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Fair point, but I would like to point out that as propaganda goes, the latter doesn't really scale.
No, Israel doesn’t scale. American country music about how awesome going to your kid’s sports matches is and how women smiling when they hold babies is the most attractive thing about them easily could, though. And it’s not as if eg Japan couldn’t have its own version of Israel’s natal propaganda.
I mean, we kinda know that a trend in American schools to try and dissuade teen pregnancy by giving girls dummy babies to look after (to show how stressful it is) had the opposite effect! More evidence, if it's even needed, that just because an idea sounds good doesn't mean it works out.
I mean Japan has the highest birthrate in the region- it’s very possible that a fairly minor campaign about the duty of having children is responsible and they just need to turn it up to 11. Or produce a bunch of pop music telling mid women they’ll be beautiful if they want to be moms. There seems like there’s a frustrating dearth of data on the subject of pro-natalist propaganda, but that it’s probably a fascinating topic. Agreed that things don’t always work out the way you expect them too(although I’d point out that your example just points at an obvious in retrospect mechanism of ‘teenaged girls are biologically wired to want to reproduce and reminding them is not going to dissuade them’, which progressive education bureaucrats ignored for biological reasons).
It really wasn't obvious to me, and that's even accounting for the hindsight bias! Parents regularly complain about how difficult handling small infants is, and since this one is a mere dummy with a speaker and other minor electronics, I would have expected it to not produce the same emotional attachment as a real child would.
If you thought that was obvious, kudos to you, and I mean it.
I'm not against more pro-natal propaganda myself, I just think that even in the worst case, technology will bail us out before most places experience dimished standards of living due to their aging populace, with the notable exceptions of Japan and maybe China, the former likely to suffer greatly within the decade, the latter the next.
Teenaged girls are, for obvious reasons, biologically wired to want to do the work of caring for babies. In cultures where it's socially accepted they still play with dolls, although in contemporary America that's more of a preadolescent thing, and my understanding is that these classroom assignments were to take care of dolls with some added electronics, not, like, a block of wood with a speaker and a fitbit. It's extremely plausible that that assignment combines with seventeen year old decision making skills to get the result of "I'm clearly qualified and I want a baby".
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