# Is There Any Practical Way to Increase the Birthrate? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 6, 2025, 8:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655 "2025-01-06T20:41:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 26
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 1:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/501 "2025-04-05T13:57:07Z")
The income group in the U.S. who has the most children per person are the ones in the top 1.3% of the population for incomes. They average slightly more than three children per family. These are people who were born in rich families or who made it into wealth comparatively soon in their lives. They can afford childcare, larger homes, and help with household chores, making it easier to have and raise multiple children, and they can afford things like fertility treatments and can afford to adopt children. The people who have the least children per family are those from working-class or middle-class families who spend all their time up into middle age studying at college, graduate schools, or professional schools and then have to work at their jobs as doctors, lawyers, businessmen, professors, or whatever before they reach a point where they are sure they can be sure that they will stay in those jobs. They average less than two children per family. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 1:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/502 "2025-04-05T13:59:25Z")
> [@Broomstick](#): > > That’s due in part to their maximizing their use of government benefits. Nah. They’d have large families, have in other countries throughout history had large families, with or without benefits. In fact Jewish immigrants as a group were often not the secularized Jews that dominate American Jewish identity today, they were religiously observant and having lots of children. So have been most immigrant groups: poor and religiously observant. Which sets up my response to this: > [@DemonTree](#): > > Except here those high-fertility religious groups, who are _already_ making the country less liberal, are a subset of the immigrants. The cultural changes I’m worried about aren’t curry places and kebab shops for god’s sake, they are the import of conservative religious attitudes The anti immigrant sentiment is where the “less liberal” … or more accurately, far right conservative, changes are coming from, across Europe. And the same is the source of religious conservatism becoming more dominant in America. It is _not_ primarily by the religious out reproducing the secular because religious belief is not genetic. Read the article I linked to. The religiously observant generally have more kids but they still fail to increase more religiously observant adults above replacement value. From there, bolding mine. > [@](#): > > Since 2002, the share of reproductive-age women who attended church weekly or more has fallen from about 35% to 24 percent. In the DIFS data, the share was even lower: only about 18% of women. In other words, while the fertility rate among religious women has been stable, society has still become less religious overall, meaning that the overall number of births to religious mothers has trended downwards. On the other hand, though fertility rates have fallen by 26% among nonreligious women since 2005, they have grown from about 17% among reproductive age women to 30%—a 75% increase. Overall, then, births to nonreligious women have risen. Despite a widening fertility gap, the ongoing trend of younger Americans becoming more secular more than offsets the fertility advantage enjoyed by religious people. > > Indeed, **religious fertility rates simply are not high enough to offset losses from conversion to irreligion.** Data from the 2014 Pew Religious Life Survey suggest that net conversions in and out of American religions lead to about a 16% loss in religious people over the course of a generation. Secular values and lifestyle becomes part of the next generation over insular religious observance in established in the country just as it has and likely will among religiously observant groups that have immigrated in the past. When they do not it is because of the success and attraction of the ideas, not because of birth rates. And it is the oppressive side of those ideas, the interpretations of religions that they should impose their beliefs onto others, that is where the battle for a country’s soul is won or lost. Not by fertility. That integration of religiously observant immigrants into the broader culture has been done many times. We know it is what generally happens. Increasing birthrate among the secular by economic incentives? We have not seen that succeed. > [@DemonTree](#): > > I really think ignorance and a defeatist attitude are half the problem here I agree! 😁 Parts of the world are going to go under water. Others are going to not have enough water. The wealthier countries are not the lifeboat in this case, they are ships sinking themselves because they need people to keep them running. But they would rather leave those others drown and sink themselves than take any “others” aboard. Humans. Amirite? ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 2:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/503 "2025-04-05T14:00:46Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > The income group in the U.S. who has the most children per person are the ones in the top 1.3% of the population for incomes. So all we need to do is make more than 50% be in the top 1.3%! ---
**Author:** ![Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/q.q.switcheroo/32/5713_2.png) [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.Q.Switcheroo)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/504 "2025-04-05T14:05:57Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > Humans. Amirite? Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em… ---
**Author:** ![Zoobi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/13edae/32.png) [@Zoobi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoobi)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/505 "2025-04-05T14:23:59Z")
Honestly this doesn’t make much sense. You are operating on optimizing the far margins here. Giving incentives to the lowest population density areas isn’t going to make much of a difference, that should be pretty obvious to anyone with basic math skills. ---
**Author:** ![Zoobi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/13edae/32.png) [@Zoobi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoobi)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/506 "2025-04-05T14:36:01Z")
Any effective birthrate augmentation plans must involve, and in fact focus on, urban centers to have a actual impact on the national level. But I suppose that is probably counter productive to the actual wanted goals of “demographic” control. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 2:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/507 "2025-04-05T14:41:43Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Frankly, it’s looks like a “places where it’s bad to be a woman” map. I know I’m late to the response on this point, but I’ll throw something different into the mix. You’re half right. That contrasting stripe up the center of the country in each of those various maps is indeed generally a bad place to be a woman. And in many cases becoming a worse place. But there are many areas outside that stripe, probably double or more the total square mileage, that are equally bad places to be a woman. So whatever we can say about why that stripe exists, “bad to be a woman” by itself is not a valid explanation. And I’m hard pressed to come up with reasons why e.g. central Nebraska is bad but central Mississippi is not. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 2:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/508 "2025-04-05T14:54:52Z")
It would need to focus on fraction of population wherever they live. By self definition more [Americans live in](https://medium.com/pew-research-center-decoded/evaluating-what-makes-a-u-s-community-urban-suburban-or-rural-159f9d082842#:~:text=In%20a%202018%20Pew%20Research,live%20in%20a%20rural%20area.) rural than urban regions, but way more in suburban ones than either of the other two. Urban aint were most self report living. Suburban is. Then rural. But getting more so called soccer moms to have child three or four? They are starting later and are older by then. It is harder to do even if they desperately want to. And most don’t. ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 3:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/509 "2025-04-05T15:16:13Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > Nah. They’d have large families, have in other countries throughout history had large families, with or without benefits. That is true as far as it goes, but in New York they most certainly do access government benefits as much as they can, which is one reason they can support such large families in an area with such a high cost of living. They will have large families regardless (see other factors later in this post) but such benefits do help them. The fact that their kids don’t go on to higher education in expensive, prestigious secular universities also factors in, and that they women by and large are stay at home mothers who devote themselves to maintaining a household and raising those large families. That is not to say there aren’t men who pursue additional education beyond the minimum, or that there aren’t women who pursue a business/work opportunity because these are still groups composed of individuals. The point is that their sub-societies have traits that make having a large family a realistic option and cultural memes that see doing so as desirable, more desirable than having a super high paying job, extensive travel, and so forth. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/510 "2025-04-05T17:20:35Z")
And to be fair while Jewish immigrants are a solid illustration how people come to A country as poor religious people having large families but with a generation become mostly assimilated and often secularized, the current Orthodox are the main example of a group who are reproducing faster than they have people moving away from their highly religious subculture. Both in America and in Israel an increasing share of Jewish young adults identify as Orthodox. A minority to be sure, but increasing in size still. Nevertheless such is notable only because of its exceptionality. Orthodox Jews and the Amish. Both also very insular as well. Not likely to be subcultures that take over the flavor of the mainstream and both still small even while growing. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 7:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/511 "2025-04-05T19:42:02Z")
I have spent a long time with Haredi families in the US. Neighborhoods and congregations function as big families. Children just walk into their friends’ houses, and any time a new baby is born, the family has meals coming in for a couple of weeks-- longer, if the family needs it-- the mom has lots of help with the newborn, and help in general. The husband of the family next door might be over doing the dishes. And that goes with money, too. People give tons of tzedakah, so even though the synagogues are practically makeshift-- often a building that was repurposed from something else, and dwarfed by the Conservative and Reform synagogues, if someone needs something, they can go to the rabbi for cash. No one has a TV, so no one has cable, DVR, etc. Most have computers, but many don’t have internet, so their computers may be out-of-date. Internet is only for those who need it for work. People do need cars, though, and if you are just starting out, and need a down payment to get a used car to get to a job, to be able to start that family, the rabbi may be able to give it to you, or may take up a collection for you. No one thinks twice about taking it, because as soon as they can they will be giving, and they do. I once had a flat tire when I was staying with a community over Shabbat, and a few days after. I had a flat tire, and changed it myself, and then dropped the tire off at a local Firestone where they honored my road hazard warranty from Indianapolis, and even put the tire back on for me. The family I was with immediately asked me when I got back if I needed any money, and I said, no, it was all taken care of under warranty. They would have taken the tire off for me, I just did it myself for my convenience-- I didn’t have to leave the car there while they got around to it. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/512 "2025-04-05T21:47:32Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > Nitpick: was there really a drop in **fertility**? producing few children is a drop in fecundity, or proliferativeness, or something. A drop in fertility would mean more people are seeking medical help to conceive, or adopting children because they can’t have them. For precision in terms you actually have this backwards. Fertility is the actual measurable number of children a woman produces. Fecundity is how many she maximally could produce, the capacity. We know fertility rates have changed. We don’t know if fecundity has. FWIW yes that extended family community sense supports having children. ---
**Author:** ![DemonTree](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/demontree/32/8646_2.png) [@DemonTree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DemonTree)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/513 "2025-04-05T21:48:45Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > Talking about cultural dilution? I’d far rather increase the number of college educated Indian programmers, thanks. What, you don’t want to increase the number of poor religious people in your society? 😒 ---
**Author:** ![DemonTree](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/demontree/32/8646_2.png) [@DemonTree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DemonTree)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/514 "2025-04-05T21:52:53Z")
These are the kind of cultural changes I could get behind. Very much not compatible with the capitalist vision of high consumption and a mobile workforce, though. ---
**Author:** ![Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/q.q.switcheroo/32/5713_2.png) [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.Q.Switcheroo)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/515 "2025-04-05T22:10:04Z")
> ---
**Author:** ![DemonTree](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/demontree/32/8646_2.png) [@DemonTree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DemonTree)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/516 "2025-04-05T22:52:13Z")
Okay, but I think we’ve gone too far the other way. It’s good to have mandatory socialising in the same way it’s good to have mandatory exercising. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2025, 11:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/517 "2025-04-05T23:27:03Z")
_Mandatory_? Whether or not such would be desirable, it isn’t practically enforceable in large scale in modern societies, not without a lot more authoritarian enforcement than most societies are capable of. High consumption is not the problem. It generally works in relatively smaller groups that can function as fictive extended families, or small tribes at most. And even then I think a strong sense of the rest of society being other also seems to be key to not losing group members. I’m thinking here of the Israeli kibbutz movement. It hit all the notes. And women in the early days of the kibbutz movement did have more kids than those living elsewhere. But kids often moved out. The following though is interesting. I just found it looking for fertility rates in kibbutzim. > **[The price of children and fertility responses: Evidence from the Israeli Kibbutz](https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/price-children-and-fertility-responses-evidence-israeli-kibbutz)** > > For years, policymakers trying to influence the decisions of would-be parents have tried to change the ‘price’ of having children. In France they have made it cheaper; in China more expensive. This column looks at whether such policies are likely to... A bit of a natural experiment with major economic incentives change. Some kibbutzim privatized the cost of having kids: individual families bore the cost; other kept it a communal expense. The impact was not zero. But it was small. Caveats to interpretation duly noted. > our paper suggests that the role of price in fertility decisions is rather modest, and even very large changes in the financial incentives to fertility may not be enough to radically alter fertility patterns among women in developed countries. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2025, 2:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/518 "2025-04-06T02:07:42Z")
The thing about financial incentives is that much of the cost to women is in the form of pain, emotional distress, and permanent medical harm. Not money. For a lot of them _no_ amount of money would be enough, and even for those who’d take the money it’d be a charge on top of the existing cost of having children. Which nobody even seriously proposes meeting in the first place, anyway. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2025, 6:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/519 "2025-04-06T06:16:07Z")
Pregnancy and childbirth are high health risk conditions, in the United States for some groups more than others. (Black women three times higher mortality rate than white women.) It _should_ take a lot to offset that. My sense though is the medical risks, and the pain of childbirth are only occasionally major considerations to having children (mostly for those who had past serious medical problems pregnancy or postpartum related). My sense is that the choice is based more on the balance of consideration between the emotional work of parenting and the expected emotional returns. However the balance falls is valued more than any reasonable economic incentive for most. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2025, 7:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/520 "2025-04-06T07:01:12Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > My sense though is the medical risks, and the pain of childbirth are only occasionally major considerations to having children (mostly for those who had past serious medical problems pregnancy or postpartum related). I’ve never seen a study on it, but I get the distinct impression that such concerns grow much larger with each child as the romanticism of having children wears off and the women actually experience the downsides. Which I suspect is a large part of why there’s such a pattern of “have one or two children then stop”. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655.md?page=25) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655.md?page=27)