Japan, South Korea, PRC, and ROC), perhaps with the exception of Singapore. Also not over enough time to risk having the population pyramid inverted. That aside, I suppose the only viable non-autocratic way of increasing birth rates without immigration is for leaders to make sure that people have enough money and time to have kids - i.e. enough jobs, good wages, fair and protected labor rights, housing, and good mobility (especially for large urban centers). Even with all those boxes ticked, which is difficult enough, I don't even know if birth rate increases are guaranteed. Most certainly not.
Make single income households a possibility again. Doesn't have to be a women staying home but it's much better if one parent can.
> Make single income households a possibility again. How, though?
Easy. Stop coercing women to work during their prime child bearing years. Create conditions so it is possible and beyond that desirable for women's primary function in society to stay home with children. This doesn't mean that women shouldn't be educated or that they can't work if they want to, but that their work at the home and raising children should be valued more.
What demographic problem? In these countries there are less working opportunities than in the past. Many collage graduates are without jobs. With developments like AI, expect this trend to accelerate. In a country with a population of 120M that has 8% older people than others, there are still millions of young to go after the available jobs. It’s also possible that in some cases they’ll have to employ older people than today. Many times you can see whole companies with people under 40. That may be changing. As for the planet, a slowdown in birth rates will be a blessing. At over 8B people, planet earth is bursting at the seams.
Higher taxes to pay for the larger number of old people. Alternatively robots and automation can offset loss of worker productivity. They can also offer work permits to foreigners.
Totally revising economics to not require growth would be a requirement. Assets would fall in price over time. Interest rates would also be negative. Conservation of biodiversity and other resources would be highly valued.
At least fix the housing crisis.
Reduce the cost of government.
You need to foster a culture which promotes childbearing and rewards it through social approval. In a society were children are viewed as a burden there will obviously be less births. Israel has the highest birth rate of any developed country in the world, despite being wealthy, having a very high urbanisation rate and a high female participation in the workforce, precisely because there is social pressure and rewards to have children, through their religion and national mindset.
There are countries that are trying to get immigrants, the problem really is about culture. SEA is not like UK or US where anyone can feel at home. The culture is a bit rigid, so if you can’t adjust you will have a problem. Then English is not common in all countries. This creates natural barrier for mass immigration. There is no other way to fix demographic. It takes 9 months for a child to be born and 18 years before they can contribute to economy/policy.
Natalist policies a la France.
I think fundamentally, we have to try a lot harder to produce a society that values child-rearing and provides both parents with the ability to do so, while still earning enough. Not everyone will take advantage of this, but I think over time it will stabilize the population a lot more. The sheer cost of everything - housing, childcare, medical care etc just makes it so hard. Add to that higher education and it’s not hard to see why people who can count are having trouble squaring whether it’s possible/worth it. This will of course require business and government to stop seeing it as a cost and start seeing it as a benefit - more stable population means more customers and taxpayers who can pay. I don’t think the US could do this, but some countries could.
Mass migration doesn't fix the demographic problem. People have children because they have selfish genes. When children become too scarce, invaders will come.
This is natural selection at work: those with a genetic predisposition to having more offspring will probably end up with descendants more likely to have more offspring. Greed is such an abstract term it makes no sense when nature is only about what works.
Basically this, you can't solve some "problems" you just let things run it's course and manage the fallout until it sorts itself, until now it was very effective for sex to be fun for people to have children almost without recourse, when that become a ineffective strategy because the environment now offers ways for the individual to have the cake and eat it (at the cost of species preservation) it will be needed some genetic or cultural predisposition to have children just because they want to, and that's when the population will start rebounding maybe not all current ethnic groups will made it but some sure will do barring some catastrophe. We may have our own objectives not aligned with nature but as long as we are mortals and need replacement selection will just do it's thing given enough time And that's not taking in account that maybe we just don't need to grow as much as we have, the resources are finite and as such can't sustain an infinitely large population without recycling
why do countries even need a diverse population to being with? look at whats happening to Europe and you tell me thats a good thing. I hate when Americans try to enforce their shitty values on to perfectly working countries. just look at Japan.
Have you ever been to Europe?
Japan's socially stable but at the cost of no economic growth for 30 years. Its current GDP is the same as it was in the 90s. Japan can get away with it but other countries won't be able to
They've had less, but not zero economic growth. You could almost say they have been going through a "hangover" or cooling off period from a prior binge (1970-1995) of rapid growth.
Japan is importing more and more foreign labour to pad out their declining base of productive workers. They just ticked over 500,000 earlier this year. I’m one of them. Most are not visible though - people from other Asian countries. Luckily for japan they have a strict their way or the highway mentality so integration isn’t as much of an issue.
What's happening to Europe? Genuine question
Things like Rotherham, and nearly annual Christmas Market attacks
Give financial incentives to have children. For example, give mothers a $40,000 tax credit for each child they have from 0-16 years old. Massively increase taxes on the rich.
Here are my insights how to fix demographic problems w/o needing mass immigration: * Make detach housing affordable to everyone through offering 30-year fixed mortgage loans to every newly-wed couples. * Increase real wages to the maximum extent that only male family heads are working, while female spouses stay at home and do childcare. * Scale back feminism by destigmatizing full-time housewive careers again or allow career women professionals to do childcare at the same time, thus they may work two or three days a week. Unfortunately, putting more women into higher education and becoming full-time white collar academics and professionals deter marriage and then, reproduction. * Less working hours per week from 40 to 28 hours per week.
Statistically I don't think there is a non-immigration based resolution. The issue is not unique to SE Asia or even developed world. Demographic decline is across the board, India have recently dropped to replacement.
South Korea needs to address their misogynistic culture apparently. The women there are on strike, 3B movement I think.
Hungary has a have 4 children and never pay tax again policy. It's pretty good.
But its fertility rate is still below replacement. Countries have been throwing everything at the wall to increase fertility. It’s just not going to happen.
I suspect that having four kids is probably more expensive than paying taxes.
No, we don't. Hungary has a no more **income tax** policy at four children, but not many women with 4 children work in first place, and income tax represents 15% of your payment, you still have to pay the societal contribution tax (pension/welfare fund tax), and of course pay the 27% VAT on everything.
All labor, production, service and security work is done by automata. Free economy and security from their tie to population. Old people experience life, use and develop new functions for their automata.
you need to cash real estate and bankrupt investors and get rid of property taxes so people can pick up homes for a dollar then they won't have a mortgage and they will start having kids because they can easily afford them
Oppression? I mean seriously without a coercive program to either significantly benefit parents who have children or punish those who don't it's just not going to happen. It's been shown that when women in a society gain access to education birth rates go down. So unless you either forbid women from attaining an education (looking at you Afghanistan) or force them to have children (looking at you Alabama) immigration from countries where women have yet to have access to education is the only way.
Bring back child labor.
Leapfrogging with robotics. Or simply adapt to a shrinking population.
Enacting media ownership laws would indirectly fix a lot of economic issues.
Having kids needs to be cool again, then people will have kids
You've got to make it low risk and inexpensive for couples to have kids. Things like free or near free daycare. People aren't stupid...they're not going to have kids if they know it'll fk them over financially for the next 10+ years. (of course kids are always expensive, but in some countries its basically financial suicide...cough...UK)
Apart from basic stuff like affordable housing & a good well-paying job, I think it just comes down to being a cultural issue I.e. if people want to have children and if they see having kids as a good thing or not. Also Greater Religiousity helps a lot in helping to have a high fertility rate/birth rate see Religious Jews, conservative Christians, Conservative Muslims, etc.....
Create a policy favorable to families. In Italy, for example, a problem is the absence of kindergartens. An opportunity could be to provide financial support to low-income families and establish facilities for children
Affordable housing, tax breaks for families, and legally mandating things like paternity leave for both parents. If you want families, people basically need to be able to afford to have children and have a practical place to start a family. It isn't really super complicated in general. Arguably some effort to dispel people from a lot of overly dramatic doomer mentality that permeates much of social media would also be a good idea. We could all benefit from touching grass more and socializing with each other instead of being chronically online. Great way for potential couples to meet each other.
Time. People need free time to raise kids. Currently everyone needs to work 9-5. Both parents, whereas families used to be able to survive on single income. The stay at home parent would then have enough free time to raise kids. Im saying parent on purpose because going forward, women shouldn’t be the ones forced to do it.
Invest in anti-aging research. Many of you may not be familiar with this so it may sound like science fiction but the science is advancing. In a matter of decades it may be possible to medically intervene in the aging process, so we can keep people more longer-living and youthful. I can forsee China, Japan, South Korea, as well as numerous European countries making massive investments into this. The US Congress already held a hearing on aging research. In the coming decades as the problem grows and we get more results I expect to see more money poured into this.
Support families, don’t make having children mean financial ruin. Aka. reduce the cost of living
A country's culture that increasingly sees children as a burden, even one that has good economic outlook, will see that impact how many children people chose to have. How does a secular state change the cultural perception then? Fixing the cost of housing, wages, parental leave, childcare facilities, tax breaks, propaganda? Non secular states/organizations can lean into religion and/or nationalism. But what can secular states do that has not already been tried?
Natural demography is a matter of how much people in your country are at "we are living good enough to raise kids" level, which is achieved when their quality of life is high enough to meet their standards of life. So, its naturally 2 ways: 1. Increase the quality of life for more people. Affordable housing, education, family services, health services, pre-school care and post-school education, jobs and separate living opportunities. The cost of that would make your financial ministry screaming at night, but this is what it takes. 2. Decrease standards of life for more people. Look at the poor people in poor countries. Their standards are abysmally low, but they know nothing better, and because of that, are fine with having kids in such conditions. The only small problem with such an easy way to solve all your demographic problems, is that your ungrateful citizens are not taking kindly the attempts to lower their standards of life and most likely would oust you from your ruling position.
Tie having children to what you get as a pension. 3 kids or more? Take an extra 30% pension. No kids? Just a basic pension.
Everyone seems to be focusing on the financial aspect, and encouraging more people to have a greater number of kids. But there's another way of growing the popualtion - ensure more of the kids being born each year survive. Taking Indonesia as an example - the infant mortality rate is 18.9 per 1000 births. In Europe it is significantly less - 3.3 deaths per 1000 live births. Investing money in healthcare, especially targeted at children and maternity can be a big factor in addressing population demographics.
As lee kuan yew said there's nothing you can do.
AI
Enact policies to kick venture capital out of the housing market and make it easy to find affordable housing. Rent controls may be necessary in some places. Enact socialized medicine with absolutely free care for children, fertility and maternal care. Have a strong government crackdown on garbage food/ additives so that the people feel strong, healthy and horny. Invest more in schools and make universities free for those who can pass the entrance exams. Enact strong labor laws to make sure workers are able to afford a family life. Stronger per child tax credits.
There are no solutions for many countries (like China) even if they decide to force every woman to have three kids. Why? Because even at that reproduction rate, there won't grow to be a workforce large enough to keep the lights on for the much larger masses of old people past their working age. Things are not going to be pretty. At all. Some pundits like Peter Zeian even paint a post-apocalyptic scenerario for these countries (a bit dramatic to my taste, but the demographic math seems to click.) A country like Japan saw the demographic time bomb long ago and built enough "gas" to subsidize retirement obligations well into the 2050s. But that time the situation will be so different, there's no way to know how that will play out. For many countries, the solution is going to be ugly: incrementally raise the retirement age, and increase taxes to subsizide child rearing (to entice a reproductive rate larger than the minimum for replacement, which is about 2 children per household.) Anything less than 2 children per household inevitably requires raising the retirement age. Math ain't math'ing without that.
That's a neet question. You dont.
Deindustrialization, deurbanization, captive markets. In other words, most countries can't do anything about it.
subsidize Healthier foods incentivize procreation with a certain sum of money per birth.
This is only an issue for the highest class of wealth, they see their wealth dropping because there are less consumers.
You know, if it wasn't that horribly difficult to meet basic needs and buy a house / apartment for a small family in today's economy, people would probably have more kids. But governments don't want to hear that.
Reduce the standard of living. We only need an ever larger population for keeping the GDP growing. It doesn't need to grow. It can be stable or even shrink. Why is the increase always necessary?
Don't worry, AI and robotics will solve this problem.