Hard to say for sure. It would have made a difference in my peer group. Several of my friends waited until they were late 30s to early 40s. For some, that was too late.
Would they have waited longer had they known enhanced fertility tech was available? Maybe, but I doubt it. They waited that long because it look that long to finish school and establish a career to the point where they could buy a house and take maternity leave (and this isn’t just about the pay–it’s about not losing key career growth years). That pretty much guarantees that you’ll start in the mid-30s.
But who knows. These things have all sorts of second and third-order consequences to them.
That was really my point. Throughout this thread we’re offering various ideas for change of varying plausibility.
But I suspect that even a radical magical change like an additional magical decade or two of fertility would pretty quickly become the new normal and there’d still be plenty of reasons to not have kids, or not many, or later, which “later” too-often turns into “never”.
It’d sure be a weird world if it took two sexes to procreate, but the adult males gestated the new male fetuses and the adult females gestated the new female fetuses.
So they’d both be same-sex-selective hermaphrodites. I can see a lot of ways that would go haywire ecologically among the simpler animal species and also go very socially haywire among the supposedly more sophisticated Homo Sapiens.
I mean it’s so much fucking work. You know? What if throughout the course of human history, you just did all that work without thinking about it, and then suddenly society changed and said, “Oh, actually, all this extra fucking work is totally optional.”
Who signs up for that?
Only people who are damned sure all that work is going to be worth it.
It might. I certainly can’t say that it wouldn’t. But it really is the case that people don’t leave school until they’re 22 or so, and then it takes another decade to get comfortable in a career. So for many, the early-mid 30s is the earliest point where many believe they’re ready, and if they delay at all they’re running into the biological clock. Even if they do start right away, they might only get one or two kids before it gets harder (this happened to other friends).
Will an extra decade of fertility just encourage people wait longer? Could be, but it does seem like the current race between career and biology is juuust unfortunate enough to cause problems.
Around one-third of Americans graduate from college. The average age for an American woman to have a child is 27.5. The average age for an American man to have a child is 30.9. It’s not a good idea to assume that the averages among the people you personally know is the overall average.
In 2023. Probably a bit higher today. In 1970, it was 21.4:
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to assume this is related to improved educational and career attainment for women.
I don’t. My peer group is all college educated and career motivated. Which is also the demographic group which has the lowest fertility rates and possibly the most to gain from improved fertility tech. Two have tried IVF and failed. Maybe new technology could have worked.
So, an update on this. Last year South Korea, which has one of the absolute lowest birth rates in the developed world, started offering massive cash payments to have kids. It is region dependent but apparently in some regions it is as high as 500 million won, the equivalent of almost 400k USD. Apparently this actually worked. The birth rates have gone up 11 straight months. This might still be too late for South Korea to recover, but apparently if the money is good enough people can be bribed to have kids.
A bit too soon to conclude that. It may just be impacting the timing of the same number of kids. If I was part of a couple planning to have a child in the next several years and this deal and they announced this? I would argue for us doing it now before they take away the deal.
It’s also highly implausible that the government can afford to be paying serious money for every kid born for years and years and years. So it’s a practical certainty the payouts will end. And the bigger they are, the sooner they will.
So even if you posit a wise long-term thinking government, not a short-term thinking fickle one, or worse yet, a chaotic one, “get while the getting is good” is certainly the way most thinking folks will bet.
Another factor: Humans are remarkably good at getting used to something novel, so that very quickly it just seems like the perennial background and ceases to motivate. If it’s been a few years now that every child comes with a $X bonus, the “bonus” ceases to be a bonus; it’s just expected. So then it won’t motivate more babies.
But for darn sure I applaud them trying. It will be interesting to see how long the experiment lasts and how the effectiveness varies over time.
If it’s true that women who see their friends having babies are more likely to want their own babies, there could be a multiplicative effect, though. And some of those people who wanted babies “eventually” would never have gotten around to it, or would have waited until they became infertile.
So part of the effect might be timing, but some of it is presumably a real addition.
Could be. Just very premature to conclude such. OTOH if that amount didn’t move the needle even in the short term it would have been nail in the coffin for the concept of monetary incentives.
If the government can’t afford it, then private citizens can afford it even less. Which certainly explains why people are reluctant to have them, if even the government can’t afford it. Children are expensive.
Yes, Tiktokians, give up your reliable birth control methods and switch to the rhythm method. While it should help increase the birthrate, the downside is that the people having these kids would be learning parenting techniques from whatever TikTok parenting videos happened to be trending at the time.
Yes. To be fair that’s mostly a way of making the practice more gruesome than it has to be, cells in a dish don’t have the same horror factor. The Dune setting used an even more repulsive version.
That said, it does bring up a point; the real issue isn’t if there’s a “practical” way to increase the birthrate, there’s plenty. The issue is if there’s an ethical way, which is much more questionable. And if there’s a politically possible ethical way, which is even more questionable.
Society as it is now would be much more prone to simply stripping women of their civil rights and legalizing rape than it would be to even trying instituting any sort of serious compensation and incentives. Much less doing anything that would convince people that children have a future worth living in.
This article about Germany’s declining birthrate touched on Ceausescu’s plan to increase Romania’s birthrate by limiting access to birth control and abortion:
If the ethical issues were ignored and women were forced to have a certain number of children, it would probably result in a negative effect on the country. Maybe it would work in a society where there were many jobs which just needed bodies, like pre-industrial agriculture, but it would likely be counterproductive in a modern society.