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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.
One problem is that a job doesn't just provide money, it provides social status. Being a stay at home mom is just dull, repetitive drudgery but working in HR for $40k/yr is an exciting and challenging Career. Paying women to stay at home and have kids won't be enough if they'll be more respected for working a job. There needs to be a cultural change that makes having kids high status. I doubt there's a western government in existence that has the will and ability to make that happen though, maybe not a government anywhere given that Japan/China/Korea are doing even worse.
Another problem is that don't just want people to have kids, you want the right people to have kids. In the US we get a $2k/yr tax credit per child. That's a negligible amount of money if you're middle class and up so it really only incentivizes the poor. I'd prefer a deduction instead of a credit and make the amounts much, much higher so that a single income family with kids can have more or less the same lifestyle as a DINK family.
Having kids is high status among the rich. I’m not sure how widespread this knowledge is but in wealthy social circles in NYC, London etc being able to afford 4 kids is probably the biggest status marker, since each additional child (including the first) is a few million in costs (once larger housing, 15 years of private school tuition, more rooms on vacation, flights, clubs, college etc are accounted for). If you see a 32 year old secular mom who has 4 kids in Manhattan, you’re looking at someone who has a lot of money.
The problem is that as you say, a DINK couple making $350,000 a year together would have to make like $1m a year or more to have the same lifestyle with 4 kids, assuming they intend to raise them in the manner normal for the upper-middle class.
Because they've outsourced the child raising - a nanny is a must, and if you have more kids then maybe two nannies. An au pair. Some kind of domestic help. We're going back to the days of the parents only see their kids when they're brought down from the nursery to see Mama and Papa for a few minutes before dinner. To quote Belloc's satire on "The Nordic Man":
The brutal truth is, if you want more babies, then ban abortion and contraception - see all the screaming** about forced pregnancy - and that didn't turn out too good for Romania either.
Economy is such that to be able to afford a house, or even renting, you need a dual-income couple. If Mom and Dad have Careers and not just jobs, it becomes more and more expensive to have kids. Cost of childcare* is high, but Mom needs childcare because she can't afford to stay at home looking after the kids herself. If you want your kids to do well in life, then increasingly they have to be "skilled knowledge workers" as someone in another thread said, and that means pouring resources into making sure they go to good schools and do the right extracurriculars to get into the good university for the degree that will open the door to the good jobs.
Being SAHM has been downgraded to the idea of being a drudge and indeed, hampering society - go out there and be Economically Productive in the Workforce! The same governments anxious about falling birth rates are also anxious about getting more women out to work.
*And it's high because it's not a simple matter of "put a bunch of babies in a room, give them the occasional bottle and nappy change".
**And I do mean screaming, see this breathless paper on the worst case scenarios where emergency care medical staff are now the equivalent of the French Resistance fighting the Nazi occupation because every single woman who can't get an abortion is now a medical emergency who will die from the nightmare event.
Social engineering is not some impossible task, societies have been regularly, consciously selected for all kinds of things for the entire history of human civilization.
If you want smart people to have more children, all you need to do is make life without or with few children less pleasurable, fun and exciting than life with many children. That is a question of incentives, most of them financial. Incentives and disincentives work, they’re why drink-driving rates have fallen by huge amounts for example, because of a feedback loop between high punishments, social stigma and shame. That same loop can be transferred to childlessness.
It is possible to make PMC life with kids more immediately attractive than PMC DINK life. But it requires hefty, substantial redistribution and engineering of tax burdens (neither of these are remotely new to Western countries).
How do you do that? It's time is the important thing here, see the complaints about "now my friends are married and have kids they can't come on nights out/trips with us anymore as everything has to be planned around the kids". Raising kids is a second job, and if you dump it all onto the mother, while Dad is the breadwinner - well, we've spent sixty years nuking the traditional family, good luck with getting that back.
If the prospect is "I have five kids and have to look after them" versus "I have one or no kids and pay more tax", some people will prefer to pay more tax and have the ability to "hey if I decide I want to hit the club tonight, I can do that!"
Think of the Parable of the Daycare Charge for Late Pickups.
It's possible to go from DINK to traditional family but you have to be realistic about the lifestyle differences especially with 4 or more children. We may have had 5 or 6 if we'd started earlier. The first 7 years of marriage we were busy being DINK with nights out/trips.
See, I absolutely think the major problem is that we've turned having children from something that naturally happens, 'well of course now you're married and having regular sex, pregnancy is going to occur', into something that needs to be planned like the D-Day Normandy landings. From the scaremongering around abortion (every child a wanted child, as unwanted children are going to be victims of abuse, so if you don't plan it out perfectly then you will be an unwilling parent who will physically and emotionally abuse the child you resent), to the idea that you must be ready so you need the education, the career-building, the having fun while you're young, then settle down to having the perfect kid at the perfect moment with the perfect trajectory for making them successful in life.
I'm not saying you shouldn't consider finances and time and the rest of it when having children, but fuck it. The best way to have more children is just to have more children. No planning. No erecting astrological charts to decide the optimum moment for conception and then forecasting the future. Just do it (to swipe a phrase).
EDIT: That's also part of my dubiousness around this enthusiasm for polygenic selection. We've already made having children, for the people who should be having more kids, so stressful and expensive and high-stakes, now we're going to throw another gallon of accelerant on the bonfire: what, Justin and Pippa, you mean you didn't undergo IVF to create a bunch of embryos that could then be selected for the optimum traits for a Better Baby? You just got pregnant like some Stone Age cavepersons? Ahahaha, surely you must be joking! You're setting up your unfortunate child to be a failure and loser in life with deleterious traits being freely expressed in their genome!
Yeah, that's going to encourage people that having three kids at a minimum is a feasible thing.
I agree absolutely. There's less expectation that children would/should follow naturally from marriage.
The difficulty for me was a working top decile spouse.
The best and brightest of the PMC ladies are indoctrinated very early with plans and pathways. Achievements and career milestones. It's challenging to move past the sunk cost even if continued career progression is unlikely to make you happy.
There was much less planning for 3 and 4 than for 1 and 2. Partly due to experience and mostly that my wife was already full time homemaker after 2.
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It used to be that the astrological charts were used by couples who wanted children and they weren't coming along.
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