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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'm laughing, because this is Ireland, more or less. We don't have a fertility crunch as of yet - in fact, our population is finally increasing since Famine levels. But I also remember a late government minister in the 80s saying that we had to emigrate, that the country was too small to support the population (around 3 million at the time). Our replacement rate does seem to be low, but it's still pretty good for Europe:
So it's not fertility that is the problem, it's being held hostage to foreign investment instead of developing your own native industries that won't collapse as soon as a global recession hits or the headquarters back in the USA decide to do some belt-tightening and close down overseas branches.
My advice, such as it is (based on Ireland):
Do NOT concentrate everything in one major city so the rest of the country is living on scraps
Solve your goddamn housing crisis
Make wages liveable so that people can get married and have kids and one partner can be the full-time home maker (or do part-time work)
This means making sure employment opportunities are not all concentrated in one major city (see point 1 above) or in a few scattered locations around the country. If you want people to live adult lives, you have to give them the chance not to hollow out the rural/small town communities by all moving to the capital or even emigrating.
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