You can’t even pay people to have more kids
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.
As someone who doesn't have and never wanted kids, I'd hate this but...
If a country really wants a sustainable birth rate, it needs to make it painful to not be a parent. Already, non-parents have to pay for public schools they'll never use, and so-on. But, that's a minor expense compared to raising a kid. A country that made it a true priority to keep the population up could do so much more.
Jobs could be required to give 3 weeks additional vacation to parents every year so they could spend it with their children, while non-parents didn't get that time. Taxes could be significantly higher for non-parents vs. parents. Workplaces could get tax breaks based on the number of parents they employ. There could be tax incentives for workplaces that hire new parents. Retirement benefits could be based on the number of kids you raised, capping out at max benefits for 3 kids.
Of course, if any modern country tried that, a lot of people who never want kids would emigrate. But, if you ran an authoritarian country like China or North Korea and could control immigration, you'd definitely get people opting into having kids instead of enjoying a child-free life.
Alternatively, you're paying for the schooling that you did use so that the people following you still have the same access you did. Whether you spawned them or not is irrelevant, unless you plan to just close the door behind you.
Also (in theory) paying to educate those that will be voting for your government. And like, a thousand other reasons. Public school is good for society regardless of if you have kids
I wanted to be succinct, but yeah, it's not like most people want to live in a society filled with the severely undereducated. A rising tide lifts all ships and whatnot.
Great point.
You don't need to penalize the non-parents to entice people to have kids.
But it needs incredible systemic change to do that. The first one would be climate change policies and programs that will at the minimum stop the current trajectory we are in, and at best reverse it.
Second, we need to reign in the extremely greedy corps and make them pay their fair share. In a not so distant past, when the economy wasn't doing well, companies would cut their profits before raising prices. Today, this is practically unheard of. The margins must be kept at all cost, the rest be damned.
Third, create decent safety nets. Right now, our social policies are eroding pretty much everywhere. Some countries more than the others.
Then, we can start thinking about policies that favor the patents.
We have enough resources and technologies to solve all of our problems, but since society is lead by greedy conmans in the pocket of corporations, until that changes, people won't be comfortable having kids.
Maybe, maybe not. In the past there were enough people who wanted to have kids that if you just made it easy, they'd do it. But, it could be that the modern world is different enough that you really do need to incentivize people to become parents and even punish them if they don't. Especially in a place like South Korea, it sounds like it's going to be very hard to convince anybody that they should become parents.
Extremely greedy corps are run by people, and their profits flow to people. It's really not about corporations, it's about people.
Society is led by rich people who own corporations or massive amounts of shares in corporations. Again, corporations aren't the problem, it's people.
The current system is controlled by a handful of people. The vast majority of the people only try to survive in the current system. It is extremely hard to take a risk and go against the grain because if you fail against people with lots of resources, you are destitute.
It is not the person on the floor that tries to survive that is responsible for the decision of the corporation and ultimately the damage that it does. It's easy to say that they should stick to their convictions, but the threat of starvation and homelessness is an extremely dissuasive.
So I disagree, corporations are the problem because they cannot be separated from the handful of C-suites controlling them.
Corporations are largely controlled by their shareholders. In many cases, Blackrock, State Street or Vanguard control those shares on behalf of their investors. They're the ones who control who is on the boards, and the boards control who is in the C-suites.
The reason that so many corporations focus on maximizing profits over everything else is that it's what's demanded by the boards, who are appointed by the shareholders, who are largely represented by Blackrock, State Street and Vanguard. Any human impulse to have a company care about the environment or about its employees is basically nullified by this process where the institutional investors only want the key numbers to go up. In some cases the shares are owned by pension funds who represent teachers who care a lot about the world, enough that they take a relatively low paying job that requires a lot of work. But, those teachers want to be able to retire some day, and so they want their pensions to grow big, so they want the companies in those pensions to make profits. By the time an individual kindergarten teacher's desires filter up from herself to her union to her pension to the institutional investor to the board to the CEO, the only message that gets through is "more profits". Alongside those teachers are a lot of very rich people who treat money like a high score, and just want the number to go up.
It's true that a lot of people in C-suites lack empathy. But, they're kept in place by boards who are appointed by huge institutional investment firms who represent shareholders who care only about profit. But, also, the current system doesn't really allow for messages other than "more profits" to filter through to these companies.
The corporation isn't a sentient creature, it's just a group of people, and those people respond to the stimulus that comes from their owners. The only real message getting through is "more profits", so that's the focus of the corporations.
If they are publically-traded, they have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to "maximize profit". They have no responsibility to "make the world a better place".
That's (only one reason) why corporations suck.
Ah so let's have people having kids stuffing them in the basement just to get benefits like foster parents do now. Lol nah kids should not be used to get free shit and having kids should not get yoy free shit.