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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.
Again, the reactionaries are actually basically right - women's education (and I mean, like basic education, not whatever you think the evil modern western college is) + available contraception = a dramatic drop in birth rates no matter what else you actually try. Iran & Saudi Arabia are having big drops, and as noted, even places like Mongolia are dropping and Hungary's attempts largely failed unless judged on a curve.
Also, as noted, because contraception is much better than even 20 years ago thanks to IUD's, teen pregnancy have fallen off a cliff in the US - something everybody to the right of Stalin was praising as a worthy goal 20 years ago. The Christian Right got what it wanted - far less pregnant single teen girls.
The difference is, as opposed to the reactionaries, I think it's good women have the right to control their own reproduction.
Women have far fewer children than they want and have lower life satisfaction though. Are they really getting what they want? Are they really in control?
I'm not convinced that you have to limit access to contraception to get birthrates to replacement rates but the current situation doesn't even seem preferable to the situation where access was more limited.
I think those studies are severely flawed, not that they're being fudges or anything but in that they assume those numbers women say are what they really want in their heart of hearts. Like, I say, I want to lose x pounds, but you know what I continue to do? Eat donuts and burritos because they're yummy, and I care about that more than losing weight. I think a lot of women say they want say three babies, and may even continue to say that after they have a kid, but when they faced with the mental cost of doing so, or other changes they'd have to make, they say no, even though they still might say they want three kids if asked in a stufy, but they also don't want to give up x, y, and z about their current life either.
After all, the American people claim they want a smaller deficit, but a majority is against any kind of specific spending cut. Note, as a dirty leftist I'm fair about this - the American people also want a larger welfare state, but no rise in taxes on anybody but very, very rich people.
I think if you did everything reasonable pro-natalists want - you might push things up .2 or .3. But, short of massive restrictions on women's contraception, you're not getting any massive shifts, because has been pointed out, a lot of the actual change over the past 20 years is a massive drop in teen pregnancy that 90% of society was behind at the time.
As far limiting access, I'm not a woman whose ability to control her own reproduction would be affected, so I'm going to claim what would be better for that woman, even though I'm aware much of this site thinks they know what's best for women and shockingly, it lines up with their general political beliefs.
I agree that the current TFR rate matches women's revealed preferences. I also recognize that those preferences depend on the social structures that make the choice of having children far too costly. So there are lots of women who would like to have children sooner, or have more children than they do, but who choose otherwise.
I used to work at a small liberal arts college in Southern California. Student body almost all traditional college age (18-22), 2/3 female. All lived on campus by default, with but a handful of exceptions. Many of the students planned to teach elementary school at least for some time (Teach For America or JET program), many of the female students said they planned to get married and have children themselves.
In my two decades working there, only a handful got married by the time they graduated. One gave birth towards the end of her senior year, and all the girls went ga-ga over the baby.
So here were a bunch of young women who wanted children, who biologically were in their prime for having children, who were mature and responsible enough to take care of children, but who overwhelmingly did not have them. And it's reasonable to ask: Why?
Why? Maybe because our college was not at all set up for families, or for women with children. We didn't even have a day-care on campus. The handful of women who married, and the one who gave birth, got dispensation to live off-campus and paid through the nose for rent, whereas our college gave generous means-based subsidies to students living on-campus.
Maybe it was because our bachelors program was clearly aimed for unattached young people: everyone had to take a semester abroad, impossible if you have a young child.
Maybe it was because it simply wasn't done. These were smart, responsible young people, and they have internalized the ideal pattern of college--then career-- then family.
Maybe it was because these women themselves come from parents and grand-parents that followed the same pattern, who therefore have older parents and even older grand-parents, with few siblings or cousins, and the idea that your mother, aunt, or sister looks after your toddler while you finish your education and start your career is no longer a viable option.
(As an aside: ever since I was fifteen, I worked hard to hide hangovers from my mom. She got way too excited whenever I threw up in the morning. Really wanted those grandchildren.)
(As a second aside: yes, I shoplifted booze. My older over-18-but-under-21 friends assured me that it's better that I do it rather than them, because at worst I would have juvenile detention.)
My point is that revealed preferences of women regarding children depend on the institutions that those women inhabit, and currently those institutions make it very costly for young, smart, responsible women to have their desired children during their peak fertile years, even though those women really want to have children.
Again, I'm sure stuff like lack of day care or the current housing situation and so on is the reason for some of the current drop in fertility rate. I just think it's a much lower percentage than people want to claim. Because again, there are European countries who support women having children much more and it hasn't made a dent either. Sure, all of what you said is why were' a 1.65 instead of 1.82 or whatever, but it's not why we're at 2.3.
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