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Notes -
Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:
https://archive.is/T6thJ
The article notes that Meloni is herself a single child, but fails to mention that she also only has a single daughter. Still the low birth rate is a core issue for her and her right-wing coalition, but as in leftwing governments elsewhere they can’t find policies to reverse course.
I will solve the childlessness problem hypothetically (amounts and currencies can of course be adapted to a country):
65% (deductible) federal income tax for all income over $50,000 for anyone over 30 with fewer than one child. The tax drops by 15% per child for the first three children, with historic deductions so that people who still have 3 kids but do so late can claw back some of what they paid. Child deductions only available to couples married at (or within six months of) birth.
Capital gains tax is doubled for those over 35 with fewer than two children, normal above. Normal rate only available to married or widowed people.
Death/estate tax for childless people is 60% marginal on estates over $1m in net worth, falling by 20% and rising in threshold by $2m for each child until the fourth.
75% of roles on boards of directors must go to married parents of at least two children. 50% must go to married parents of at least three children. The same applies to Congressmen and women and to senior positions / positions of responsibility in all regulated industries, and to all cabinet positions in the executive. 90% of senior positions in the military, state department and justice department must be occupied by parents of at least two children.
Divorce comes with a 10-year additional tax penalty except in cases of (convicted) domestic violence or other abuse (in which case all marital benefits can continue for the victim).
To qualify for any tax credits, a movie or television production must show or imply that at least 65% of characters with more than 10 minutes of screen-time described or implied as over the age of 27 have children. The same, in real life, applies to cast members with the same screen time threshold.
Entry to any selective schools (specialized high schools, gifted programs etc) requires a child to have at least one sibling. Priority is given to those with two or more siblings.
For every child after and including the third under the age of 18, graduates of four-year college degrees can receive $8,000 per year in student debt forgiven. This stacks for married couples where both partners have student debt, and for graduates of medical schools or STEM programs at top-50 (US News) universities, it rises by an additional 50%, meaning that some PMC professional couples could have hundreds of thousands of dollars of college debt completely wiped out, never paying anything, if they have three or more children. (Two doctors with 4 kids under 18 would see $48,000 per year of college debt wiped off).
A 10% state levy on home sales by childless adults over 30 funds mortgage subsidies for married parents of three or more children on a variable basis depending on the money raised the previous year. Married parents of 2 or more children who have had a child within the last 48 months pay no capital tax on primary home sales.
White House, senate and congressional internships, state-funded scholarships, Supreme Court clerkships and other prestigious positions for young people are limited to those with at least one sibling. A core part of pushing up birthrates is convincing parents of only children to have another, so it has to be stigmatized.
For constitutional reasons, exemption from some policies is available for those “constitutionally incapable” of having children. These exemptions must be filed for with a $10,000 processing fee, do not apply to inability to bear children related to any decisions taken by the individual (eg. gender transition, voluntary castration) above the age of federal criminal responsibility (12), or to psychological or material conditions like ‘asexuality’ or just being ugly. All decisions have to be approved unanimously by a panel appointed 50% by congressional republicans and 50% by congressional democrats. The presumption is that in cases of genuine medical infertility that is likely from childhood (ie not discovered later in life) the state will know about it years before any exemption may be needed.
How would that policy handle people that intend to be childless fleeing the country? Could it be financially sustained if most of the people that are now going childless would mostly leave the country?
Most people don’t intend to be childless. They just end up that way. Ratcheting up the pressure is good.
Perhaps most people dont currently intend to be childless and just are, but when being childless is accompanied by debilitating taxes, wouldnt anyone that isnt currently married and expecting opt to live abroad, and if they get lucky and find a partner they might come back?
My main point is that policy cant exist in a vacuum. A lot of the policy points you mention act as if people cant choose alternatives, while in reality anyone that is upper middle class and above can leave the country. Especially any of the policy that targets people with millions of dollars...
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You can probably create a large one time baby bump at comparatively modest cost if you’re willing to fuck up certain markets- eg, turning house rentals into rent to own agreements for newly weds, whether the landlord likes it or not.
The main thing is getting existing, stable, relatively happy couples in long term relationships (whether or not they’re technically married yet) to get married (if they’re not) and to have (many) kids. That requires making life with kids better, more fun and more affluent than life without them.
Locking off career progression and heavily taxing childlessness and only having one child, plus smoothing over some of the problems with having many children (eg. heavily subsidizing the purchase of 7-seat cars for large families) have to happen together to create a baby boom.
Heck, federal regulatory tweaks to require car seats to take up less space(so you can fit more of them in a backseat) would have an effect.
There’s a lot of low hanging fruit that hasn’t been tried. Personally I think we should try it before dramatically restructuring the tax structure to punish childlessness.
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Now that's a proposal I could see actually bumping the birth rate. Wish the CBO would estimate its cost, just so we have a sense of it. I'd be interesting in single-penalties that scale depending on the severity of the problem: if the birth rate is lower than target, add more single penalties; if it's higher, lower them. Otherwise the exact levels can easily under or overshoot the targets. The only cost is making tax planning more difficult for singles, which isn't even a negative with the goals of the plan.
You have a combination of direct and symbolic policies. If you wanted higher birth rates and had to choose either the direct or symbolic policies, which would you go for?
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I am sure that Canada would love for the US to adopt this policy. Are you prepared to go full Walter Ulbrecht to make it stick?
I am totally sure that knocking down the Chesterton's Fence of no-fault divorce will totally not have any negative side effects. Not.
Sure, a few people might get stuck in an abusive relationship because they can not prove to the standards of criminal justice that their partner is abusing them. But really serves them for marrying the wrong person, right?
And a few others might have a huge incentive to frame their partner for abuse to out of the divorce tax.
And I am sure that little Timmy will have a great intact family home if his parents are forced to stay together by economic necessity. Yes, perhaps there might be a lot of yelling, fighting and weaponizing kids, and perhaps both of his parents will bring their boyfriends/girlfriends home, but at least he will not be scarred for life by having to endure a divorce.
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If you pass all these laws by some miracle, here is my business idea:
The company aims to provide tax benefits for people who are disinclined to raise children. For maximum benefits, unmarried men and women are sorted by state and will marry (potentially over zoom) in a minimal civil ceremony. Subsequently, a fertility clinic will be create a number of embryos from the germ lines of the couple, three of which will be implanted in surrogates in Mexico. After the births, the 'couple' will become the legal guardians of the children, getting full tax credits. As the parents, it is their legal right to task others with helping them to raise their kids, so they can just pay a Mexican orphanage to raise them. When they come of age, they will be US citizens who may or may not be eager to come work in the US. The parents pay the costs for the surrogates and however much it costs to raise 1.5 kid in rural Mexico.
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Seriously, if you want to lower the costs of having a child to zero, I am ok with that. If you want to specifically incentive people who earn well to have kids (perhaps because you expect that by nature or nurture, their kids are more likely to be productive members of society) by also compensating them for lost earnings, I am okay with it.
But using tax cuts to bribe or bully people into having more kids feels deeply wrong. I believe that kids deserve parents who actually want to have them instead of parents who put up with them as an unfortunate side effect of some tax optimization scheme.
Chesterton's fence is a fence that it's not totally obvious what the reasoning for construction is. No fault divorce is a chesterton's well documented power line. One can very reasonably argue about what the line powers and the downstream implications but there is no doubt on the original motivations.
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No-fault divorce isn't a Chesterton's fence, it's what we got by knocking down the Chesterton's fence of requiring grounds.
We've had it since the 1960s. Please recalibrate what are proposed radical changes to long established norms.
What kind of "conservative" would consider a "fence" built in living memory to have any history at all?
Any time someone appeals to tradition you should ask whose tradition and when? Back in colonial New England civil divorces were granted for reason of spousal abandonment. So you could just bail on your spouse and they'd get a civil divorce in your absence.
Lots of things are like that. Interracial marriage wasn't common in 1750, but it was legal and accepted. But in 1950 it was very much illegal and almost universally opposed across much of the United States.
I'm not going to greatly respect the hallowed traditions of 1950 in opposition to 1650, 1750 and 1970. Norms and traditions drift in a variety of ways in various places. Then a modern 2024 Conservative cherry picks one they happen to like and declare it to be Tradition, can't be frivolously tearing down Chesterton's fence, etc.
Having no enormous respect for a carefully chosen set of norms and laws circa 1950, and since we're a few generations into the current set of laws and norms, I'm going to follow the good example of Conservatives and declare the current norms to be Tradition and warn everyone not to too easily tear down this fence.
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No-fault divorce still loses on long enough time-frames.
That's an easy assertion to make. But I have no reason to think that is better than the previous norm of a married couple working together to contrive a fake at-fault divorce.
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We knocked it down because it was starting to normalize perjury to the point where it risked the legitimacy of the entire justice system. When you need grounds but don't have them,. you're incentivized to invent them,.and it's easy to get away with it when both parties agree to the charade. Even in the best case scenario where no one does this, you still have estrangement, with the added disadvantage of spousal rights remaining intact. So if your spouse decides to move out and abandon you, she's still entitled to the spousal share of your estate because in most states you can't just disinherit your wife.
And now she is entitled half your assets, plus alimony and child support; not exactly an improvement.
She isn't entitled to half of your assets, because when you're married there are no "your" assets, only "our" assets (excepting what you had before you got married). So before she leaves she drains the bank account and there's nothing you can do about it. In modern times it's considered fraud to take assets in contemplation of divorce, but since divorce doesn't exist in this scenario, what are you going to complain about? And forget estrangement, she's still entitled to live in the house, so what if she decides to stay and make your life a living hell? She could give her boyfriend blowjobs in your easy chair while you're home and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it, except surrender the territory and move out.
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I think this would work, although it's of course it's impossible politically. It will be interesting to see if China actually goes for something similar.
No country has truly gone big on fertility. Critics have pointed out that small efforts to boost fertility have not worked so why try. My stance is that if small efforts don't work, much larger efforts are needed.
From a political perspective, we are of course doomed. The normie opinion is that if we want to boost the birth rate we need even more feminism. So instead of interventions that work, we'll get things that make the problem worse such as child care subsidies (which only encourage greater marginal female employment).
Ceaușescu's Romania doesn't count as "going big?" If not, then what does?
I guess Romania was doing something right. The results are actually pretty significant. Take a look at Romania vs. neighboring Bulgaria. Something changed in a big way in the 1966 and stayed that way until Ceaușescu was deposed.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=BGR~ROU
So what changed? Here's what Wikipedia says:
I don't know if this counts as "going big". Rewards for mothers who have 5 children!? That's a pretty tough bar to clear.
My guess is that it worked mostly out of patriotism. Reversing the decline in unpatriotic Western democracies might be harder. The civil religion has faded to the point where people no longer think their society has any value in preserving.
Stories out of Ceaușescu's Romania suggest a decent amount of it was out of fear. Patriotism does not generally lead to a bunch of mothers bearing babies, then abandoning them to unusually miserable orphanages. Also, after the first two years, that's quite the steep plunge. Maybe the first two years were patriotism, and the next several decades were fear?
How many children ended up in orphanages?
I don't trust Western institutions to report on this issue fairly, especially as it deals with the hot button topic of abortion. It is in the interest of Western academics to exaggerate the harms to the greatest degree possible.
I do find it bizarre to think that the state would say "have children or else" but also "once you have the children feel free to dump them in an orphanage, no problem". If it was only threats driving people's behavior, then couldn't the state simply mandate they raise children too? Then again, Communist regimes are not exactly known for good state management.
I think the correct posture here is one of epistemic humility. The birth rate went up. This was due to state policy. Everything else is mostly noise.
...Well I'm not going to find original Romanian records.
The main personal stories I've heard from Romania in that era were through Orthodox priests talking to other priests and more visible Christians who had lived there, and the enforcement of atheism sounded pretty brutal, so my baseline is "enforcement of preferred state outcomes was pretty brutal."
To the extent that you're simply observing a fact, and not making any policy proposals, I suppose. And the USSR did make it through WWII intact and modernize significantly under Stalin. No judgement. Everything else is mostly noise.
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There’s a case to be made that the historical fertility advantage for new world French populations comes from coercive fertility raising efforts in the founding population, as well.
And of course, let’s not forget Argentina, which had above replacement fertility until Covid because they so mismanaged their welfare system that single mother benefits were higher than prevailing blue collar female wages. I doubt it was intentional, but it was a thing.
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Romania counted but it’s a poor example because Romania was an impoverished communist shithole in (seemingly) terminal decline. Life was miserable and there were no real incentives. So yes, people made do and within a few years had changed behavior to reduce fecundity. It’s like a Leninist state offering +-5% extra bread rations for whatever behavior, it’s not goin to move the needle because it’s a depressed, inefficient, ugly, impoverished society with zero vitality (something the West, for all its many problems, still has in part).
What we can say is that true incentives for fertility and disincentives for lack of it in prosperous capitalist societies have never been tried. Not even in the communist ‘never been tried’ meme way, but in the sense that nobody has ever actually tried to do it.
I think Argentina was still reasonably prosperous when they accidentally made single motherhood a rational economic decision.
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This post kind of comes off as a self-indulgent power fantasy. You'd need God-empress level of political power to enact those policies, so the whole thing is basically implicitly assuming that you're infinitely stronk, and then writing a long detailed list of all the ways you'd use your unlimited power to put the screws on people whose life choices are (in your view) incompatible with the greater good of society.
And if we hypothesize some alternative society in which those policies would be popular, then would you even need them in the first place? Hm, maybe they would still be useful to fix the pro-natal attitudes and fight against any potential value drift.
Anyway, while I don't expect you to explain how you're planning on becoming God-empress, I'm still curious how would you roll out those policies? Would there be some transition period so for example people who were already old and infertile when the policies came into effect wouldn't get screwed up without any chance to avoid it, or would their unavoidable impoverishment be a sacrifice you'd be willing to make to keep things simple and on track?
That's not a sensible or fair criticism. The point of the post was to illustrate that effective policy solutions are certainly conceivable, they're just outside the Overton window.
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On plenty of issues factions that are minorities impose their agenda on larger more disorganized majorities by capturing institutions of power and by creating organizations and lobby groups. Then they promote propaganda about those opposing their blatant actions being conspiracy theorists.
Also, after policies have been promoted by energetic factions with power, a certain % of people are willing to change their mind. We have seen this with gay marriage. This doesn't apply to all policies, some might be too extreme to not be disliked by the majority, but it does apply to many.
If natalist measures are implemented, then you are going to get people who go along with it who previously wouldn't have supported these kind of policies. Part of that might also be the power centers promoting propaganda.
And beyond just changing one's opinion, the policies, quotas themselves affect behavior.
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I think it's a fine post. From a practical perspective we need to:
Decide what must be done
Decide how to do it
@2rafa has given us #1. #2 is probably impossible without god-empress status. So the alternative to their post is to throw up one's hands and say "it's impossible".
I am actually somewhat bullish on China solving this problem before the West because they actually have the state capacity to take the radical actions necessary.
My suspicion re. China is that a lot of senior communist party elites are very bitter about pro-fertility efforts because they themselves were only allowed one child (despite being in the ruling elite of one of the most powerful nations in the world). Eg. Xi himself only has one child, a daughter.
I think Chinese childhoods are also just horrible experiences all around, so people don’t want to have kids regardless of how well they’re being paid.
I don't think Chinese childhoods are horrible experiences all around, and upper class Chinese parents certainly don't think that.
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Unfortunately, they probably won't want to take actions that penalize those currently in power, which makes some of these harder.
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I have no intentions of coming to any kind of power. These are just an illustration of the fact that this isnt an impossibility issue, it’s a willpower issue. There are solutions, they’re merely considered undesirable.
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