Is There Any Practical Way to Increase the Birthrate?

In My Humble Opinion
61

This. If there’s high infant mortality, high childhood mortality, and high general mortality, people want more kids. Men want more kids than women (since kids cost women so much more) so gender inequality helps. It also prevents men from actually being saddled with child care, so they are free to want more babies. Lack of alternatives increase unprotected sex, too. If you can’t read, can’t watch tv, can’t surf the Internet, you can still fuck. And if there’s a lot of violence and instability, the only people you can trust are your family, so it’s good to make more family.

If wealthy nations want to increase the birthrate, they might try lessening the cost. Government-paid nannies to care for the kids might make a difference. As sometime said upthread, kids cost all you time.

62

I find it hard to believe anyone in their right mind would want to increase the human birthrate. The earth is fucking dying under the weight of so many human beings.

I will never ever understand this. Everyone is fucking insane. For the earth to sustain human life, there needs to be a much much smaller population. In the millions, not billions.

To me this is as obvious as the sun rising in the east, as inarguable as gravity. I see the death and damage humans bring, everywhere. It is everywhere. There is nothing I feel more strongly about, nothing I feel there is less ambiguity about.

63

Except that’s kinda true? Once you have a kid, you need to care for that child 24/7. You basically don’t get any free time for decades.

And if you don’t get started professionally relatively young, your kinda screwed.

We can solve this locally by incentivizing immigration. Canada does that, it’s much easier for young adults to immigrate them anyone else. Smart policy.

And if people immigrate from poor countries to rich ones, a lot of people’s lives improve.

64

Yes, the world might be better off with many fewer people but getting there is going to be painful. Programs like the American Social Security system depend on younger people paying into the system so older people can receive benefits. Employers find it difficult to hire new employees. South Koreans could probably provide other examples.

65

Then how do families with two working parents survive?

That’s just obviously untrue. You can care for a kid and go to school or work a job or whatever. You need some degree of child care and other services, which should probably be subsidized. But it’s certainly not a 24/7 job.

I guess I’ll just have to repeat this forever, but the world fertility rate is already almost down to replacement level and still decreasing. Immigration does not solve the global problem.

66

Yeah, this is very true. And there are enormous savings in other places too. Food grown hydroponically in a greenhouse is multiple orders of magnitude more efficient in every metric (water use, energy use, labor use, space use) than growing food in a field like it’s the Neolithic. Which, incidentally, is how we grow the vast majority of our food.

We could have 50 billion humans on the planet and we could rewild massive stretches of wilderness with reintroduced megafauna. None of this requires new technology; just widespread implementation of existing tech, taken to the limit.

This is silly.

You couldn’t have even 1 billion people if they’re using bronze age agricultural techniques.

You can easily have 10 billion with modern agricultural techniques.

As we become more efficient, we can have more people.

That was also true when the Earth’s population was in the mere millions. Where did all the megafauna go?

More energy and more people means more resource surplus. More resources beyond those we need to survive means more time and energy spent on luxuries like conservation.

67

Spoken like a man without children. Yes, we hired a nanny. And we had essentially zero free time for 15 years, after which we started to tentatively go out and play bridge every other week or so.

And both our jobs were impacted, because neither of us totally sacrificed everything so the other could get ahead.

Get back to me when it’s actually below replacement levels. Until then, why yes, we can solve the problem with immigration.

And… The world didn’t feel underpopulated to me when there were only 4 billion people.

68

There is however the argument to be made that more people compromises conservation no matter what you do. Sure we can probably sort out the problem of more people trying to burn polluting fossil fuels in North America. Can we as easily mitigate poor folks in Madagascar deforesting and degrading areas for scarce cooking fuels (and do so in a timely manner)? Perhaps, but it will be rather more difficult and costly. And can we eliminate the phenomenon of loving things to death as we recreate, even as we try to connect with nature? Simple things like every additional person walking about on tide-pools, tramping down duff and compacting soils in forests, putting their grubby fingers on ancient petroglyphs or what have you. My boss loves off-roading - I know one “park” area that was a productive ecosystem in the living memory of some friends that is now a moonscape from people just trying to have a good time and harm no one.

People are inevitably an additional strain and in some ways that cannot be mitigated. I’m not quite as extreme in my opinions as Ulfreida, but I do empathize with her point of view. The progress and prosperity of the human race specifically need not be the top priority in all circumstances*.

*Ask me if I can be a hypocrite when it comes to my own family making sacrifices and I’d tend to agree. Consistency is not very human :slight_smile:.

69

Raising children is obviously a huge sacrifice, which is why fewer people want to do it at all and of those who do not many choose to have more than two. (My second kid is about the age at which my first kid was when we started thinking about trying again; and this time around we are much further from ready).

There are ways that we could make it an easier pill to swallow, as a society. Culturally, that could mean grandparents who are much more eager to take a major role in helping with the children. If the cultural expectation was that everyone lives in the same city and the grandparents take turns watching all the grandkids five days a week, for example, that could help. (And that could be a place where a rubber banding effect comes into play - a generation of small families could mean four grandparents to a single pair of married children, which could encourage that couple to have more kids than they would have if the grandparents had to help with eight other couples’ kids!)

A government program could include more paid leave, stipends for stay at home parents, free or heavily subsidized childcare programs at younger ages, etc.

And as noted by other posters, access to technology like IVF and embryonic screening that can prevent genetic disorders or complications during pregnancy would be massive. So funding access to that kind of care, or even funding research into further developments in these areas, would also help.

70

I feel like the incentives would have to outweigh whatever benefits they get from working and then some to make up for the drastic loss of autonomy, body changes, etc… And it probably wouldn’t hurt to throw in free health care for her and the kid, as well as stuff like temporary babysitting (not day care), etc…

I mean, I suspect that a lot of women who are really gung-ho about having careers, making their own way, etc… might change their minds if they made considerably more money by having a kid, and had most of the concerns like healthcare, babysitting, etc… taken care of.

71

The problem there is that the people in Madagascar don’t have the time or resources to worry about conservation, so they don’t. And can you blame them? You and I feel sorry for the lemurs who lose their home, but the guy cutting their tree down feels sorry for his kids who are cold and hungry at night without firewood.

Part of solving the problem is ensuring that the people who live in the parts of the world most at threat (which also are often poorest) have enough to worry about conservation, too.

That’s fine in theory, but at the end of the day, you need to convince people to do these things.

Between the two options of us all disappearing tomorrow and us becoming super prosperous and taking care of the earth really well over the next 200 years, which is “better” for the environment? Maybe the 2nd one. But to be frank, who cares? If we all disappeared, who or what is that pristine environment for?

72

OTOH, note that Haredi Jews and the Amish have both larger-than-average families and lower-than-average teen pregnancy rates.

73

No, someone who grew up in a household with two working parents who certainly couldn’t afford a nanny.

They did have a reasonably robust social circle, so us kids spent time with the grandparents, babysitting circles, and so on. But often we just stayed at home alone.

The idea of needing constant surveillance for the first 15 years seems crazy except in very unusual situations. Older kids can look after younger ones, too.

74

We could probably add abolishing Social Security to the list. One factor that used to motivate people to have children was concern over who would take care of them in their old age. Eliminating Social Security would bring that fear back.

75

Why are we all ignoring the most obvious solution?

As several have posted, the problem isn’t really “Not enough children”, it’s “Not enough children to support the increasing percentage of old people.”

We already know literally hundreds of ways to get rid of people, yes? And I’m sure we could invent plenty more if we turn our best people to work on it.

How about making getting your monthly SS payment into a bit of roulette? You stick your hand into a box. Some 90+% of the time, it plays a cheery note and dumps a load of money into your hand. The other 5 or whatever percent of the time you get a little injection that causes a nice, painless instant death.

So each month, the ‘burden’ of caring for the oldies drops by 5%, and hey! many of those oldies have houses/bank accounts/stocks/other assets that can be forfeited into the SS fund to help with the payout to the rest. Nice bonus, yes?

And the plan can be super0sized. You can say it’s pure chance who gets the shot, but why not bias it toward preferentially offing the oldies who require the most expensive medical care? Could cut way down on the need for more and more hospital and senior care facilities. More money to save/divert to the SS and Medicare funds. ckearly.

It’ll also offer a great incentive for those basically healthy oldies who qualify for retirement but who could perfectly well keep working. Well, keep working! If you don’t stick your lazy, greedy hand into the box for your money this month, no chance of a shot for you, right?

Oooh! Another thought: you might be worried about the oldies who keep working failing to clear the way for younger workers to rise up the ranks. No problem! Just force the oldies to shift to working in child care! With all these new nannies and babysitters and after school tutors, the parents will be provided with thousands of hours of freed up time! So much, they might even be inspired to crank out another kid or two.

Heck, the future is so bright, I need some welding strength vision goggles. :slight_smile:

76

So, um, how many kids have you reared? I grew up in a household with a full time mom. My parents had more free time than my husband and i, but my mother had very little autonomy for many years. She was pretty unhappy and exhausted a lot of that time. I didn’t want to follow in her footsteps. My sister didn’t want kids at all. There were a lot of unhappy moms trapped at home rearing children when I was young.

77

This is a good point. There are various ways to address the inverted pyramid.

Less draconianly, we can just force people to work longer. And yes, make them retire from the plumb jobs that younger people need, but make them babysit, sell coffee, stock shelves, cut hair, tutor, all the dead-end jobs that aren’t too physically demanding.

78

I find the whole idea of manipulation of population size for the benefit of the state or economy to be almost as offensive as eugenics or mass deportations. Even incentives as supposedly benign as tax credits. The state’s job is to adjust conditions to meet the changing needs of society; not the other way around.

79

Well stated. It’s like a goverment is wanting a higher birth rate so they wont have to make some tough decisions.

80

As an added incentive, we could distribute free food to families with newborns.

Just don’t ask a lot of questions about where all that Soylent Gray is coming from.