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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.
Why don't we just give parents a direct financial claim on a portion of their children's income? Obviously there will be some details that need to be ironed out (maybe this portion goes to the state when one's parents die, to prevent perverse dynamics), but this seems straightforwardly incentive-aligned.
It seems almost too obvious. Do any countries anywhere do anything like this, surely this is a cultural custom somewhere?
This seems like a roundabout way to do things. Why involve the state at all?
One proposed reason for the fall in fertility is that people no longer think of children as an asset. When they get old, the state will take care of them. Of course, this is misguided and wrong and they will regret it when they're 80, but probably some people think that way.
But my kids will take care of me (I hope) because they love me, not because the state forces them to give me half their paycheck.
The dirty little secret was this basically failed in the US - rates of severe endemic poverty among old people were massive even pre-Depression, which is what led to support for Social Security in the first place. It turns out a lot of people either just don't care about their parents or are barely surviving on their own, that another mouth to feed may tip the scales.
So, yes, we have a less connected society, but severe endemic poverty among retirees basically doesn't exist and now there's a massive class of consumers who didn't exist. Win-win for the social democrats and the capitalists.
I wonder how much of this is genuine econometrics/history, how much was and is pure political posturing (either to drum up support for programs like SS or to maintain that general zeitgeist), and how much is just "actually, basically everyone was just poor back then". Looking at figures like this, I lean toward "everyone was just poor back then". James T Patterson wrote:
with some numbers that are in various year real dollars, comparing how different 'standards' for poverty have changed significantly over time. Were old people poor back then? Almost certainly; everyone was poor back then. It's the absolutely phenomenal success of American capitalism that has made us just absurdly wealthy in comparison that has been the major change. It's extremely difficult to 1) actually break out detailed age-based numbers in that era and tell a significant story about what did/didn't "work" in the context of universal poverty, and 2) have any sense for whether something "working/not working" in the context of universal poverty says much about a world where we have literally 10x more wealth.
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