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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.
Subsidization is not necessary. I started working part time minimum wage jobs when I was 14, high schoolers are more than capable of handling minimum wage work. It’s not like they’ll be sent to the salt mines (for one thing, salt mining pays a lot more than minimum wage).
There's so many easy jobs for a site boy, which seems to be a completely vanished role now. I was doing "construction work" at 12, even though most of it was sweep, fetch, and carry with a bit of "show the kid how to do this" whenever there was a slow minute.
By the time I was 15 I had a reputation and was worth an adult's salary, which really helped out with the "girlfriends are fucking expensive" issue.
Come to think of it Obama's rules probably made that job very illegal. But if I'd knocked up my HSGF and not gone to college, I could have still made a decent living and been a highly paid specialist by 20.
Yeah, something like that sounds perfect! But it does illegal now, and even if it wasn't, I would have had no idea how to find a job like that as a 12 year old growing up in the upper-middle-class suburbs.
Contra @FlyingLionWithABook, I do think you'd have to subsidize and regulate it a bit though. The idea would be for everyone to get a job like that, or at least most people. Including the very below-average kids. I don't care whether they're actually "productive" at it though, the point would be to gently guide them into the workforce, sort of like how we have Kindergarten set up to get kids used to being at school without really testing them on anything. All of the part-time minimum wage jobs I had in high school were absolutely miserable, just forcing kids through the wringer doing the worst stuff with the expectation that we'd all quit before too long anyway. And some of the managers and older coworkers were downright sadistic about it.
Actual employers and people who do productive work will violently hate and oppose this idea. Putting someone who needs constant supervision into a potentially dangerous workplace, or even one with a modicum of complication, is a massive burden that would require ruinous compensation. That super below-average kid who can't understand conditionals and violently assaults people for taking his nintendo switch away would be a net negative for any business saddled with his care. The very below-average kids aren't just unproductive, they're actively destructive in any kind of task that's worth doing. Even as a customer I don't actually want the super below-average forced into humiliating service positions they have no hope of ever performing adequately - hell, I don't want to have to see that as a human being.
There's this weird wish among decent groups of all ideologies for basically tuning the clock back on actual advancement - whether it's my fellow lefties unhappy that America's a productive enough country we no longer can make cheap t-shirts here or conservatives upset the workforce is advanced that nobody would want to hire a 14 year old to do a manufacturing job.
It's actually a good thing for you to be a country where you're so advanced, 13 year old's are basically useless in the workforce! Sure, there are downsides, but there's a reason why the only places where there's massive amounts of low-productivity manufacturing work and cihld labor are some of the poorest places in the world.
making the life of all teenagers completely pointless and utterly dependant on their parents for everything is one heck of a downside. It notably leads to a lot less people having children. Works OK as long as we can keep filling the gaps using immigrants to handle all the low-wage jobs, but we'll be in trouble if that source of cheap disposable labor ever goes away.
This is just an extension of the weird rationalist view that everybody hates school and it's pointless.
You bring the median American 13-year-old from 1924 to live the life of a median American 13-year-old in 2024 and they'd kill their own mother to stay in 2024, so it's not as if the previous generations loved working.
Plus, no, it'll mostly be technological advances. The reason why we don't need 13-year-olds to work at the factory anymore isn't Mexican's, it's that for there to be a cost-effective factory in the US, your workers actually need to be fairly intelligent and efficient, even without a college education.
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