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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.
Have they tried economic incentives that are at least a 2 digit percentage of the opportunity cost of having additional children?
Hungary spends 5% of gdp on boosting fertility. So yes they cross that threshold. Without verifying that number it’s going to be very hard for governments to go any higher than 5% of gdp. Countries need to do a lot more things than subsidize fertility.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-populist-right-want-you-make-more-babies-viktor-orban/
What they need to do is guarantee mothers the same career income they would otherwise have. So, eg. if a female doctor aged 28 has three children, she receives $2m in cash over a certain number of years. If a shop assistant of the same age has three children, she receives only $200k. No country subsidises kids to the extent that an even moderately successful woman would notice the difference.
This wouldn't work at all, women would just get whatever degree would "pay the most" and then have 3 kids starting at 22. It would bankrupt the system in no time.
Medical school places are limited and handed out based on intelligence and conscientiousness, that isn’t a flaw with the system at all.
I can imagine the admissions scandals already. It's already bad enough that people think that there's a vague but strong-enough link between getting a degree from a particular school/program and expected lifetime earnings. Can you imagine if there was a literal government-backed guarantee of a multi-million dollar payoff?
And after admissions, hooo buddy. I went to school in what was considered a difficult field of study. A couple other students stick out in my memory as being relevant here. I remember right after one guy gave his capstone senior presentation; it was atrocious. Just hilariously bad. By that point, I had a pretty decent relationship with the assistant department chair, and we were talking right after it. I think I was remarking on how it was possible that he was even getting a degree. I think I even pointed out that my view was that giving such folks degrees devalues my own degree, because if people in the market hire guys like him and start thinking, "This is the kind of people we get from Program X?!" they're going to think we all suck. His comment was, "His GPA is ___. Who the hell is going to hire him?" [Yes, he literally told me the kid's GPA. Yes, I know that's totally not supposed to be allowed.] The message is, of course, there is very little incentive to not go ahead and give people a degree, so long as they can just barely sneak through (aided by rampant grade inflation and such).
The second example is a girl who pretty honestly told me that she wasn't really planning on using her degree in the workforce. It was an interest, a hobby, maybe even a status symbol that look at how smart and cool she is to have gotten such a difficult and neat-sounding degree. She legit was planning to be a mother. Sure enough, within a couple years of graduation (I don't recall exactly how long), she was a stay-at-home mother. I don't believe she's ever used her degree in the workforce. [FYI, I think she was actually mostly interested in the subject matter, and she wasn't an atrocious low-performer; she was actually reasonably smart. But I kinda don't think she was always the most motivated to really push herself all the time like some of the other students; she really was able to just sort of focus on the stuff she was interested in and then sort of skate by on the stuff she wasn't.]
In any event, putting them together, a multi-million-dollar government guaranteed payout would cause some hella targeting of programs. I'd say that I could imagine an underground website that details exactly how much a degree from every specific program out there is guaranteed to be worth, but it wouldn't have to be underground! It's the government! They'd have to use a public formula and make determinations, in public, of which programs are in/out of which pay bracket. Once you've gotten in, by hook or by crook or by bribing the admissions department, what incentive is there to not graduate you? Like both of my examples, everyone knows what you're doing and what the outcome will be. Everyone knows that you're not, like, actually going to be out there performing surgery on people or whatever. "Nobody's going to hire you," and you don't even want to get hired anyway. And since you're probably not going to cause any harm anyway, do we really want to be jerks and get in the way of a poor young woman's multi-million-dollar payout? If we try, she might even protest or sue or do any number of things that cause extensive paperwork and unneeded headache. Much easier to just let it go.
If you move it to, "Well, you have to at least get hired and have a salary," that helps with part of the problem, but would almost certainly contribute to hiring discrimination, combining features that already currently exist, from parental leave policies to affirmative action. It will almost certainly give a company pause when considering hiring a brand new female grad if they think some combination of, "On top of having weeks/months of leave if she gets pregnant; she has a literal multi-million-dollar payout coming to incentivize her getting pregnant," and, "Does she really even want to do this job? Did she just do enough to get into/through school, so she could max her payout?"
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