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We should start thinking about raising the birth rates as a practical, logistic and technological problem to solve and not a moral commandment to enforce upon society. And I think Caplan's approach to convincing people to have kids is a step in the right direction.
First, some things have to be be acknowledged. Pro-natalists will not get people to have more kids with moral arguments.
For most, having kids is a risk-reward calculation, and, given freedom of choice, at current levels of expected investment in terms of time, money and effort, less and less people are going to have kids, and TFRs will continue to fall. It just seems like a bad deal to many people – they don't want to give up their free time and life's little pleasures for 5-10-15 years (depending on the number of kids) for dubious benefit. The pro-natalist side may reply that "it may seem like a bad deal now, but your whole perspective on life will change once you have kids!". Well, what if it won't? The life described by you and other people down the thread seems downright miserable to non-parents. Once you have a kid, you're stuck spending most of your time and extra income on them at least for the next 10 years. That is a huge downside risk that you're asking people to take as, essentially, a leap of faith.
Trying to convince young people with spiritual arguments (from Christian pro-natalism to vaguely gesturing towards the fate of the West, human race and the infinite) is laughable. Ain't no one actually, truly believes in those things or cares about them, to the point where it influences their actions, and the minority that does already has kids. Every young Catholic I've met uses contraception, and a few have had abortions. The genie is out of the bottle and it's never coming back. Nor is the "lonely cat lady" scaremongering effective, for that matter.
You have to meet people where they are at, and where they're at is a world of hedonism and infinite alternatives. Unless you have a way take away their freedom, which you don't, you have to sweeten the deal. Alter the risk-reward calculus. Make it drastically cheaper to hire help (perhaps by mass-importing Philippina maids, Singapore style, with no path to citizenship). Offer massive tax credit and subsidize childcare. Somehow convince people that they can relax and not care about extracurriculars and mostly let their kids entertain themselves, which is what Caplan writes about. Create artificial wombs. Whatever. Make having kids somehow take less money and, most importantly, less time and effort. People can spare the money. The hand-wringing about kids being too expensive is mostly cope. But they will not surrender their time, and every attempt to take it from them forcefully will be rejected at the ballot box.
The pro-natalists have to do something other than shake their fists at people and tell them to "suck it up and just do hard things like your ancestors did". No one will "just". No one has ever "just". The left had to learn this painful lesson in the recent years, and it's high time for the pro-natalist right to do the same.
(This rant is mostly aimed at the pro-natalist discourse I see day in and day out in my feed, not your post in particular. If it is not obvious, I sincerely wish them luck, it's not a boo outgroup post)
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