No, I routinely pop in, pop off and pop back out.
It seems like an obvious solution, but there are many countries (in Europe for example) that have generous child care policies, and yet have fertility rates below replacement level.
So it’s clearly not the whole solution.
I see no real answers here to the question asked. Maybe there is no answer.
I’d react a little differently.
We’ve pretty well established that there are very definite factors that motivate towards large or small families. It’s simply that for most of us, the factors that motivate towards large families are an enshittification of our culture and/or economy.
So yes: we can raise the birth rate. But not at a cultural or economic price we’re willing to pay. So no: we won’t raise the birth rate.
Sure there’s answers. But people want an answer that’s both ethical and cheap; and that’s what doesn’t exist.
I’m pretty much in agreement that there are no easy answers to this problem. Birth rates were higher when medical care specifically and life in general were far worse; we’re not going to return to a crappier world just to get birth rates up.
Maybe something unforeseen happens that changes my mind - history is full of huge events bringing about massive changes over short periods of time - but I still contend that managing a contracting and aging population will be less difficult than heading off the potentially horrific effects of climate change while ever burdening the planet with more of us to feed.
Bumping just to gift link share this on topic NYT article about the “pronatalist” movement(s).
Not much discussion about the efficacy of any proposals unfortunately. Only that what Trump is going is likely counterproductive to the goals if these groups.
Why do we want to raise the birthrate again?
I get that any rapid change in demographics hurts people. Whether it’s a baby boom (all those unproductive children to support) or a sharp drop in birthrate (all those aging boomers to support).
But we have a lot of evidence that healthy, happy, free people don’t want all that many kids. And honestly, there are a lot of people in the world. We could have a lovely human society at a lower population level. Wouldn’t it make more sense to research how to support the population with a smaller work force than to try to jack up the birth rate?
When there’s any risk that humans might go extinct, or reach such a low population as to cause a genetic bottleneck, sure, then we can worry about those real problems. But the real problem facing us now isn’t “too few babies”, it’s "how do we maintain a wealthy peaceful society with a higher fraction of humans over age 60 (or whatever).
Expecting some valuable labor from older people is part of the answer. Maybe there are better ways to organize that than expecting them to choose between working full time or retiring to a life of leisure. (And older adults already do a lot of stuff, ranging from childcare to volunteering in their communities. Can we encourage more of that?) Higher efficiency of production must be part of the answer. I read that the Japanese were working on robots to help with some of the services people need, as well as in the production of goods.
But i think all of those are more productive areas of research than “how to get women to make more babies”.
Birthrate increase is one potential option for the issue. The issue is that an economy with an upside down demographic pyramid is … of concern. Unless productivity rapidly increases it would result in labor shortages, and a shrinking number of a working population supporting the needs of a graying population. Also innovation usually emerges with a younger workforce. My staying at work until I cannnot may decrease my dependence on younger taxpayers, plus I will still pay mine, but I won’t be coming up with the creative new ways to do things.
Again it is not the only possible solution to the issue. Immigration is the obvious one but we are in an anti immigration era pretty much everywhere. America is not alone in having fears of others diluting their cultural purity. Increased productivity may be what saves the day to some degree at least.
If they can take fluoride out of the drinking water, surely they could add clomiphene? And who wouldn’t want to have twins? (/s)
People who live in our current modern societies seem to have fewer children. It is not clear to me that this is because they are healthy, happy, and free. There are many ways to be healthy, happy, and free and still desire larger families.
Irish immigrants in New York City in 1910 had large families. They mostly felt as healthy, happy, and free as anyone else you asked in those days.
They also had no access to birth control, and the women had few good employment options other than, “mother”. The men may have been free enough…
Decades ago, when Mrs. Homie and I were of the age when people typically start thinking about children, we couldn’t, and for reasons I won’t get into here, we decided not to adopt. At the time, we were devout, Evangelical Christians. Needless to say, there are some elements within the Evangelical community who are quite salty about Christians, or people in general, choosing not to have (or adopt) children. He gives a variety of “reasons” why (th him, anyway), Christians choosing not to raise children is a bad thing, and none of them are actually what I think is the real reason. Truth be told – and frankly, the truth is rather thinly-veiled here – he wants Christians having more children because that means there will be more English-speaking, Republican-voting, white Christians, White Genocide, Great Replacement Theory, and all that.
Truth be told, I’m glad I got out of that nonsense.
Keep in mind the replacement rate is 2.1 or 2.2 children per woman (obviously on average, no one is raiding .1 of a kid).
Given the abundance of people in the world the current ideal is probably to hover around that mark. Maybe a bit below for a slow reduction in population. A bit over every now and then isn’t a problem, either. But something close.
So, OK, “healthy, happy, free people” don’t want 10 kids in a family. But society/civilization needs women to average 2.1. In modern societies the number of kids is limited not solely by desire (or lack of it) for offspring but also the cost of raising and educating a child, as well as the need for supervision during the child’s lifetime meaning someone has to take care of the kid while the other adult(s) in the household are out earning a living. That - the cost and need for someone to supervise the kids - is probably the big limiting factors in industrialized/advanced nations these days.
There is still the expectation that women are to be the mothers and take care of the kids… but now there is ALSO an expectation that women have careers, or at least full-time jobs. Below a certain socioeconomic level women pretty much have to work these days, making childcare difficult, making holding a steady job difficult (because sometimes you have to take off work to deal with a kid’s illness or whatever). Then women are penalized in their old age because staying home to raise the next generation does not count in any pension scheme whatsoever, including social security.
In a society where everything is reduced to a dollar value, and everything considered of value has a dollar value, raising kids is valued at $0… which shows that in fact society doesn’t value either mothers or child-raising.
So… if these “pro-natalists” or whatever they’re calling themselves these days really want to promote a healthy level of child-raising maybe they should start acting like there’s some worth to the endeavor. Have “quarters” or years spent caring for minor children actually count towards the national pension/retirement plan so people who spent decades raising the next generation are left in poverty in their old age. Support child care, including after/before “normal” work hours so those doing shift work instead of 9-5 jobs aren’t left in the lurch. Actually fund public education so that the ALL kids have access to decent buildings in which to learn and small class sizes. Make sure families have access to health care. In other words, make sure no one is penalized, even unintentionally, for having and raising kids.
And yes, we should find ways both to keep older people healthy/functional AND find ways for them to continue to be productive, such as part-time work and also not jacking around with making them pay for maintenance healthcare that keeps them healthy.
Some of the ideas in the linked New York Times article have merit and would help remove obstacles to parenthood. Some less so. But the powers that be don’t really have an interest in promoting child-raising, and the “conservative Christians”, by and large, have demonstrated that they only give a damn about the unborn, once the kids are here they’ll gladly kick them to the curb. Then they wonder why women are choosing to have fewer kids.
If there were any risk of running out of humans, i might agree. But the only risks to our overall existence are war and plague, not population decline.
Yes, rapid population decline causes all sorts of troubles, possibly including war. But humans could comfortably survive some slow population decline for generations, if we manage it carefully.
It has to eventually go back to 2.1 if you want to avoid extinction. A little less is ok if you want a manageable reduction in population. The trouble is that the tip of the spear is South Korea, with a fertility rate of 0.78. That is just completely unsustainable and frankly I’m not sure they can recover from that. The elderly will be forced to work until the grave, at the least–you can’t have the entire working age population dedicated to taking care of the elders. But that’s how it’ll be if each generation is 1/3 the size of the last.
What’s to stop other nations from reaching that level? There seems to be no natural stopping point. Italy, Spain, Japan and others are at 1.3 or not much more. That’s already unsustainable, but things can still get worse.
Slow. Not South Korea levels, or even Italy levels. And if anyone knew how to manage anything, it wouldn’t be a problem in the first place.
Minor disagree. I think (pointing to the whole thread) we know how to manage things, just not in effective (either cost or morality) manners that our societies or governments are willing to endorse. Most nations don’t want, or don’t expect said populations to support the draconian dystopian solutions we’ve largely condemned, but don’t want to increase the spending to support a financial standard which encourages (or even incentivizes) having additional children to even a break-even (time, opportunities, and actual costs) level.
I agree that 0.78 is too fast a population decline to manage. But while world population growth is slowing, it’s still positive. The 2024 UN world population prospects says:
Currently, the global fertility rate stands at 2.25 live births per woman,1 down from 3.31 births in 1990.
(I found this in Wikipedia, which i got to from a Google search.)
Maybe vastly increased immigration is too hard a sell for a cultural monoculture like Japan, but the US ought to be able coast for quite a long time on our less extremely low fertility rate if we also increased immigration moderately.
But that’s explicitly what they don’t want. They aren’t concerned about replacement rates in general, they are concerned about the replacement rate for White people. This is an existential threat for them, replacing a white person with a brown one is actually worse than not replacing them all all.
I was talking about what the denizens of the SDMB might support, not what the folks at project 2025 want. 