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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 libertarian adjacent in my views so top down policy is something I always have some trouble endorsing. The suggestion from recent threads that I found most compelling was doing things to nudge up the status of parents and down the status of single people somewhat and double income no kid(dinks) significantly. Less twenty something singles dramas, more happy family sitcoms. Anywhere we're giving people bonuses or better deals for being a veteran we should also be giving better deals and bonuses for being a parent. Make them stack! Make every dude in media who just sleeps with women and doesn't commit look like a shifty sleezbag instead of Neil Patrick Harris. Less scare stories of getting knocked up at 18 and being a single mother with no prospects and more scare stories of having a 35th birthday party that no one shows up to because your friends no longer relate to you because you never had kids.
As far as actual top down policy end all public funding that might somehow find its way into propping up and college department devoted to grievance studies of any kind.
But this is circular - a 'status nudge' requires either 'everyone' or 'the high-status people' to think having kids is very good and promote it, and convincing them is just the original problem, again. The combination of contingency, individual action, the many dramatic changes in modern society, and whatever else that led to both tastemakers/the media/other influential people not supporting having many children is the problem then, and 'they should promote having more kids' isn't much better than saying 'everyone should have more kids'
I feel like there's an issue of the tastemakers generally being of demographics that don't reproduce especially frequently. Gay, single women, urbanites etc.
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The elites actually have not too bad fertility. Yes this nudge would require something as lofty as a total shift in culture, no one was under the impression this would be an easy problem to fix surely?
The elites have figured out how to have "marriage"' in a way that suits them (even then, there's a baby price for a woman choosing to stay at home that might keep the fertility rate amongst the elite from truly booming)
But the actual businesses they sit high up in value the anti-fertility ethos of "I define myself by my work", for obvious reasons.
It's not so much that your plan is hard and more that it doesn't attempt to explain why the original culture shift worked, so it's unclear that your new one can replicate it.
My theory?
Liberal feminism (aka "do what you want", "women can do anything men can do") always seems to win, even against more radical (in some ways, anyway) feminisms. Why? Because it suits people trying to succeed or exploit in the marketplace - turning women into fungible widgets makes them easier to plug into your system.
Your high fertility Hollywood is nowhere near as good a handmaiden for capital so, if you believe material factors and elite interests determine cultural production, why would we assume it's even doable?
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