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I've only ever encountered birth rate concerns in the predictable context of "p.s. they should get out of my workplace and onto my dick"-type sentiments, but I also remain confused as to why this whole weird part of the discourse cropped up, mushroom-like, seemingly overnight.
Tinfoil-hat read is that the whole fertility panic was deliberately astroturfed on Twitter as a way to lay the groundwork for "....so this is why we need to invest heavily in artificial wombs," with incels as useful water-carriers for the interim messaging. I can certainly think of entities who'd plausibly want to push that based on stated values, but speculating about end goals gets too bizarre to waste much time on.
I don't find it so tinfoil-hatty because I do believe artificial wombs need to be invested in. It seems like things that are meaningfully different about the West and made it good inevitably lead to things that make people find something better to do than coerce half of the population into being the means of reproduction and little else.
I think it's instructive that the debate has already baked in "coerce" and "means of reproduction and little else," though, which feel like complete non sequiturs. If women increasingly delay childbearing through (imho entirely reasonable) economic anxiety and difficulties finding a suitable partner, it's weird that people jump to "so dumb 'em down and marry 'em off by force, or if you don't want to, guess we'll just have to replace all y'all hoes with robot uteruses," rather than, you know, making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years, or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.
I know plenty of mid-20s women who would love to find a kind, conscientious guy to have three kids with, followed by a nice Boomer-style dual-career middle age. I know absolutely no real-life girlbosses wishing someone else would pop eggs into a slow cooker so they could get back to those late-running meetings with Marketing. Thus, the fact that the discourse keeps presuming the latter rather than the former feels like an artificial move to guide the conversation to a place it wouldn't normally go.
This is one of those things that sounds great when you say it but in practice requires some extremely unpleasant political compromises. Are you going to...
The only thing that could possibly raise birth-rates non-coercively is for society to stop forcefully redistributing the labor of working age adults to unrelated elders. Removing social security and medicare would give people a much stronger incentive to either invest productively during their working years or have children to support them in their old age. There would still be a need for welfare, but it could be distributed as a UBI: flat cash payments to every citizen.
This seems like an unnecessarily fatalist take on an already very solved problem. We already have working structures to encourage people to enter the military while ensuring that their time in service won't work against their employment prospects when they return. Vets are also people who have not necessarily been gaining experience that's 100% relevant to the civilian workplace experience during their time away, but who have been building job-adjacent skills and demonstrating conscientiousness while away, as well as sacrificing pleasure to serve the greater good. I haven't noticed that mild preferential hiring standards for vets have caused every business to collapse, and employers aren't forced to give vets credit for more experience than they possess, just forced not to use their work gap to freeze them out versus other similarly-experienced candidates. It seems to me that most mid-20s professional women leaving the workplace to raise young children would be happy simply to reenter at the same step on the ladder, the way veterans get to; what I've seen in practice is that employers just arbitrarily won't even consider them, so they have a terrible time reentering at all.
If preferential hiring for returning moms seems like an unthinkable drain on productivity while you don't feel the same way for returning vets (notwithstanding high rates of PTSD, etc., etc. that make vets at least as empirically risky to hire), then I think that intuition merits some extra scrutiny. Is it possible that we don't really believe increasing the TFR is actually a contribution to the public good, the way bombing villages in Afghanistan was? In which case, it's a fair question why that same TFR would then require public investment in robot wombs.
Or is it possible that we don't actually believe that raising small children is a respect-worthy task for a talented person to spend time on, the sort of thing that should look good on a resume the way military service does? In which case, wouldn't the feminists be correct that people pushing momhood are mostly doing it as a way to demean women?
Not all work experience is universally applicable in every other domain. Experience in the military is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to carry out orders while working as a team under time pressure-- a.k.a, most well-paying jobs. Experience as a mother is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to determine your own schedule and manage small children. That admittedly does prove useful in stuff like hr/people manager/project management roles. (Basically all the managers I've ever had have been parents, and I think that makes perfect sense.) But the supply for those roles is much greater than the demand, so rationally self-interested companies filter for accumulated domain knowledge, which disadvantages mothers. Meanwhile the most numerically common jobs that benefit from experience as a mother are childcare and teaching related, but those jobs have a whole ton of structural problems that prevent them from accurately renumerating employees based on the quality of their work. The incentives of school district administrators are poorly aligned at best with actually maximizing learning, and any attempt to assess teacher skill and renumerate appropriately will piss off so many entrenched groups.
There are a few fields-- like nursing, for example-- that avoids the problems I've mentioned... but if you just compare the number of veterans versus the number of order-following jobs, and the number of mothers versus the number of caretaking jobs, and you see why things get to be the way they are.
Really? Slavishly following orders and following repetitive protocols under conditions of extreme physical stress sounds more like McDonalds jobs to me. And one could argue that running a household with small children is far better preparation for C-suite roles that require big-picture strategy, critical thinking about efficient use of limited resources, thoughtful design of people-friendly processes and institutional structures, etc. But both sides are just special pleading, because of course there are many military tasks and many mom tasks that will cross-apply to any given job, and many others that won't. The point of preferential hiring is not that the person is inherently more qualified for every position; it's that their resume gap was undertaken in order to render something of value to the public, so they shouldn't be disadvantaged for it versus a similarly-qualified person who didn't serve.
But I'm getting from your comment that you pretty much agree that mothers should be disadvantaged in hiring? The claim about how women with children should be unhireable lest they eventually bear more children makes no sense unless you're rationalizing a general sense of "moms, eeeeeeew": men could similarly acquire health problems or decide to become stay-at-home dads at any time, and statistically a childless man is far likelier than a female hire to eventually create expensive workplace issues through drug and alcohol problems, running-off-with-a-floozy problems, white-collar or violent-crime problems. But better to hire Schroedinger's embezzling coke addict than... a lady who's at some point changed a diaper, I guess. On account of the mom ick.
So yeah, this is kind of an illustration of the problem: if raising children well is not respectable professional labor, just base "caretaking," and if moreover being a mom at any point condemns you to be fit for nothing but caretaking scutwork jobs ever after, regardless of your pre-childbearing education and professional skills, then it's no wonder young women get nervous about the tradeoffs involved. Seems like a little open-mindness would fix the whole thing, but I guess there must be a lot of people who don't respect their moms.
#1
I don't think mothers should be disadvantaged-- I think people who are relatively less capable, experienced, knowledgeable, etcetera in a job area should be disadvantaged. And unfortunately, raising children makes it harder to become those things. I don't like that, but it is an unfortunate fact. Forcing companies to preferentially hire mothers is just going to lead to economic inefficiency and poverty. Yes, there are some specific roles where motherhood is actually good training. To the degree that those roles are prevented from hiring on merit, those roles should be reformed. But if you genuinely think mother are better for already-meritocratic roles like C-suite roles, then no actual intervention needs to happen. Companies will be darwinistically selected until they have the appropriate amount of mothers and everything in perfect.
Similarly, while I can tell that your whole veteran argument is non-salient, can you not see how it's proving my point? Yes, being a veteran makes you better at mcdonalds. Also, it makes you better at a whole lot of other places. Therefore those places preferentially hire vets, so that demand outstrips supply and military vets end up paying well. And judging by how well vet-owned companies seem to do, it looks like those place are actually making reasonable decisions. So why aren't I hearing about any companies that preferentially hire companies making it onto the fortune 500? If it was legitimately a good strategy, it would just be money on the floor. But it isn't, so it's not.
#2
All that being said... I completely sympathize with
I definitely don't blame young women for not wanting children. You seem to be coming at this from a perspective where you think I both expect women to have more children and yet have zero interest in giving the woman what they want. That's not my perspective. I understand that the tradeoff is skewed against women, and that not having children is simply the rational option for many of them. But you seem to have this weird belief that motherhood is intrinsically skewed, and that therefore we need special government to make it not suck, but that's the opposite of reality. Motherhood isn't a profession, but it is an investment-- and one that has historically paid off very well. People have given up part of their entertainment and leisure potential to raise kids since the dawn of time because they reasonably and rationally expected that their kids would contribute to their well-being in turn.
From that framing, it's obvious that we don't need to specifically promote motherhood, we just need to stop hindering it. We need to let parents internalize the full value of their children by ending government-mandated transfers of labor to freeriders by ending medicare and social security. I know that might be difficult to process emotionally because there's this idea that those programs are "helping grandma," but if it weren't for the money they lost to taxes, grandma's descendants could help her themselves.
Look, just imagine if women gave birth to massive piles of money, or robot servants that did their chores and took care of their needs. If that were the case, they would obviously be happy to accept less professional advancement in order to give birth more often. Conversely, if the government started taking 90% of their robots and their piles of money, women would stop giving birth in favor of looking for professional advancement. That's the situation we're in: everything about our society is geared around socializing the benefits of motherhood while privatizing the costs. All we need to do to get above replacement fertility is to just stop doing that.
So you'd be cool with your mom taking a cut of your paycheck? Interesting plan. Unfortunately, I'm not sure who would be the constituency, given that professedly people want above-replacement fertility because of the need to prop up Social Security and Medicare.** What would be the point of draconian policy if the community weren't planning to socialize the benefits?
**Although the back-to-the-kitchen arm of the discourse never seems to consider that you start by deliberately deactivating a large chunk of your current taxpaying workers, in exchange for a nebulous promise of additional workers two decades down the road. Unless the stay-at-home mom happens to have daughters, in which case her sacrifice is in vain for forty years until one of them pumps out a son.
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