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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.
You can't bribe people into having more children with government subsidies when it was becoming wealthy that caused this situation in the first place, and the population of any developed country will see right through any natalist propaganda for the pitiful attempt at cultural engineering that it is. This issue will never and can never be addressed by the tools of the state, outside of implausible scenarios like spending your entire nation's R&D budget on artificial womb technology and robot nannies, going full 50 Handmaid's Tales (Saudi Arabia is not nearly theocratic enough to prevent dropping birth rates), or the simplest route of nuking oneself and returning to a pre-industrial agricultural state.
If it's possible to "culturally engineer" people to focus on their careers, why not culturally engineer them to focus on family instead?
But there was no centrally-planned effort to create modern, career-focused people; it was simply an emergent property of industrialization. Our current demographic troubles will resolve themselves in a similar way, as high-fertility subpopulations and individuals replace those of us who are unwilling to reproduce. The intervening strife can be managed more or less successfully, just as countries around the world dealt with the social fallout of the industrial revolution in more or less effective ways, with some managing a relatively smooth transition while others succumbed to communist revolutions and other ills, but it cannot be prevented entirely.
This is only true if you're going to be strictly literal. Yeah, it wasn't "centrally planned", but the elites, from the Rockefellers to Bill Gates, have been fretting over population control for over a hundred years, and they were sponsoring psy-ops to achieve it out in the open.
Interesting hypothesis. Please provide as much evidence for it, as you'd expect from people you disagree with on the issue.
The demographic transition in the US was essentially complete by the late 1960s when the overpopulation panic set in, so the damage it did was primarily to China and India in the form of the one-child policy and forced sterilizations. However given that nearby countries like South Korea and Japan have just as low or even lower fertility rates today I'm not sure even that changed very much in the grand scheme of things.
Industrialization reduces the value of the kind of manual household labor children were responsible for in agricultural societies. Farming is done by massive combine harvesters, laundry done by washing machines, and food comes prepackaged at the supermarket. In the past, a child "earned their rent" starting when they were barely 5 or 6 years old, now they are a money sink until adulthood or even longer if they go to college.
Wealth gives people options, and most of them are more immediately pleasant than raising a child. Why change a diaper when you could take a vacation to the Caribbean instead? If you offered people the option of suddenly having an adult child who was already independent, came home to visit on holidays, and would take care of you in old age nearly everyone would take it in a heartbeat, but for many today their time horizons are not long enough to tolerate the years of effort needed to get there in reality.
This trend is not even necessarily linked only to industrialization, but rather urbanization more generally. Modern Italians are not descended from imperial Romans because those Romans didn't reproduce themselves, and as far as I know there was not any population control conspiracy going on in the 1st century AD.
That's multiple decades after the elites started freaking out about it.
Those are interesting arguments, but I wouldn't call them evidence. Evidence is a material fact that points to one argument being true over another. This one in is particularly interesting because on hand I'm tempted to agree - cities seem like alienation machines driving people into despair and therefore childlessness, but OTOH I'm old enough to remember where they weren't so. At least where I'm from even big cities had a distinct community spirit focused around each of their districts and neighborhoods.
I never said all population collapses in history are a result of a conspiracy, though it does look like the current conspiracy took some lessons from the fall of Rome.
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