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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.
Change the structure of working environments. The dominant mode of employment in developed countries is calibrated around the assumption of either a childless worker or a parent (i.e. husband) who has no obligations that might interfere with working hours and a parent who stays home to take care of the kids and do domestic labor. Needless to say, while single-income households with children still exist (and were somewhat less universal in the past than is commonly supposed), it is no longer typical, especially as you move up the socio-economic ladder. This is problematic for TFR because a dual income household has to either pay for childcare for any young children (often cost prohibitive, eating up most of one partner's salary) or have a partner (almost always the wife) drop out of the workforce (highly non-normative for people in developed countries, especially middle class and up). Throw in some extremely high standards for what constitutes an acceptable minimum level of parental attention and you have a recipe for even fairly affluent couples deciding they can't afford more than one child.
If you're right-wing, you may favor more women leaving the workforce. If you're left-wing you may favor childcare subsidies. I think the former fails for normative reasons. It's going to be very hard to persuade women to go back to being housewives, even with big pro-natal propaganda efforts, and most people will find the proposal unacceptable in any event. The latter struggles on economic terms - the same people who advocate for childcare subsidies want childcare workers to be paid more and tend to push for a lower ratio of children-to-worker (basically, childcare is already very expensive for your average family and they want to make it even more expensive). In a world where we expect most people to have several children, you can't have everyone pay someone else to raise their kids.
This brings us to option 3: Retvrn, but not like that. For a very long time, it was normal to work out of the home for both men and women, so the question of who was going to watch your kids was straightforward. We can modernize the concept via a mix of encouraging permissiveness with respect to WFH and encouraging/requiring workplaces to be more accommodating to parents with young children. It should be entirely acceptable for a parent to bring their very young children to work with them and reasonable accommodations made for them. This reduces financial and attention pressures on parents. (If you don't like poor people, this has the added benefit of disproportionately favoring middle class+ families).
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(Aside: a lot of pro-natal policies can be helped along by avoiding reactionary framing. Child tax credits are popular, taxing childlessness is not. This despite the fact that they're functionally the same thing).
Housewives aren’t the norm in the United States, but they’re not that rare, either. Liberal middle income women simply happen to be very very visible to the public, and this is the demographic least likely to stay home.
Housewives aren't unicorns, but women's prime-age LFPR is 75-80% (cf. ~90% for men). This isn't just professional women having outsized presence; the vast majority of adult women have jobs. And it's not just liberal women - the vast majority of working-age conservative women are employed as well.
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