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The quality contributions roundup has a lot of discussion of fertility. I found it pretty disconcerting to read, since it all seemed to assume that the only way to get women to have kids is to enforce a top down dystopia. This is not my personal experience in my social surroundings★, but of course I live in Israel so I don't count‡.
Anyway, here is my follow-up question:
If you had the ability to set policies that will encourage increased fertility, what policies would you be implement across the board for both men and women simultaneously?
In other words, not "women can't be allowed access to higher education until they've had at least two children", but "people of child-bearing age can't be allowed access to higher education until they've had at least two children". Or "new parents of children are given twenty additional paid vacation days", or whatever. Are there any such policies you think could actually be effective?
★ if anything what I see is women regretting not being able to have more kids
‡ In Israel, fwiw, having kids is simply by default assumed to be a shared responsibility of men, women, and society. It is expected that men take (government paid) sick days to stay home with sick kids. It is not blinked at for the manager to show up to a meeting remotely with a sick kid in his lap. It is expected that men will leave work early several times a week to pick up kids from school — at least in all the places in Israel I have lived I have seen reasonably close sex splits of the parents at pickup/dropoff. I am not clear on whether or not this is equally the case in America — I don't get that impression, but as my knowledge of America is limited to TV and internet discussions, I could be wrong. But I see fathers at the park supervising their kids all the time, and the internet discourse re America is about men getting assumed to be pedophiles for being around kids... So I assume there must be some difference...
I'm coming around to the belief that nothing can or should be done. What, exactly, are we trying to save? Groups that choose not to reproduce will die off and be replaced by those that do. Same as it ever was. Why should society, at immense cost, prop up genetic dead ends. The amount of intervention necessary would be staggering and as far as I know has never been successful.
Post-AI the future of humanity looks weird anyway.
Personally, if you care, you should have as many kids as you can reasonably tolerate.
Because if this ai thing doesn't take off and fertility doesn't make a U-turn and quick the economies of every major nation on earth are going to collapse in like 30 years. It's such a straightforward and obvious reason I'm baffled why it gets asked every thread. We don't have anything like the timescale needed to make a Mormon and Amish dominated society work. We just don't.
Honest question, what exactly is meant by economic collapse here? It's not obvious to me why a lower birthrate would be so disastrous. Even if production output goes down there's less people to produce for, right?
Old people don't work (or work much less efficiently if you force them to). The more old people compared to yoing people you have in your society, the more people you have to provide for and the less people are able to provide.
Look at South Korea, currently with a fertility rate of 0.78 (!) If this rate continues, this means there will be 5 grandparent/old person for every grandchild. It means the next generation will be 40% (!) the size of the previous generation. This is a doomed society, it is completely unsustainable.
Where I disagree slightly with @aqouta is that it's not even a matter of taxes and wealth, not that they don't matter, but it's a red herring. It's really a question of labour. There simply won't be enough labour to actually do shit that needs to be done, wealth be damned.
Accumulated wealth is meaningless if you can't actually find or have enough anyone to pay to do things. If you don't have kids or grandkids to look after you, it's going to have be someone else's kids that wipes your geriatric arse. And they can charge a lot for the pleasure, because the demand will be sky-high. Assets and capital actually need someone to use them. It all comes back to labour. Again, you need people to actually do shit, and not have a signifant percentage of the manpower taken up by caring for older generations, which drains wealth from society, it doesn't generate it.
Also, in many countries, generational wealth stored in property, and the property market will crash as the population shrinks and demand crashes. The value of many assets and wealth in general will crash - the idea that the older generations can used their accumulated wealth (perhaps substainal due to not having kids) to pay for people to look after them comfortably is an illusion, a lie. (Don't get me started on national debts which will have absolutely no way to pay off with a shrinking labour pool).
I suppose we can just hope robots and AI bail us out. Although that might just cause its own not dissimilar issues.
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The proportion of people retired and thus not producing and just consuming becomes much larger. Imagine the difference in your personal life if you and your partner had to both support 3 sets of parents each instead of one each. Yes, I know taxes do that in practice but it's the same result. And this extra pressure on the younger generation further compounds and makes it harder to reproduce in future generations. And it's hard to build wealth without inheriting it because the next generation will be too small to absorb all of the current generation's capital investment.
To reply to both you and @ThenElection , as repugnant as it would be to say, the historical(?) solution to population burdens has been to simply...reduce...the number of mouths to feed.
Covid-19 was supposed to help with that.
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It's the ratio of dependents to earners, not the aggregate number of people. At least, that's what I'm concerned about. It has the potential to lead to a death spiral: working taxpayers have to pay more to support more non workers, the incentive to work dissipates, and the world is made much poorer.
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I think that's hyperbole. The economies of major countries won't collapse, they will adjust as they always have, perhaps with a small decrease in standard of living. With an average age of 48.1, Japan is already 30 years further progressed than the United States on this timeline. They are doing just fine economically. Arguably, they have a higher quality of life than the U.S.
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