The baby gap: why governments can’t pay their way to higher birth rates. Governments offer a catalogue of creative incentives for childbearing — yet fertility rates just keep dropping

>Politicians in Lestijärvi thought they had the answer to Finland’s demographic woes: each mother of a newborn baby would receive €1,000 a year for 10 years if they stayed in the Nordic country’s second-smallest municipality.

>“It wasn’t worth doing at all,” said Niko Aihio, the town’s former head of education. “The baby boom only lasted one year.”

>Policymakers around the world are grappling with the same problems as those in Lestijärvi: no matter what they seem to offer in the way of incentives, people are not having more babies. For the Finnish municipality it failed even to lure people from elsewhere: “It didn’t stop people moving away, and it didn’t attract new families,” Aihio said.

>China has offered free fertility treatments, Hungary big tax exemptions and cash, and Singapore grants for parents and grandparents. A Danish travel company even ran an ad campaign to “Do it for Denmark”. In Japan, the state funds AI-powered matchmaking, while Tokyo’s metropolitan government is offering a four-day working week to staff in an attempt to encourage people to become parents.

>Governments are still hunting for policy options to counter a looming economic crisis as older populations expand and the pool of workers shrinks. It is a shift that think-tank the Robert Schuman Foundation has called “demographic suicide”.

>The reasons for the trend have been fiercely debated, while some potential solutions, such as immigration and pushing people to retire later, have proved deeply politically unpalatable.

>The decline in birth rates is a peculiarly universal problem — no continent has been left unscathed by the trend. Two-thirds of the world’s population now lives in countries where people are having babies at a rate too low to replace their population.

This article is paywalled. However in response to the title, the clear answer is that they either haven’t tried or their efforts were akin to a pizza party.

I think that substack of local governance being at a higher  standard equalling better ability to raise kids is a telling point for how the government can get more people to have kids 

This might seem counter intuitive, but beat your boys. That’s right, make them violent. That in turn increases testosterone which improves fertility. We are a violent animal. either we embrace it or we lose.

It mostly has to do with people being too self involved and distracted to care for another person these days. Sad because it is one of the greatest things a human can experience.

I think a lot of this has a lot to do with lack of knowledge. If people had these forms filled out for them like a Social Security number I don’t think people would have an issue

In Europe, the countries with the most robust support for parents and children (France, the Nordics) have higher birth rates than those with the least support (Italy, Spain). It seems to me that spending money *efficiently and effectively* on children gets you more children.

Now, it’s not the whole story. The birth rate still declined in places where there is robust support for families. But the situation is much worse for societies who fail to support families.

The current administration keeps giving us every reason not to bring a child into this world.

I mean, they **can**. It’s just that none of the options thus far put forward do more than scratch the economic cost of both child-bearing and child-rearing (including career impacts).

So governments are basically asking people to pretty please have children, we promise we’ll cover 1% of the cost (if administrations don’t change). Unless you’re already 99% of the way confident you can economically raise a child, that policy won’t change anything for you.

To be clear, the full cost of raising a child (beyond the absolute bare minimum of keeping the child alive) can easily run to little under half a million. This still doesn’t account for the career and opportunity cost, so this should be understood to still not be enough.

So assuming half a million per “subsidized human”, and assuming some inefficiency from the administration of all this, a nation like, say, South Korea could probably counter their estimated loss of ~15 million people by 2072 at a cost of 8-ish trillion, or 200 billion a year, or some 10% of the country’s GDP.

Something tells me they aren’t gonna do that.

Outside of being an interesting case to look at the maths (because it’s particularly bad) South Korea is one of few nations where this won’t work, because the desired number of children per woman is also below replacement level. Only a cultural or socioeconomic change can get that polity out of a death spiral, these policies can only slow it down.

Throw billionaire lunatics in our face that makes vaporware and Nazism while completely screwing us out of basic food shelter and medical.

You know the solution. Grow some balls.

My sister in-law is an elementary school teacher. She quit her job to raise their two kids because her entire salary was going to daycare.

“The reason is probably late stage capitalism!”

“Yes, but no, that’s not allowed to be the reason!”

“But… but… that’s the reason!”

“Okay, look, we just want to complain, we don’t actually want things to improve, OKAY??”

Society has become fully commodified. Even our free time is controlled, groomed, packaged, sold. I always struggle to suggest activities to people that don’t cost money- there are few, and we’re losing our ability to enjoy them.

This existence has become precarious, when we are more productive than ever, yet have little free time to pursue interests or hobbies. Disposable income is drying up, leaving less money available to court, date, have privacy to fornicate, and procreate. While social media divides us by espousing platonic ideals as reality to seek in a partner.

We’re so fucking cooked and that’s probably a good thing. This world sustained humans in balance with nature for a long time with population levels much lower than they currently are.

The only reason birthrate is a topic of conversation is because the powers that be want to exploit more people, not less, and the knock-on effects of lower population might topple their house of cards. Humans will endure, humanity, possibly not.

Until people can return to single income households having large families doesn’t even begin to make sense.

Finland paying €1,000/yr for 10yrs for a woman to have a child is a spit in the bucket relative to the expense of having children. Because the majority of families require 2 incomes you’re having children for other people to care for them, at great expense.

For birth rates to go up we need.

Single income affordable shelter

Single income affordable transportation

accessible, reliable, healthcare

robust education and childcare availability

abundant 3rd spaces for people to congregate

If people are relaxed they’ll have more sex, they’ll be willing to take on the challenges of being a parent, and their kids will have things to do to allow for more sex.

For me (a late-20s male who still wants to have kids someday) it comes down to: not being able to maintain stable gainful employment, mortgages costing 3k-4k/month (on the low end), impending climate catastrophe, government corruption/disfunction/erasure of basic rights. I want to have kids, but I am scared that I won’t be able to protect them and give them a good life. How the hell am I supposed to fill them with optimism and hope for their own future when I am trying, struggling, and generally failing to do the same for myself?

Crazy idea: Have a society people want to live in, and the rest sorts itself out

Support the middle class so that people feel like they can succeed, own a home and raise a family with only one parent working like they could in the 50s?

Politicians don’t know how to handle this problem because the solutions are making the cost of living cheaper and also restructuring our work/life balance (especially for women). Don’t want to do that? Fine, you get no babies.,

Life’s tough enough as it is without having to worry about feeding another mouth and teaching that mouth between right and wrong and trigonometry. I don’t want a kid, but if I was rich I would consider it.

If life was easier, more people would have kids, simple as that.