Another very interesting bit, analysis, in the NYT. Gift link.
Several here have made the point that there is a big difference between a moderately low birthrate and a collapsing one.
There’s a common factor in countries where birthrates are cratering: They are almost always places that are both modern and highly patriarchal. Last year, the Nobel Prize-winning Harvard economist Claudia Goldin published a paper called “Babies and the Macroeconomy,” aiming to understand the difference between developed countries with moderately low birthrates, like Sweden, France and Britain, and those with very low ones, like South Korea, Japan and Italy. The lowest-fertility countries, Goldin found, modernized so recently and rapidly that social norms around gender equality didn’t have time to catch up. That left women with far more economic opportunity but not much more help from their husbands at home. Between 2009 and 2019, for example, the average woman in Japan spent 3.1 more hours a day on domestic work than men. The average Swedish woman spent 0.8 more hours than men.
So here at least @DemonTree is correct. The version of pro-natalism that comes from the right is highly likely counterproductive. They are the sexist attitudes associated with cratering birth rates that risk economic collapse. More money won’t make women want to have more kids with less actual support from the fathers in the drudgery side of raising them.