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I don't think low birth rates can be fixed through policy. If you look at historical or current pro-natalist policies, how many of them have succeeded? Norway has excellent compensation for parents, but the birthrate is still falling. Romania's Decree 770, making abortion illegal in all but a few rare instances, and higher income taxes for the childless, did lead to a temporary baby boom, but the consequences were not positive with high maternal and infant mortality, and the birthrate started to decline again anyway. Wealthy women bribed doctors while poorer women had risky illegal abortions, and many children were abandoned in orphanages.
I don't think there's any way out of this problem for Western civilisation as we know it. The cost of children is not only financial, but also biological, social and emotional. Either religious groups with high fertility rate take over (although even the Muslim world is having declining birth rates) or technological advances make the whole problem go away. If you automate the vast majority of human labour, then nearly your entire population is non-productive dependents whether they're young and able bodied, or old and infirm.
They can absolutely be fixed by policy. People aren't going to have kids because they get paid. They will have kids because the family is their support structure and they need it.
Cut all money to unmarried or divorced women from the government. Promote the family as the pension system. Have a culture that instills family values instead of individualism.
Modern women are married to the state. The marriage to the state is fruitless one. This form of marriage needs to be abolished and the other form needs to be promoted.
One big thing I see missing from all these "the solution is simple: force women to have children by coercion!" answers is - are men ready to be fathers?
Parenting is not just "I knocked the bitch up, that's my job done, now I should be able to live as I please without being asked to do anything with the squalling brats except pay the minimum out of my wages to feed and clothe them".
Are men today able, and ready, to be a father to a family of three, four, or more children? Are they ready to make sacrifices? Because even with all the laments over how women divorce and bleed men dry, men very easily drop their existing family to go off and start with a new partner (and maybe a new baby). They don't have relationships with their children, see the arguments over "what if you found out the kid wasn't yours?" and several men have no problem that after being the father for ten or more years, now the child means nothing to them and they don't love it and don't care if it dies and don't care if they're the only father it has ever known, that tie is severed.
You can't have big families where it's all on the woman. That's how we got 'married to the State' in the first place; men were willing to fuck around, not so willing to be parents. Or even would be disasters if permitted to be in the life of the family.
Being a husband and father involves a lot more than just "I married her and got her pregnant, job done".
I mean, isn't that a solved problem? You coerce them too.
Right. This is an asked and answered question. We already throw men into Definitely Not Debtors Prison if they refuse to participate. What reason do we have to believe this couldn't be trivially scaled up and out?
My position on this issue is that men as a demographic should be extremely careful when proposing coercive measures to solve this problem, as virtually all of this coercion is all but guaranteed to fall on their own heads. Men can be conscripted, both into war and child rearing, and women cannot. If you peel back the (philosophically) liberal live-and-let-live sentiments many in our culture harbor, you'll find nothing but contempt and scorn for what little freedom men have in this domain. Do you think this is likely to change any time soon?
Yeah, I think that this is a big part of the reason fertility issues seem like they would be straightforward to address with policy changes but in practice are very difficult to solve by means of public policy. Because at the end of the day, addressing fertility requires enacting policies which will (1) be coercive towards women; and (2) will in many cases treat women unfairly. And Western societies, although very much willing to bring the hammer down on men, are far more reluctant to do so to women.
But this still doesn't address the bread and butter issue. More men than women in Japan don't want kids. What do we do about the high costs and salaryman culture? Aspiring parents need to get on daycare waiting lists ahead of conception. FWIW this is as many people as our planet can take, maybe we finally set up those space colonies?
Assuming for the sake of argument that this one study is valid, significant, and representative of attitudes throughout the Western world, I don't think that really matters. Because (1) most men desperately want female validation; and (2) society has no problem imposing coercive and unfair policies on men as a group.
If women want to marry and have children enough, it will happen despite the costs. Both historically and today, people bring up large families in conditions much poorer than those offered by a median Japanese worker.
It's true that an income based breakdown of birth rates show a U curve, because middle class families want at least similar levels of economic stability for their kids that they enjoyed when they were kids. But corporate also wants to maximise output per worker despite stagnant salaries.
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