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Notes -
An aging species tries to save itself
We begin with Do It For Denmark. The angle in this ad campaign is sex. Don't you want to have sex? No? Well, do it for your country, or at least your mother, who wants grandchildren. We'll also throw in a travel discount for a romantic holiday getaway, where you will hopefully have sex. Of course, the declining appeal of sex is probably not the main cause of declining birth rates.
Like Denmark, Iran also has a fertility rate of around 1.7, but of course we find a more conservative version of the exhortation to build a family in this ad from an Iranian cultural center. The sell now focuses on the benefits of a tradwife: she'll replace your alarm clock, cook you healthy meals, and give you children. I guess they saw no need for an ad on the benefits of a tradhusband.
For the most direct and honest appeal we turn to Taiwan, whose fertility rate of 1.0-1.2 portends a crisis possibly even worse than the much-discussed demographics of its belligerent neighbor. To a soundtrack that tries to be hopeful, this PSA from the Taiwanese ministry of education, which I recommend watching, pleads its case:
I don't know about you, but the earnestness and sheer desperation in this plea really broke me down. And I have no reason to think the whole project isn't exactly that: an act of desperation.
I think this belongs squarely in the 'raising awareness' category of government activity. Governments raise awareness about obesity, mental health, cancer and so on - it does basically nothing.
On the other hand, there are actual kinetic, physical actions.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41487443
From the abstract of this article, it cost the government about Aus $ 126,000 per new birth in its fertility spending program (giving $3000 to women who have children). Accounting for inflation, that sums to about US $ 118,417.10 2022.
So if Taiwan wants to double its fertility (which I'll take to be that of 2019 pre-COVID, 177,767) births, it would cost somewhere around $21,050,634,839 per annum, or about 2.5% of GDP. That's more than they spend on defense, so they're at least consistent about ignoring all threats to national existence. Anyway this naively assumes the effect scales, which it probably won't seeing as many Taiwanese women are too old to have children or too rich to care about a few thousand here or there. There'd be some dysgenics too.
Only a massive spending program is going to have any significant effect. Alternately, there are more unconventional options like organizing social credit for parents (such that they're priveliged in education and workforce), suppressing contraception, placing caps on women entering higher education and so on. My suspicion is that the ultra-nerdy East Asian youth would instantly start having children if it meant they'd better be able to get into prestigious universities. The amount of effort that goes into education there is ridiculous. But nobody has bothered trying this. Perhaps it's a case of 'you know who else tried raising their country's fertility by encouraging mothers to have children?'
Real desperation is when states start taking serious action.
I’m skeptical that even a massive spending program will have any effect. Eventually natural selection will run its course and the USA, France, Japan, Australia, etc will have high TFRs once more. Of course the populations might look very different, but eh, hajnalis shouldn’t have invented the pill.
... why do you think so? Even if we aren't all converted into biodiesel for use in drone tanks and jets by competing AI armies by 2060, there won't be much 'natural' selection going on within 50 years.
If we don't die out, odds are very high the dream of biological immortality is going to be realised, at that point a high fertility becomes a real problem unless your plan is to dismantle Venus into raw materials for a lot of space habitats.
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