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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...
What would I do to make myself have more children? Hmm. At the age of 24, the barriers preventing me from having children with my boyfriend are;
I do not have enough money to afford diapers, much less food for another person, so I would increase the minimum wage to the proper rate it should be, which is $20 an hour. I would, in the same vein, eliminate tipping as a substitute for wages as well to eliminate the hostile tipping environment and poor wages encouraged by my state’s poor labor laws. That would include eliminating all Republicans from my state’s government, as they have opposed all measures to do what is listed above.
I am not confident that, should I approach trying to build a career in my state with a child, that I have protections from corrupt, lazy and immoral business owners who would abuse their position of authority over me to compromise my work/life balance. So, I would replace my state’s labor laws with laws similar if not exactly to California, so that I could, for example, have a lunch break and maternal leave for my post-pregnancy complications.
I cannot afford medical care for myself, much less my children. I suppose with higher wages that would be solved on it’s own, but if not, I would change whatever policies need to be changed to decrease the cost of medical care. I am not too verbose on medical care policies to know what the causes for high costs are and how to solve them.
My social network is dangerous for children, as it consists of social conservatives who will try to shame my children into gender roles and disrespect my choices as a parent, and I would not want to reach out for help from them in an emergency. If I had higher wages, I would not need to work so much and I could spend time developing friendships to replace my network. If not that, reducing the cost of interstate travel so I could move to a state with a locale more suitable to my personality would solve that problem. I am not too sure what policies need to be enacted to solve high-cost interstate travel, as I am not verbose in those policies as well.
Emotionally, me and my boyfriend are recovering from the effects of growing up in an abusive, socially conservative household, and need therapeutic services to confirm we won’t pass our issues to our children. I supposed lowering the cost of therapists falls in the same category as “decrease medical costs”.
This sounds vaguely reasonable on paper (aside from shoehorning in some unnecessary snipes at political enemies). It rationally makes sense that if you'd want to be economically secure before starting a family.
But I don't think it stands up to millennia of people in much worse economic conditions having many many children. In fact, poor people tend to have many more children than middle class people do. Even lower class people in the first world are massively wealthier than most people in the rest of the world, in the present or future. And yet they tend to have large families anyway.
Is it just having higher standards? Access to birth control? Maybe poor people having large families makes them even more poor and potentially more miserable, but they do it anyway because they're used to being poor and just tolerate the problems more children causes? Or just don't have birth control and don't really plan it on purpose? Or maybe being intelligent and vaguely upper-middle class in bearing but earning lower-middle class amounts creates a mismatch between standards and income, while traditional poor people expect to be poor so don't see a point in waiting?
Given this trend across human populations, logically it must either be the case that if you and people like you had more money you still wouldn't have children and the economic argument is an excuse, or that you are in a meaningfully different scenario than most other poor people who have many children anyway. I don't purport to actually know, but am interested in how you would explain this discrepancy.
Because kids were useful labour that'd help you be more secure during the times when agriculture sucked up most of the human capital.
Does this imply that eliminating child labor laws (and ignoring the ethical issues therein) would drastically increase fertility? Or is there not enough productive labor that children could accomplish in the first world, even on farms? But even then, reducing/eliminating minimum wage for them would allow the market to find some sort of niche. Like, if a poor family could just have a bunch of children and send them off to McDonalds for $6 an hour, 40 hours per week (after school and on weekends would allow this), that's $12,480 per year per kid. I'm sure lots of minimum wage jobs would hire children if they could pay them less than they had to pay adults, and could avoid public controversy. Have 10 children? That's 124,800 per year. Granted, you would have to feed and house and clothe all of those children which would eat most of that money, but that's kind of the point. Have as many kids as you want and the costs and you're just as economically stable as you would have been without them, if not slightly more.
I'm not at all actually advocating for this. I don't know that we want a society where poor children are forced to work 40 hour weeks at fast food restaurants, and poor people literally create children for the purpose of earning a profit. But it seems like it would solve the fertility issue in exchange.
Having children work in fast food restaurants for less than minimum wage is a lot more similar to Victorian London than to a high-fertility agricultural community. The difference is that in the latter case the work done by the children can be performed at or near home, visibly contributes to the family, and allows them to act as surrogate parents for their younger siblings at the same time. This reduces the burden on their parents and also prepares them for future parenthood, as it won't induce the same terror it might in a 25-year old college graduate who has never held a baby in their life. The former provides some financial incentive but none of the social or household management benefits.
I think some combination of work from home, homeschooling, and building more walkable communities is the most reasonable path towards increasing fertility in developed nations if natural selection is too slow for one's liking.
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