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So, motteizeans, thought experiment- you’ve been hired by the government of a country you’ve conveniently never noticed before, let’s call it genericland. Genericland has a problem- they have an economy dependent on high tech manufactured exports using highly skilled labor that can’t be imported, it has to be homegrown, and has had a TFR of 1.5 for long enough that the government is seriously worried about a labor crunch taking them from an upper to a middle income economy in 20 years or so. They’ve hired you to raise the birthrate enough to save the economy in the long run, and are willing to spend .5% of GDP to get it to 1.8 or 1% to get it to 2.1. You don’t have reserve currency status, but genericland has excellent credit ratings. The government is dominated by long-running consensus politics and will stick with your recommendations long term. They aren’t concerned with feminism, but are dependent on remaining in American good graces and are well aware that they cannot get away with saudi-level black sheep behavior. The population is homogenous and speaks a language not spoken elsewhere, but 90% are fluent in English. Family norms are perhaps slightly more conservative than PMC American ones, but not by a wide margin. And, of course, because the government wants future factory workers, it’s strongly preferred if the fertility increase doesn’t come from genericland’s underclass and doesn’t care how it affects the elites, it needs to target the working to middle classes.
What do you do?
For myself, all women with white collar jobs get two year’s entitlement to WFH after every childbirth in addition to parental leave, in which they can’t be required in the office more often than 1x week. Renters who get married have access to a government loan to buy the apartment or house they rent, and the government issues loans to couples having a 3rd child to help buy a bigger home. At a fifth child these loans are forgiven and payments pause for three years after a fourth. The ministry of culture is directed to work with generican-language pop culture producers to promote pro-family memes, female pop stars are paid to give interviews and sing about how much they love being a mom. High schools now require ‘family formation’ classes to graduate in which teens assist existing families with childcare(particularly for girls this is strongly associated with wanting kids) and learn social skills for forming relationships, along with some basic home ec. New fathers get an automatic 5% raise regardless of employer. Female civil servants have the option to go part time if raising a child, and genericland’s many factories are enrolled in a subsidy program that pays them to allow female workers with a child under ten to work part time.
I think the core issue is that you have to heavily subsidize the very concept of childraising. Having children is horrendously expensive, to a point where you can't simply subsidize it by giving money to the people having kids, you have to build systems that make childraising cheaper. And that's not just expensive in a monetary sense, that's expensive in a time sense and an effort sense.
I think, if I were going to try this, I'd be aiming at essentially building an entire new culture around larger familial units; "houses" specifically designed for ten to twenty families living together, with a designated subsidized night caretaker and one or two full-time employees to handle things like food and cleaning. Make it clear that living in these places is easier, in a way that extends beyond simply "having money", but that they're available only for people with kids.
Honestly, this would kinda be aimed at a modern reinvention of tribal living.
The problem is that people today want careers, and what you're basically offering here is the government guaranteeing that you can cripple your career for your kids if you want. I'm not going to say that's bad - having that available would help - but it doesn't really solve the problem, which is that people don't want to cripple their career for their kids.
I mean the thing with your idea is that it rounds to being either a mass dormitory(which westerners don’t want to live in) or an apartment complex(which we’re assuming there’s plenty of).
I'm not sure there's really an option for this - how many places are really set up for multiple families to live? Mass dormitories, in my mind, map to "row of bunk beds in a room, low quality food", not "each family has three bedrooms and a private living room, plus there's a kitchen for every four families". And apartment complexes are generally set up without coherent common areas; you step out of your room and you're in a hallway whose sole purpose is to be a hallway.
As an extremely rough example, I'm kinda envisioning something with this basic concept. Bottom-left chunk is one family area, with three bedrooms and a private living area; there's four of those surrounding the common area (pretend that's copy-pasted, I couldn't find a copy-paste tool on this site), common area includes kitchen and relaxation areas and play areas. Maybe stack two to four of these on top of each other. The proportions are completely wrong and also I didn't put in, like, bathrooms, so obviously this is not a finished version, but that's the basic idea; get people interacting together.
(I'd probably want to set up some way that people could easily open their Private Living Area to the main area if they wanted, like, maybe just turn that into a sliding wall or something, I don't know. Something to make it feel less like a wall with a door in it but still closeable for privacy. This is not an easy thing to solve.)
(edit: this specific plan comes out to ~10,000 square feet for four families, which is actually not as far off from "reasonable" as I'd expected)
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Man, if only.
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Sadly the link is a 503 error. If it's back up when you see this message, let me know and I'll take another look. But I did do a Google search, and, yeah, it seems similar at least.
I think a big problem with things like this, on a small scale, is that there isn't really a good way to find compatible people. If you're looking for someone to date you can choose from millions of people; if you want to form a baugruppen, assuming you're even aware such a thing exists, you not only have very few people to choose from, you probably have to convince people that the idea even makes sense. If there were exactly one person in the world interested in romance, what's the chance you'd be compatible with them?
So if this were done on a national scale, if we said "yes, we will build a hundred baugruppen in every major city, here is the big online matchmaking system we have built, there are major incentives to be involved with this", then suddenly you're going from Only One Other Person In The World Is Interested In Romance to Online Dating Sites Now Exist. Which makes it a lot easier to find, in the metaphor, a partner, and outside the metaphor, compatible families.
Which is not to say it'd work, but rather, I don't think the spotty success of the times it's been attempted is good evidence that it wouldn't work.
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I mean there’s not really a solution to ‘having kids hurts your career if female’, so I focused on trying to make it so women could hurt their careers without it being crippling.
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I am jaw-dropped at the picture this paints of modern atomised American life - "houses" specifically designed for ten to twenty families living together".
What about, you know, having the grandparents living with their adult children, maybe unmarried siblings as well, or at least extended families living in relatively close proximity so you can go visit your sister/aunt/cousin and their kids and you get advice, help, and child minding where it's not you and your partner on your own with your first baby and only freakin' self help books to tell you what to do?
The idea of "solve this problem" by making it so that a bunch of unrelated strangers all live in an apartment block is making me shake my head here. Okay, so maybe you don't want the in-laws breathing down your neck so you don't have the granny flat - but you are not having to move halfway cross the country for work away from your family support system! Honestly, the impression I get of the American notion that "at eighteen you go to college so this means you move out of the family home and never return again, because when you graduate you get a job and live independently and probably move far away" is so alien.
Let me pull this up about the reasons why people refuse offered social housing:
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/too-small-no-garden-unsuitable-location-bad-internet-why-one-in-five-on-waiting-list-rejected-social-home/a1162198261.html
If you want more babies, you are going to have to budge on a return to a more traditional sort of extended family network.
Sure, you could do this.
But this only kind of helps in some ways, and really hurts in others. Kids play well together; like cats, the difficulty of taking care of kids scales up nonlinearly. And many many people have iffy relationships with their families. One of the strengths of US life is that you don't have your parents breathing down your neck, which lets you make your own life and forge your own path and not constantly be taking care of your elders.
Finally, this exists in many parts of the world and empirically it is not working. If we're trying to solve the fertility problem, then I don't want to waste time and money on solutions that already aren't working.
The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. It doesn't take too much raising-children-together for those people to start feeling a lot like family; the tricky part, I think, would be figuring out how to match those people up in the first place.
That’s a made up saying from the 1990s lol
OTOH people have been saying blood is thicker than water since the 1600s
Makes sense in our atomised age that people look for made-up idioms to justify their atomization.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/147902/is-the-alleged-original-meaning-of-the-phrase-blood-is-thicker-than-water-real
Maybe a bit gentler, if you please.
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Beautiful idea on renovating living spaces. I’d even add in playgrounds, libraries, hell maybe a gate in certain neighborhoods/cities where there’s a lot of crime. The hidden costs of childcare are often overlooked in these discussions, as you mention time is a big one.
You could also create stores specifically designed to supply children that are heavily subsidized by the government. Make baby food, diapers, clothes etc very cheap. Have caretakers not only for food and cleaning but laundry as well. If we go on your design where many families are living in a dense area, this wouldn’t even be that expensive as the density could defray the cost quite a bit.
I think if I was going whole ham on this, I'd be putting multiple of these megahouses together with a playground in the middle.
Ironically I don't even think you'd have to; if you're in a house with twenty other families that you get along with, hand-me-down clothes are going to be traded back and forth constantly.
Baby food and diapers, though, absolutely - bulk delivery helps a lot there.
(I will note that Amazon has done a spectacular job of providing cheap diapers.)
My own reservation (cough) regarding this constructed community is that it would relatively quickly become class-based and such places would acquire the status of, say, what in the US would be called section 8 housing, or 'government projects.' In other words subsidized housing for, at one extreme, the shiftless, and at the other, working poor trying to climb their way to something better. The kiss of death for any such venture if one is trying to lure in the middle class. How would you suggest staving off that kind of perception?
I dunno!
I think one answer to that, honestly, is just to not worry about it all that much. Consumption is always going to be idolized, and providing ways to have a good life for cheap is always going to be looked down upon, but is that a good argument for not doing so? I'd say we do so, and thereby improve the reproduction rate of people who don't idolize consumption, and maybe that's fine.
Note that the only part we're subsidizing here, by this description, is a small number of permanent helpers, kind of similar to how apartment buildings have janitors and maintenance people. Maybe if this gets off the ground, that subsidy can be removed and just make it a part of the group community.
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