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Notes -
Some people might say that the uncomfortable truth is that women's liberation is incompatible with above-replacement fertility, but I think the problem is broader: personal liberation in general is incompatible with natural above-replacement fertility.
And you can't really use economics to overcome this. Like in that story in Freakonomics about an Israeli daycare, once money enters the equation, duty leaves it forever. Stimuli and fines simply say: "you don't have to have children, if you can afford it". You need a society which treats having children as a sacred duty to the community, where it's unthinkable to go against its will.
Or, conversely, the first society that industrializes childbearing and childrearing will win. Via artificial wombs, as there aren't enough women that are willing to go through regular childbearing many times that you can make this into a full-time job: if the natural replacement rate is 1.2, then we need 1x more child per woman to offset this, or one woman in nine turned into a breeder and having 10.2 children instead of the usual 1.2. I don't think even the most collectivist society is totalitarian enough to achieve this.
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