Most countries’ birthrates are now below that needed to replace the current populations. Mostly we consider this a good thing. Put that aside for a moment.
Many things have been tried to encourage women to have more children. These include cash incentives, free or low-cost child care and so on. None of these ideas have worked.
Can you imagine any practical way to increase birthrates in a population? I cannot.
Disgusting as it is, that has a chance to work. (Not that I think is necessary or warranted)
It is commonly said that the birthrate goes down as female education goes up.
By everyone, or just by people that enforce this barbaric custom of not educating females?
I am sorry., I do not understand your question.
It has often been said that the best birth control is a job.
In all societies which allow women to work, there are fewer children born.
In societies that don’t allow women to work , the difference is obvious.
In answer to the OP–there is no practical way to increase the birthrate, in the real world.
BUT…in an imaginary world:
For modern societies which value individual freedom, the only way to increase the birthrate would be to create the 1950’s stereotype.
Make jobs high enough paying that one income could buy a house and support a family easily. That would allow many women who are now stuck at jobs they hate to quit working.
I am sorry, but I cannot make the question any simpler.
@Czarcasm is asking who commonly says that the birthrate goes down as female education goes up?
Increase the size of the incentives as I think those tried are lower than the additional income gained from a second income.
Free health care is also a big deal [I have a relative with a new child and additional copays and deductibles from the birth and baby’s health care are adding up to several thousand dollars].
The stats show this pretty clearly, from a US study:
Just take a look at the countries with the highest birth rates - they must be doing something right, right?:
Niger tops the list - so let’s see what strategies they are employing:
If you wanna be like the pros, you gotta swing for the fences! /s
I am not making fun of the problems facing Niger, many of which were not their making or doing. I am just pointing out that in order to increase the birth rate in more developed countries, you have to create conditions that are known to increase birth rates, and all of those conditions are non starters. Stable, secure, well-fed, societies with close gender equality and high education tend to suppress birth rates. You can also have the government help by offering free contraception, as the Philippines has done (and subsequently has a declining birth rate).
Bottom line is giving people the choice, they will want less kids, and affluence affords that choice, no matter how you may try to incentivize the opposite.
100% of this. Incentives don’t work if the net gain is still a negative (or at least perceived negative) - the loss of income, loss of advancement, loss of time, cost of prenatal through birth care, on TOP of the costs of raising and educating a child to 18+ is staggering in the US.
And honestly, for some, the biggest is the loss of time I mentioned above. Even if the cash loss was balanced out, you’re going to lose a LOT of time to be just yourself for the better part of two decades. Travel, eating out, going to movies, or just vegging are going to be much more difficult.
I agree with PastTense. The incentives are the right move; they just aren’t generous enough.
The problem is, I think the only way the incentives could increase the birth rate would be to make them so lavish that they would start to hurt the nation in other ways. It might take something as drastic as, “If you birth and raise 3 biological children, you’ll be exempt from income taxes altogether AND we’ll give you some special additional bonus.”
Why on earth would we want to increase the birth rate? There are far too many humans on the earth already. In the '60s and '70s there was a movement to only replace oneself. I abided by it, and I wish that we could do something along those lines again. The world would be far better off ecologically if there were far fewer of us.
Developed countries are below replacement rates. Often far below: South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.78, while the replacement rate is 2.1. Every new generation will be 1/3 the size of the previous unless they fix things. Other countries are only slightly better.
A rapidly shrinking population is a very bad thing for the people that live in it. Steady is good. Maybe even slightly shrinking. But the current rate is disastrous, especially if trends continue.
One thing that may help is technology that allows selecting embryos with no serious defects. A major source of anxiety among prospective parents is the possibility of having to dedicate their entire life to taking care of a child (like one with severe autism). Parents who have done this deserve much respect, but no one would ever want to be in that position. More people would be parents if they could guarantee their kids wouldn’t require undue work.
The economist Noah Smith provides an answer:
sub req, but a little under half of the article is provided.
Me: Well who cares? The world is over-populated and we could use less pressure on the ecosystem. In particular, reducing CO2 emissions and reversing CO2 concentrations would be a great thing. The population is growing. Give me a break. Noah Smith:
Here’s the thing about exponential functions: They either explode to infinity or decay to zero.
Human population growth is an exponential. This is because humans are the thing that produces other humans — the more you have, the more you produce. If every human, on average, produces 1.000001 other humans, the population will eventually explode to infinity; if every human, on average, produces 0.999999 other humans, the population will eventually decay to zero. Here are pictures of the two possible futures:
So how do we create a world where the human population neither explodes into overpopulation or trails off into an empty planet? The only way is active stabilization . We need ways to nudge fertility a little bit above the replacement rate when it’s too low, or knock it down a little bit below the replacement rate when it’s too high. We don’t want to send fertility back to 5 or 7, but we need some way to be able to return it to 2.1 if we want to.
Right now, we know lots of policies that can reduce the fertility rate — in fact, those policies have been used to great effect around the world, which is one reason population forecasts have fallen so much. We’re good on that front. But what we don’t know are policies that reliably and durably increase the fertility rate by an appreciable amount. We have downward nudges, but we don’t have upward nudges yet.
Me: Ok, but it took a while to develop and implement downward nudges. And I think we do have upward nudges: they are just really expensive at present. Noah Smith:
There are two main classes of “pronatal” policies that people talk about — 1) paying people to have more kids, and 2) trying to change culture to encourage people to have more kids. Unfortunately, the first of these has only had minor effects so far, while nobody really knows how to do the second.
Agreed that this needs to be looked into in a big way. But “big way”, is pretty cheap as things go: economists and demographers aren’t that expensive.
ETA: Since reading Noah’s Nov 2024 post, I’ve been wanting to debate this with @Dr.Strangelove in GD, but haven’t gotten around to framing a thread around it.
ETA: Der: In addition to Handmaiden’s Tale approaches, another dystopian method would be to deny old age benefits to the childless. Or sharply reduce them. Unlikely to happen in democracies, likely to be tried in authoritarian countries. So we need to get our asses in gear and figure this out.
The obvious way is to strip women of their rights and not give them a choice in the matter. What people are dancing around is that it was never an issue in the past because women weren’t given a choice in the matter; if they didn’t want children they’d just be raped until pregnant anyway. The right wing solution, in other words: turn women back into voiceless property.
Incentives might work, but they are nowhere near generous enough. Not just for the reasons mentioned; something else that gets ignored is the sheer physical toll of pregnancy, some of which is permanent. You’d have to pay somebody a lot to make up for months of discomfort, the proverbially agonizing pain of childbirth, and lifelong debilitation to one degree or another.
Noah explains things very well (he’s one of my favorite bloggers) and his graphs of exponential growth vs. decay make things pretty clear. The thing about exponential growth is that it is actually self-limiting even without policy changes. But there seems to be no lower bound to the decay!
I doubt Noah shares my opinion that Earth is actually massively underpopulated, but never mind that (it’s more of a technological question), we certainly agree that rapid shrinking is bad.
Maybe we should de-stigmatize teen pregnancy. Not to the extent of withholding sex education… but maybe just not telling teens that their life will be over if they have kids too early? Heck, give teen parents extra resources to incentivize them.
I’m genuinely curious: to which past societies do you believe this applies?
I do additionally wonder if selection effects will make an appearance. Hopefully not quite to the extent of Idiocracy, but:
There may be additional effects like “dumb people can’t figure out birth control”, but there are enough other factors that I hope that isn’t dominant.
So maybe there will be a rebound eventually. But it had better happen quick if civilization is to last. Or at least if we want things like “retirement” to exist.