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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...
(Slightly tongue-in-cheek because I kind of used up my battery on another post ... so, remember to laugh)
Bring back 8th grade bullying.
Not the sadistic / sexual embarassment kind, but the slightly barbed ribbing about "not being able to get a girlfriend" or "no boy is going to ask you to the dance." (Remember! Tongue-In-Cheek!)
The more serious version underlying this is; we have to teach adolescents and young the skills for an imperfect information, yet cooperative mating strategy - and call out the ones who fail to do so. Society wide fertility is a society wide responsibility. Part of growing up through adolescence is mimicking adult behavior, failing, learning, and improving on the next iteration so that when you are able to make serious life decisions, you've got some practice behind it. The "radical acceptance" and "zero bullying" mentality completely ruins this to the point that when young men and women date in college or afterwards, this may literally be their first relationship but nowhere near their first sexual experience. That lack of symmetry is disaster for fertility because a big part of fertility is both parties (but especially the woman) being comfortable in the long term stability of the relationship (that's hard-wired into the brain).
Quite side note: A male-only version of this is fighting. It's important to get into a few scuffles in High School when you're still underdeveloped physically and no one knows how to fight. I've seen bar fights between 25 year old dudes where neither knew what he was doing turn out fucking awful for both parties simply because they didn't know how to throw punches, or how to go down and cover up, or to stop hitting someone when their arms go stiff.
A lot of the other policy recommendations in this and other threads are good from the incentive-seeking rational actor standpoint, and I do support them (sort of generally, not each one individually without exception). But, from a learned behavior perspective, I think they would underperform simply because people's interpersonal development is getting extremely weak because of the super-importance of personal development-of-the-self without regard to society.
If the only way we can survive is through both sexes being terrible to each other, either though physical or psychological violence, maybe we don't deserve to continue on.
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