These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
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If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.
In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.
You’re correct that my comment was not inclusive. That was not intentional on my part and I’m sorry if I offended anyone. However, this is a distraction from the main point.
It was not a strawman. I was making a statement about how society is right now, not how it should be. “men can be house spouses”, etc is true but until we have better workplace equality and in absence of daycare, the vast majority of prospective families are going to do some very simple budget math to figure out who can afford to be a stay-at-home parent. It is exactly the “kitchen” crap from years gone by but with some populist indirection to avoid calling it that.
