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.
Europe got both, we are still below replacement rate.
Because it’s a natural consequence of high education, lack of benefit for having a lot of kids, and our overall population having gotten too high.
I agree with this except for the bit about the size of the overall population. I can say with a great deal of certainty that most Americans (for example) are not giving a single thought to how many people live in China and India when deciding to have kids or not.
There is a third thing that people often miss in this discussion: legacy. If you own nothing then you have nothing to give to a child. The people who had the most children owned things, particularly land and business. The suburban nuclear families being as large as they were was a cultural artifact from their own parents’ way-of-life, single-income households, and religious beliefs. It will not repeat itself.
With nothing to inherit, little individual hope for the future, a plurality of world leaders intent on pushing us into a world where “you will own nothing and you will be happy”… what did people expect would happen?