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I couldn't resist copying this exact question and asking our new AI Overlord.
Here`s what ChatGPT had to say:
As a populist center-right leader, your primary goal is to maintain the support of your base while implementing policies that align with your party's values. However, increasing the total fertility rate in your country requires more than just ideological alignment. Here are a few potential strategies you could use to achieve this goal:
Incentivize childbearing: One way to encourage people to have more children is to offer financial incentives. For example, you could provide tax breaks for families with multiple children, offer subsidies for childcare, or give bonuses to companies that provide paid parental leave. These types of policies may appeal to your base, who prioritize family values and may be more likely to have multiple children themselves.
Improve access to family planning services: While banning birth control would be deeply unpopular, you could implement policies that make family planning more accessible and affordable. This could include expanding access to contraception, offering free or low-cost fertility treatments, or providing education about natural family planning methods. By giving people more control over their reproductive choices, you may be able to reduce unintended pregnancies and increase the overall fertility rate.
Address economic barriers to childbearing: One reason people may delay or forgo having children is the high cost of living and the difficulty of raising a family on a single income. To address this, you could implement policies that make it easier for families to make ends meet. This could include increasing the minimum wage, offering subsidies for housing or healthcare, or providing job training programs that help people get higher-paying jobs. By addressing economic barriers to childbearing, you may be able to increase the number of families who feel financially secure enough to have children.
Promote pro-family values: As a populist, you have the ability to shape public opinion and promote certain values. By using your platform to promote the importance of family and child-rearing, you may be able to create a cultural shift that encourages more people to have children. This could include highlighting the benefits of large families, celebrating parents who have multiple children, or emphasizing the role of family in building strong communities.
It's worth noting that there are many factors that influence a country's fertility rate, and no single policy or strategy is guaranteed to be effective. However, by implementing a combination of these approaches and working to create a pro-family culture, you may be able to increase the fertility rate in your country over time.
Sorry ChatGPT, we keep doing that and it keeps not working.
On its face counterproductive, and you've offered no reason it wouldn't be.
Same as the first: We keep doing it and it keeps not working. Fails to address the U-shaped income/fertility curve.
Nice idea but ruled out by the conditions of the hypothetical.
Do we? My not-particularly-well-researched impression is that the cost of having and successfully raising children is growing faster than any subsidies provided for doing so.
Isn't that expected? Same thing happens when you subsidize education, healthcare, etc.
And if the costs are the reason fir thr liw borth rates, why is it the poorest who keep having most children?
It may be expected, but that's unrelated to the question whether the observations actually give us any signal about whether sufficient levels of subsidies would work.
I assume the subsidies you get do not scale with your own wealth all that much, and raising a poor child is (definitionally) cheaper than raising a middle-class child. Subsidies may be sufficient for the former but not the latter: if the subsidies let a person living in a moldy apartment, bagging groceries at a convenience store in a gang-riddled neighbourhood for a living and eating rice and beans every day raise a child also living in the moldy apartment, eating rice and beans every day and going to the public school those gangs recruit from, all this says is that they would also let a middle-class person raise a child in a moldy apartment, eating rice and beans and going to a gang-riddled public school. Having children with a significantly lower standard of living than yourself may be supported in the ethical frameworks of medieval noblemen and warlords, but I don't see it being something inhabitants of our culture could be persuaded of easily.
That would only be the case during their childhood, you don't actually need to spend a lot of money for them to have a decent career. Maybe not being able to guarantee trips to Disneyland, or that everyone has their own bedroom (you're being a bit of a drama queen with eating rice and living in moldy apartments), is what keeps people from having kids, I can even get into that headspace, but ultimately I think it's precisely backwards. Let the little bastards experience some scarcity, so they don't get spoiled.
I don’t know how it is elsewhere but the American poor do often live in barely habitable apartments and eat terrible diets(although usually not literally rice and beans).
He's saying it's ok for them, because they're so poor the subsidies will be enough to make a difference, but that a childless middle-class couple would be propelled into similar squalor if they have a kid. That's what I'm skeptical of.
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