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If you were going to increase the birth rate how would you do it?
There's lots of suggestions, most of them bad. For example, Scandinavian countries have been touted as "doing it right" by offering generous perks to families such as paid family leave. But these efforts, despite outrageous costs, have done little or nothing to stem the falling birth rate. Sweden's fertility rate is a dismal 1.66 as of 2020, and if trends hold, the rate among ethnic Swedes is far lower.
I think that, like everything, deciding to marry and have a family comes down to status.
Mongolia is a rare country that has managed to increase its fertility rate over the last 20 years, from about 2.1 children per women in 2004, to about 2.7 today. This feat is more impressive considering the declines experienced worldwide during the same period. It's doubly impressive considering the fertility rate in neighboring Inner Mongolia (China) is just 1.06!
What is Mongolia doing right? Apparently, they are raising the status of mothers by giving them special recognition and status.
https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1827418468813017441
In Georgia (the country), something similar happened when an Orthodox patriarch started giving special attention to mothers with 3 children:
https://x.com/JohannKurtz/status/1827070216716874191
Now, raising the status of mothers is more easily said than done. But I think it's possible, especially in countries with a high degree of social cohesion like in East Asia. In Europe, a figure like the King of Netherlands could personally meet and reward mothers. In the United States, of course, this sort of thing would be fraught as any suggestion coming from the right might backfire due to signalling. Witness the grim specter of the vasectomy and abortion trucks at the DNC. But the first step to fixing a problem is to adequately diagnose the cause. To me, the status explanation is more compelling (and fixable) than any other suggestion I've seen.
Counterpoint to the "status" argument- in Japan, being a mom/housewife is still considered a good, respectable job. Maybe not "high-status," but not low-status either, and it beats the hell out of working a terrible office job with insane hours. Young women there will unabashedly say "I want to become a housewife." But the birth rate there is still quite low, so apparently something is not working.
I wish I had a source for this, but I remember reading somewhere that the decline in birth rate is mostly coming from a decline in the teen birth rate. Women who wait until they've finished college and started a career to have kids are just not the sort of person to have large families. They'll have 1, 2 at most, and often zero. The younger they start, the more likely they are to have more kids. In part that's just biology (higher fertility), but also psychological, young people are a lot more likely to think "why not just do it" instead of agonizing over the decision for years.
My crazy idea would be to, essentially, abolish high school. Or at least, rework it to be very, very different. I think it's insane that we expect teenagers to learn calculus and biology as if they're all on track to become future scientists, while at the same time forcing them to follow the strict rules and low status of children. I would change it to be more of a "finishing school" experience, where they get taught how to live independantly, give them a job that's subsidized by the government so it's less brutal than most minimum-wage jobs, but still gives them some responsibility and spending money. Give them some freedom and independance from their parents. At that point they'll have time, money, and freedom to interact with the opposite sex, and things will just happen naturally. Then they can decide for themselves whether they want to continue "real school" by going to college, or just keep working and raising a family/dating.
One simple solution would be to make parents of young children Priority Candidates for all government jobs. In other words, to hire someone who doesn’t have at least one child under ten at home, you need to show there are no viable candidates who do.
The nice thing about this policy is that it could be sold to both left and right in different terms. For the left, it’d be about reducing the child-rearing associated with careers, and it pattern matches to affirmative action. For the right it’s about raising TFR.
The best thing about this is that I think it would encourage people to have children younger too. Very often climbing the early rungs of the ladder is more difficult because there are more viable candidates for any one position. You can imagine professional couples in their early or mid 20s saying things like “if we want a shot at the big leagues we should have kids before we’re 30.” And while this would only apply to government jobs in the first instance, soft pressure could be put on private employers to copy it.
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