“Notably, Chang’s report claims that biological females develop earlier than males do, so requiring girls to enter school at younger ages will create classes in which the two sexes are of more equal maturity as they age. This, the author posits, makes it more likely that those classmates will be attracted to each other, and marry and have children further down the line.”
(…)
“The report does not include evidence of any correlation between female students’ early enrollment and the success rate of their romantic relationships with men. The author also does not detail specific mechanisms by which his proposed policy would increase romantic attraction or birthrates.”
“We’ve got a birthrate crisis, maybe we should make it so a single income of someone working 40 hours a week can support a family of 4?”
“… Or we could explore literally every other option no matter how ridiculous and not do anything which would impact corporate profits even a single penny.”
Any sensible country will think about providing more incentives to women & couples to have more children and fix financial stressors that’s scaring people away from parenthood.
But no let’s try some nutjob theories 😂
Actual answer: stop overworking your fucking population.
Won’t fix it, unless women want to stop working and stay at home, couples aren’t having more kids.
The solution is better population distribution, we’ve got overpopulated countries and countries where the birthrate isn’t high enough, no need to be a genius to get it.
Edit: Thanks for the downvotes, how about you propose an actual realistic solution? It’s not 1850 anymore, people have goals other than making sure their family name lives on, no matter how easy you make it to have kids, more and more people just don’t want to have them because it’s socially acceptable and they don’t want the burden. What then? Let the population go down until the average age is over 70? There’s not a single birth policy that respects people’s freedom of choice that has achieved the objective of making the local population have its birthrate go back over 2.1, none.
How does that fix anything? You keep some parts of the world as human breeding mills and send them to the places where quality of work/life balance is so bad that they can’t have kids there either?
No, at some point the human population won’t be able to increase forever and as conditions are improving in poorer nations their birthrate is decreasing, I’m just pointing out the obvious, immigration is the solution to birthrate problems in some parts of the world and it’s the solution to overpopulation in other parts.
Heck, that’s exactly what multicultural countries are doing, it’s an issue with Asian countries that refuse to welcome people of other cultures.
Raise the price of labor to the point that a working family can afford to have children at the standard they consider socially acceptable.
That would devalue investment accounts though, so it won’t happen until there is suffering on a scale not seen outside of major wars.
It won’t make people have enough kids to renew the population though otherwise birthrate would have been higher than it was in the 70s and 80s
Give women AND men the opportunity and means to stay at home for childcare and stop putting the burden solely on the women might actually help.
But I guess treating women like actual people and with equity is way too much to expect.
South Korea has a huge misogyny problem to the point where young women choose celibacy and staying single over marriage and family to escape their bad situation under the current patriarchy. They actively choosing not to have children, because men treat them like shit.
Data shows it’s not the case otherwise rich people would have way more kids instead of being poor people that have the higher fertility rate.
Also birth rate goes down with improvement to women rights, not up. If there was less misogyny in South Korea people wouldn’t have more kids than they do at the moment.
You think the world wasn’t misogynistic when people were having 10+ kids in the 18th and 19th century?
Rebalancing is only a temporary solution. Birthdate in developing countries is also dropping: they may still be in the “good” part of the stop, but there’s no reason to expect it won’t keep dropping. Predictions vary widely but in about half a century, the overall population will start dropping, regardless whether you rebalance.
The thing that really hasn’t been tried is to value parenthood, value children. Sure, we may culturally and may even give a few incentives, but it has always been a huge burden on parents. Very few countries with the possible exception of a couple Scandinavian ones, do much to help make this easier
US is particularly bad at this
- parental leave is minimal
- healthcare is expensive
- childcare is even more expensive
- many jobs don’t give flexibility to take care of kids (especially since schools insist on you going there during their business day)
- pre-school is mostly not public, expensive
- college is extremely expensive
- housing is extremely expensive, especially trying to fit more people
- if a child has special needs, now all of these are even more expensive, and may be needed for their entire life
I’ve read estimates that parents spend on average $250,000 to raise a kid, and that’s an old number so I don’t see how it’s anywhere near that low. Who can afford that?
And that’s not counting the work, the attention, the hardship of raising kids. I always wanted kids and regret not having more than 2, but raising them is neither easy nor cheap, and society does very little to help
How come Scandinavian countries don’t have a higher birthrate then?
How come you can see birthrate fall at an alarming rate the second birth control becomes easily available even in the 60s when traditional families were still the norm?
How come millionaires don’t have bigger families than poor people if they don’t have the financial burden or the need for both parents to work?
Valuing children also means educating them and you know what happens the more people are educated? That’s right, birthrate drops.
The truth is, we’re not going back to numbers over 2.1 unless we take away women’s freedom and I’m sure no one with half a brain wants that.
South Korea, are you ok?
check the authors’ browser history
This idea is a complete non-starter from a practical standpoint. Parents would complain about it either way. Either they wouldn’t want girls in school early or they’d want boys in school early, too.
It’s just much easier to treat children all the same.
Also, I personally think this plan would backfire. Girls graduating wouldn’t want to have to be adults earlier than boys, so they’d stay in school longer. And from what I’ve heard, the most reliable way to reduce birth rates is to educate women more.
I think everyone also knows how to ethically increase the birth rate. Make having children easy and affordable. Lots of government assistance. Make sure everybody has access to cheap or free childcare.
And there’s also the generational problems. Young adults can see the problems that the previous generations caused. You can’t go back in time to fix those. It will be expensive to change this sort of thing.
But quick fixes aren’t going to change the underlying problems.
The best way to increase birth rates in advanced countries is: Work life balance. Restore the traditional tax rates on the rich.
Work life balance meaning one parent can stay home and raise the children without needing that second income to put food on the table.
If both parents work, the birth rate is always going to be lower, even with better work life balance.
For real man. We were so overworked when both of us had a full time job and no kids. Now we have one kid and one full time job. It is easier, hard in another way but somehow easier. Soon I’ll have to go back to work and I don’t even know how we will survive. We would love to have another kid but we either can’t afford it or we will go insane trying to afford it.
The other part is that stupid part time career pit. Ideally we would both work half jobs, but this will mean none of us can have a well paid job (per hour). But this also means that if my husband is laid off while I am at home, were fucked. Job security is a huge factor in work life balance.
But also, we are the “risky” ones. Most of my friends from school wanted to wait until they are “settled” financially. I don’t have one mom friend from school/university. They are either still settling in their careers or have given up on feeling settled and now have fertility issues.
Just for context, our kid arrived shortly before I turned 30. My friends are in their 30s and 40s. None of them is really “financially secure” since job security is just not a thing anymore.
Not just work life balance, but also the cost of living. I can barely afford to take care of myself, so I’m completely disinclined to go and create a whole new person that will be absolutely dependent on me to provide for it for years. If people can afford to live reasonably comfortably and conditions give them confidence that conditions will remain stable for the next 10-20 years, I bet you’ll see them start having kids. When they’re worried they could be homeless next year if things worsen and their retirement plan is advocating for the right to end one’s life on their own terms, it shouldn’t be a shocker that people don’t want to add kids into the mix.
Also, perhaps decades of social stigma that said having a bunch of kids is something only poor, ignorant people do that represents a moral failing amongst the upstanding daughters of decent society is a bad thing to maintain when you want folks to keep cranking out more kids to feed into the meat grinder of the workforce.
Why has birthrate been lower than 2 in most developed countries starting in the 60s/70s even if there were social programs and people were able to afford to have a family with a single salary?
Maybe people who don’t have access to birth control have accidents and they need to deal with the consequences and in fact, when given the choice, people don’t have enough kids to renew the population? Crazy, right?
Really, there’s nothing specifically wrong with having a low birth rate. On a large scale, we have an overpopulation problem, and there’s not really a negative for each person having fewer children. Of course, smarter people will decide to have fewer kids. But eventually, it will all balance out.
