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Just saw this geographic fertility map of Turkey on reddit. The statistics were released yesterday:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ctccjz/turkish_fertility_rate_20162023_comparison_oc/
Population map for comparison (urban rate is a whopping 75%):
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Visualizing-Population-Density-in-Turkey-Full-Size.html
In 7 short years FTR crashed from 2.11 in 2016 to 1.5 in 2023.
https://ilkha.com/english/health-life/turkiyes-birth-rate-declines-despite-ranking-high-in-europe-393736
Women get children later (average is now 29 years; which is older than in the US (27 years in 2021)) and there is an increase in one-person households (14.4% -> 19.7%)
And despite President Erdoğan being more powerful and way more conservative (out of touch?) than other leaders:
https://www.turkishminute.com/2024/05/16/turkey-records-dramatic-decline-in-its-fertility-rate-official-data/
The solution is simple. If the state wants women to give up their careers, their education, their financial independence so that they will have and raise children then the state needs to adequately compensate those women for what it is asking them to give up. No state on earth is prepared, or could afford, to do this, which is why functionally all efforts to increase fertility fail.
We might further ask: why can't states do this? The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value. The issue at the heart of raising fertility by having women work less is that society will be poorer, which people are generally opposed to.
Why could this work historically? Partially because much more of women's labor was needed inside the home (and so unavailable for work outside the home) and partially because there were actual legal restrictions on the work women (especially married women) could do outside the home.
Solution isn’t simple. Countries have tried economic incentives and mostly failed or slowed the decline.
It also introduces a huge deadweight loss of higher taxes. Since most of these ideal heavily bread females would be supported by heavily taxed men who are their husbands it’s wooing just further depress economic activity. The past would have expected the man to man up and work 80 hrs a week if he needed and transfer directly to his wife instead of using the government as a middleman.
Probably far easier to propandize all the Instagram executives. Instead of filling young females with attractive girls traveling to Bali bombard them with pretty pregnant chicks with 5 children and a dutiful loving husband. You can change economic incentives sure but changing what people value changes how the evaluate incentives. If real life hot pussy is begging men to man up I am guessing there is no shortage of men willing to work 80 hours a week for that deal.
Social media turned a not insignificant faction of young girls into Hamas lovers so I would bet on social media being able to make young girls obsessed with cute little humans.
This is because the economic incentives they offer are pitiful compared to the costs they are asking people to bear. Defraying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs and lost income with tiny payments.
I am skeptical that doubling the hours of work men do would totally compensate for the loss of all the extra workers in the form of women. Structuring the transfer this way also requires a women become almost totally dependent on a man, which has its own issues.
I am skeptical about the number of men who would sign up for this, or the extent to which women could be propagandized into it. We had this kind of arrangement once. We ceased having it for a reason.
You said it was a simple solution to just pay women to have kids. Now it sounds like you are arguing being a mother sucks so we need to pay them a lot of money? How much like a million a kid? More? Obviously we do not have that much government money. So government paying women money to have kids instead of worker would not be viable. At the end of the day women being homemakers and taking care of children has to be funded by basically the earning capabilities of one man (whether direct or indirect thru taxation of men). It sounds like your saying one man can’t make enough money to fund a women staying home which means we should just accept low fertility.
If women prefer being boss babes and going to Bali instead of motherhood then just isn’t a solution. Personally I think the current viewpoint is the propaganda and most would prefer motherhood if society did not pressure them to oppose it. But if Bali is preferred to babies there really is not a solution. Motherhood is evolutionary programmed into females since well it’s necessary to survive so I think it’s the other side doing the propaganda.
It's not that motherhood "sucks" as an activity, but being a stay at home mother does have significant opportunity costs in the form of lost income and other expenses. A million a kid is probably far too much. I suspect you would raise fertility pretty significantly if you paid women merely they wages they would have had if they had not stopped working in a kid-independent way.
So like $2 million a kid? For the people you want breeding the most. IQ >110. That’s a yearly income of probably $150k give or take which capitalizes to $2 million plus or minus.
Having someone carry your biological kid for you thru pregnancy runs 50-150k and that’s recruiter lower class. Doesn’t include the 18 years of motherhood. I don’t think we have anywhere close to enough money to boost tfr at the rates you imply by paying people. You need people to desire motherhood as it’s own reward.
Maybe $2 million for some people, true. Most would be much less. According to FRED the median US personal income in 2022 was $40,480. According to the US census there are about 74M women between the ages of 15 and 50 (the age categories used for calculating TFR). Let's say we get half of them to have a child (that would boost US TFR to ~2.3). If we gave each of them the median income that comes out to about $1.5T per year. That would be about 15% of the US federal budget, 10% more than we spend on Social Security. This is much less than I expected it to be!
IMO at least some of that should be back-loaded. For example, count child-rearing years as median income or last earned income (whichever is higher) * number of children for the purpose of calculating social security benefits. Advantage: selects for low time-preference. Advantage: Defers payout contingent on future taxbase able to support it. Advantage: Provides the long-term spousal independence that women seem to crave.
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