You could have a national exam on leaving school, like most European countries. The pass rate could be set to be similar to current graduation rates, and it could also award higher levels or just give students a percentage score which would allow employers to differentiate more skilled students. It could also be an option to do employment-oriented training courses from 16 to prepare for a job - I’ve heard Germany does this well and it’s boosted their economy, but hasn’t done the same for their birth rate.
Winding back the effort to send as many people as possible to universities would be difficult though, same as downsizing any other significant part of the economy.
No one in this administration seems to have the least idea what they are doing, much less the guy in charge of it all. I rather wish they weren’t looking at pro-natalism; at this rate they’re more likely to tar it by association than to achieve anything useful.
Let’s start by stipulating that the current adminstration criminal traitor regime is simply hell bent on destroying the USA in service of our rivals and enemies. Nothing they do is well-intentioned. Nothing.
Setting that aside, we can talk about programs a well-intentioned executive and legislature could implement in a hypothetical USA that was trying to succeed, not fail. And trying to deliver actual education to the masses, not simply corporately grift for taxpayer and private dollars in every way possible.
Far more likely what it means is that the large number of people who used to quit high school to enter the workforce on the family farm or other child labor no longer do.
Exactly. I don’t think it tells us anything about the academic standards, just that more kids stick it out to get a degree, because it’s much more valuable to have that degree, as compared to seeing our and getting a job, than it used to be.
Also not very useful given that most people don’t pay anything close in taxes to what children cost. Children are expensive.
Paying prospective parents more per child than the children costs might work; as I think others have mentioned nobody has actually tried that. Everyone wants to do it on the cheap and hope people are dumb enough to fall for it, which apparently doesn’t happen often enough to make a difference.
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.
Probably true. One thing that’s noticeable is the lack of much in the way of social reward for women having children. Which is of course a historically very effective way of convincing people to do things that are unpleasant or dangerous; men being convinced to go off to risk their lives in war out of a desire for glory, patriotism or just impressing women being an obvious example. Women are unlikely to be praised, admired or granted privileges for having children.
You just don’t see that; the right wing is outright hostile to women, and the left typically is hostile to the idea of convincing women to have more children due to the well known history of misogyny surrounding the issue. And the authoritarians just want to use force, not convince women to do anything.
However that’s a cultural issue I don’t think the government can actually do anything about. Oh sure, a government can talk about how great women are for having children but it’ll just be treated as white noise, empty blather that mostly won’t even register with people.
EDIT: Which is why I didn’t mention it before. The question is if there’s any practical way of increasing the birth rate, and I don’t see any practical way of changing our culture that way. Not when nearly all social, political and economic forces are pushing in the opposite direction.
It used to be possible to start at the bottom in an industry and work your way up. It used to be common for teens to serve as apprentices and learn a trade while working. In that context, ‘child labour’ is not necessarily a bad thing. If it’s a dead end job that means forgoing better opportunities in future, then it’s bad, sure.
This is a feedback loop, though. A major reason that the degree is more valuable is that more of one’s peers will have one, allowing employers to raise requirements to get a good job. It’s not necessarily benefiting either individuals or the country as a whole for young people to spend longer in education instead of working, much less for them to get into huge debt for it. I do think education is valuable in itself, the question is whether it’s worth the financial and time costs as currently implemented.
Yup. ‘Baby bonuses’ and the like never come close to covering the true costs of raising a child, and have little to no effect as a consequence.
More charitably, many people think defraying large costs like childcare will help parents - this is the usual left-wing answer to falling birthrates - but it also seems to make little difference.
Thanks.
Yup. Imagine we went back to expectations in the 50s that women quit work after getting pregnant. The birthrate would crater further as very few would be willing to make that drastic change in lifestyle. Political polarisation between men and women is an additional problem, reducing relationship formation and making both sexes less happy.
Young right-wing men on Twitter have their own ideas: limiting how many women can go to university, or banning women from lucrative professions or from working altogether, so that average and below men, and raising children, will be more attractive prospects in comparison. I fear that’s what will end up being tried if no one else solves the problem.
At least the author of the article does acknowledge declining fertility is a problem. That’s more than we were seeing a few years ago when low birthrates tended to be celebrated as a solution to the climate crisis.
Yes, this is an important point. The cringy idea of a motherhood medal is presumably trying to address this, but such attitudes are indeed hard for governments to change.
And fathers stepping up to the plate to do an equal share of parenting drudgery, the parts those in the Rightist version of “pro-natalism” see as “valued” women’s work, get even less. Those fools think of men who do that as having low testosterone and a disgrace to manhood. But it gets little celebration as a choice anywhere on the spectrum.
Remember: Proper manly alpha male parenting ends at conception. After that it’s all women’s work for a sentence of 9 months and 21 years at fairly hard labor.
Or so say the hardcore wackos of the Manly Right.
Hint to those bozos: Putting the genie of women as equal actual human beings back into the bottle will not work well for anyone living today. You might get there after 150 years of force and intimidation and killing, but no male advocating for this nonsense will live to see any benefit from it. Instead you’ll reap the whirlwind of extreme pushback.
I think my side of the political spectrum needs to cop to some guilt as well. Yes I was a dad who did, frankly more of the parenting drudgery than my wife did (other than pregnancy and childbirth and postpartum medical issues …). Main cook. Main lunch packer. Main person keeping the laundry going. Main person dealing with the kid vomit in my face. But easy ego wise as I also had a society valued job. My being a stay at home dad? Not having the ego validation of my work? Was not gonna happen and I don’t think I am the exception among liberal men.
And I see few fathers getting to full equal share of parenting grunt work. Partly due to mom’s insistence that they do it.
Yeah. “I tried to do (insert task), but my wife yelled at me and insisted she do it herself” is a complaint I’ve heard plenty of times from fathers over the years. Never seen a poll about how common it actually is, though.
And earlier I agreed it is hard for governments to change social attitudes, but we routinely expect them to do it on other issues. Isn’t that the whole point of what you were saying earlier about how governments should lead rather than follow voters’ preferences on immigration? Changing views on that probably isn’t any easier than persuading people to admire and value parents more.
Politicians could talk up the value of having kids and how much parents are contributing to society by raising them, rather than acting like only paid work and GDP figures matter.
Schools could teach about life goals in general, including that most people will want to have kids, rather than only focussing on careers. They could at least stop the kind of sex-ed that teaches having a baby is the worst thing that could happen to you. The intention is to reduce teenage pregnancy, but it’s not a helpful message if you want to raise the birth rate.
I’ve seen significant shifts in how immigration is perceived. The higher endorsement of nativist anti-immigrant views have gone one way and the other. Even just between election cycles. And the facts of the need for immigration specifically now has not been told well. To be sure comprehensive rational immigration system reform has been a hard sell to get through the harder right side on the GOP for a long time. Dubya tried and failed.
Shifting parenting to be as respected as a high earning profession, or primary breadwinner? Have not seen that happen before. Which does not mean that using all bully pulpits to support it is not worth trying.
Do we know that was due to government (or media) messaging rather than to changes in number and type of immigrants, and/or to other factors that might affect acceptance, like the job market?
I was thinking this is strange. Has any government just straight up said that higher immigration is needed due to low birth rates? Pretty sure I haven’t seen it, but it would not necessarily be reported in international news.
It wouldn’t have to be as respected as a high earning profession. Just more respected than currently. It’s at least something that hasn’t already been tried and failed. Though I think governments would have to do all the free-childcare and benefits for parents stuff before trying this, or it just wouldn’t be credible.
Does anyone wonder how strange it is that this thread should be about the possibility that the world population will keep going down, possibly until the human race completely dies off? Have any of you read the 1968 book The Population Bomb by Paul and Anne Ehrlich? Have any of you read the 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison (set starting in August 9, 1999) or the 1973 film Soylent Green that was made from it? The first book was written by a very good academic. The novel and the movie were pretty popular. They predict population increases and famines much larger than actually happened.
They were very poor predictions of the future. People in the mid-1960s greatly overestimated how fast the world population would increase. Prediction is very hard. You might want to read the book Superforecasting - The Art and Science of Prediction by Tetlock and Gardner. My personal suspicion is that the world population will top out in the late 21st century and then slowly decrease. But then I’m not a great forecaster either.
And as for all this “pay people to have babies” stuff… The people who will be most likely to be incentivized are those who aren’t giving up a good job. The poor. Black people, Hispanic people, first generation immigrants, the underprivileged. The same people who object to increasing immigration will lose their shit if we “pay welfare queens” to have more kids. Because they don’t want those kids, either.
Not me. Mainly because I haven’t read anyone in this thread saying anything like that?
The concerns expressed here are more about concerns over several generations only, and the focus is most immediately on economic impacts, albeit with clear recognition that economic stresses tend to spill elsewhere …
A few generations of economic upheaval and all sorts of things can change. Directionality can change. Technology will change. No idea what will keep happening. My WAG is that this is not high on the list as our existential risk.
No one in this administration seems to have the least idea what they are doing, much less the guy in charge of it all. I rather wish they weren’t looking at pro-natalism; at this rate they’re more likely to tar it by association than to achieve anything useful.