Is There Any Practical Way to Increase the Birthrate?

In My Humble Opinion
461

I missed this. Yeah, it would be valuable. But I’m not sure how many grandparents would want to do it, and I’m not sure how many parents would, either. There must be selection bias here, but I see an awful lot of complaints on parenting forums about how grandparents who provide free childcare or babysitting don’t follow the parents’ rules on parenting, or are otherwise doing a bad job in some way. This may be another manifestation of modern parenting standards being way too high. (Or maybe they really were too low in the past, IDK?)

Maybe it’s a common phrase in economics (he’s an economist). He used it in an essay on how to raise birthrates, and I hadn’t heard it anywhere else.

462

Just watched this video that Broomstick posted earlier, and want to highlight it. Very scary stuff, actually, especially how essentially irreversible the Korean decline is. And how rapid the endgame will be.

463

I need to bookmark this and show it to everyone who thinks I’m crazy for saying we need to increase birthrates.

464

But also how it can’t really practically be done …

The conclusion I come to is that increased productivity and gradual decline may help stave off the impacts some, but getting over the right’s fear of immigration diluting the national character, and more racist versions, is more the practical solution. In a time that will definitely see climate refugees if nothing else there will be great migrations providing younger workers and new ideas, if we allow for it, let alone welcome and plan for it.

465

This. Increasing the birthrate is hard. Increasing immigration is relatively easy, we could do it in a year. And world fecundity is still above replacement levels. We could do it without screwing over some other nation. And that would buy us time to work on how to support society with a smaller fraction of workers – something that i believe can be done.

We should increase immigration sooner rather than later, because sudden huge influxes of people who don’t share a nation’s culture are disruptive in lots of ways, but the US and Canada have shown that gradual influxes can work well.

(And everyone keeps saying that the Swedish measures don’t work, but i wonder if Sweden would be like South Korea if they didn’t have those measures in place.)

466

At the volumes needed, it’s an entirely rational fear. If instead of the next generation consisting of 36 South Koreans for every 100 now, it consists of 36 South Koreans and 64 immigrants, mostly from 3rd world countries, and the generation after that consists of 36 kids from that generation, the majority being second generation immigrants, plus another 64 new immigrants… it’s going to be a very, very different country. Things are not quite that bad in Europe, but since we already have extremely high immigration for exactly this reason, we can already see the problems it causes, and lack of integration of much of the second generation.

As a temporary measure, it might be more acceptable, but there is absolutely no sign of any recovery in birthrates, and few efforts to change this or even acknowledgement that it’s a problem. Plus seemingly very little interest in how we can improve productivity and manage with fewer workers.

Yeah, I was wondering that too.

467

That’s huge.

SK shows what a modern society does to birthrates with no support for child-making. The birthrate just craters.

Sweden shows what a large-scale supportive regime that the baby-making public believes will be there for the whole 20 years they’ll need it. Under those circumstances, the birthrate is too small, but not ginourmously too small.


My own bet is that if everything the Swedes do was turned up significantly, there’d be more babies. Like pay stay-at-home parents well above the median wage, and include free college for all.

And have some sort of overnight “day care” akin to pet kennels where parents can leave the kids of whatever age someplace for a few days at a time to take a kid-free weekend or vacation. Certainly not all the time, but maybe each kid is entitled to two weeks per year of “kiddie kennel” so the parents have two weeks per year of guaranteed kid-free time.

If the “price” of a modern egalitarian educated high income society is the tax revenue necessary to heavily subsidize babies just like we heavily subsidize other things, so be it.

468

Specifically addressing this, which I realize is not the main point, but it is “in play,” I think. I’m going to address the main point, though, and not flog this.

Global warming is going to cause population shifts. Countries that are still habitable in 50 years are going to see population increases from immigration, and that’s good, because the biggest problem with not having enough people to replace the current population is that there won’t be enough people do eldercare.

Eldercare is not the greatest job, in general, since lots of the tasks involve bedpans, bathing people with limited mobility, and dealing with people with degrees of dementia.

Immigrants usually take jobs that the homebred population doesn’t want, and, the country doesn’t have as much invested in immigrants, like 13 years of public education.

Extrapolating current problems to the future, and saying “we need to increase the birthrate” is short-sighted, I think.

So, I think you can increase the population without increasing the birthrate, except in countries that are becoming uninhabitable.

Just as a mental exercise, how do you increase the birthrate? yes, not educating women in general, and the whole population specifically about birth control will increase the birthrate.

But it will also increase women and infant mortality. The younger population will be able to care for the elderly partly because there will be fewer elderly. An ignorant population means one with a lower life expectancy.

What you want, I think, is not simply to increase the birthrate, but to increase the healthy birthrate. In other words, you are looking for a sweetspot where there are lots of babies born, they are born full-term and healthy, and they survive infancy.

You don’t want to increase the populations of newborns-- you want to increase the population of 5-yr-olds. Once a person has made it to 5, they are statistically likely to make it to adulthood.

For this, you need free, quality pre-natal care, free help for anyone who needs it in caring for babies, encouragement of breastfeeding, but free quality formula for those who simply cannot.

And destigmatizing of motherhood. Men can be fathers, plus something else, and that is normal. It needs to be normal for women too.

Also, you need to make it illegal to touch a pregnant women’s belly without asking. Seriously. Knock that shit off.

469

To which I say it’s not rational and “so what?”, respectively. All cultures change over time, quickly or slowly - they’re dynamic. You cannot hermetically seal UK culture like a fly in amber.

As an exercise in realpolitik I’m willing to go along with programs that ease peoples fears over population migration by putting reasonable and as non-punitive as possible restrictions on migration. But as far as I’m concerned most of those fears are irrational. Human beings in general are scared little mice, desperately afraid of change.

On a personal level, I mostly despise nativism. The difference between it and racism is often tissue-thin at best. There is nothing sacred about a country’s culture as it exists in the moment and changes to it are not the end of the world.

470

Yeah. Concepts like keeping a culture, nation or “race” pure just fundamentally ignore how such things work. The only way for a culture to stay the same forever is if it’s dead.

471

The fact that you personally are from a country whose culture was moulded by immigration, and you like it, does not make it irrational for other peoples to prefer their own culture and want to preserve it in a recognisable form. America is a perfectly nice country and I’m happy it exists, but I don’t want my grandchildren, if I’m lucky enough to have any, to end up a marginalised minority like the Native Americans.

But we are getting off topic again. South Korea is a useful comparison because it shows how economic and social factors do affect the birthrate, even if in this case they are making it much more negative. It suggests that cutting hours at work, making it easier to buy housing, and encouraging men to help more with childrearing would be positive for the birthrate, even if not sufficient on their own. I got the idea of reducing competition in education from looking at East Asian countries, as it seems to be a significant factor there. If parents could be sure their kids would have a good future even if they didn’t work particularly hard in school or do extra-curriculars, that’s another way to make parenting less onerous. Unfortunately there is a competitive aspect here that makes it hard to reduce.

472

But I think you point can become circular. What if the culture you want to preserve is a large part of driving down said birthrate. That the assumption in any number of cultures that you have to have X amount of savings/job-security or career/apartment/house/what have you before you’re ready to start trying to have kids means always putting it off, or at least, possibly putting it off until it becomes medically difficult?

Because those assumptions are just as much a part of a culture as knowing about the Pilgrims, George Washington, and Manifest Destiny.

473

This is the problem, but it’s a deeper one than you suggest. I think we all agree that wealth, comfort, freedom, empowerment of women, high levels of education, and contraceptives giving us the choice of whether and when to become parents, are the major factors driving this trend. The only countries that still have high birthrates are the ones that lack some or all of these factors, and even middle income countries that do comparatively badly on these fronts have already fallen below replacement.

I don’t want to give up any of these things, but if we can’t find a way to raise birthrates without doing so, we are going to lose them one way or another: either current civilisation will collapse due to lack of young people to keep it running, or, more likely, religious groups that eschew liberal values and freedoms, and in many cases modern technology, will take over demographically and then politically.

474

Very nicely said. Thank you.

Shame it’s such bad news, but I think you nailed it.

As I said a bit ago, I believe our wealthy societies could afford to adequately value and subsidize child-making to achieve any birthrate target we desire. I strongly doubt our wealthy cultures would choose to do so.

475

Which is the loss of my culture, which I think of as based in shared secular values and mutual respect, that I don’t want.

That said with rare exceptions I don’t see that happening in many more wealthier nations. Even in the main case for fertility overall being propped up by the highly religious, Israel. One simple reason: the groups that are highly religious and … being fruitful … are not producing the lion’s share of the nation’s productivity in aggregate or per capita. They are not big contributors in tax dollars, public service, or creative ideas for science or industry. A country dominated by them soon would not be a wealthy nation.

So here are the possible paths:

Become an authoritarian even theocratic nation that eliminates freedoms and secular values moving us back to barefoot and pregnant.

Risk a South Korea collapse.

Really ramp up productivity to 11.

Or develop a means to allow immigration from parts of the world where births are higher than the country can support, including climate and political refugees. FWIW I don’t think Britain is less British for all their kabob shops and Indian restaurants. They’ve become an integral part of the culture instead.

The prediction is that by 2100 half of the children born in the world will be born in Africa. Societies with arms open wide enough to absorb people from these and other parts of the world, and find room for their cultures within the whole, will be the ones that prosper.

476

An odd set of maps. What’s with that vertical stripe in the middle of the country?
Imgur

Maybe rich and rural is the trick:
Imgur

Or they’re just happy?
Imgur

Or something do do with farms?
Imgur

Maybe the high winds bring the storks in faster.
Imgur

477

Hmmm…interesting. I like those and I do wonder what exactly is going on in aggregate. Prosperous and rural/semi-rural (less urban/job stress, less need for dual-incomes) might just be the main driver.

478

Ultimately I think rich+rural is it. Why are they rich? Because they’re on high quality farmland. Which is rural by definition. They’re happier because of it. And the high winds are because it’s the Great Plains… a huge expanse of very flat land (i.e., productive farmland). But it is interesting that this shows up in the fertility rate, too.

479

Also correlates with church attendance pretty well.

480

Looking again, I see I misinterpreted the suicide rate map. The stripe is “no data”, not “low suicide rates”. That there’s still a stripe is interesting… but it may be due to very low population density, for example. Hard to say, though the red counties to the rest aren’t too promising if they’re correlated.