UN 2015 report on Japan's birth rate policy attempts: https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/events/pdf... To summarize, they've started policies and measures since 1992-1994 but UN reports and I quote: "Despite these efforts, Japan’s family policy so far appears to have been largely ineffective."
There are other news opinion articles from Japan: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/06/04/editorials/u...
The other kind of trying is when you put vigorous effort into making it easier to have children. Dramatically ramp up childcare support. Strongly enforce anti-discrimination laws, particularly in the case of discrimination against mothers. Forbid employers from requiring more than 40h of work per week under certain (very high) compensation thresholds. Provide direct payments to parents that substantially offset the costs of additional children. Align housing policy with the need for larger dwellings for larger families, but still with decent commutes. Etc.
Where has this been shown to work?
By and large, the nations with more childcare support, more protections for pregnant women, etc have lower birthrates than those that don't.
For example, if we look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d..., then America seems to be the developed country with the highest birth rate despite having little of the social policies you mention.
In fact, based on that chart, it would seem the opposite is true. The less social safety net, the more kids. This makes intuitive sense since if government isn't taking care of you, you'll need children to.
Give poor women education and access to those, and even poorer countries will see similar declines in birth rate.
I think humanity’s growth was dependent on women not having a say in the matter. All the situations I see where women have gained the ability to easily choose whether or not to have kids lead to lower birth rates.
Seeing new role models who had interesting lives, and especially learning that it was possible to withstand pressure from grandparents to have children seemed to be more important than mere availability of contraceptives or education.
IIRC there was a similar effect in Bangladesh, but it was harder to track since TV rolled out more quickly there.
One wrinkle is the gap between how many children women say they want when surveyed (about 2.5 in most western countries) and how many they end up having on average (fewer).
It could be that the surveys are asking the wrong questions, or that for some people they just never get the circumstances they want.
As far as I know that gap has never been conclusively explained. Hypotheses abound, of course.
That's because they also have more public poverty and old-age support; which reduce the incentive for large families as old age and disability “insurance”.
Which on its own is a good thing, but if you want to encourage births anyway, your public support for parenting has to offset the effect that has on incentives to have children, which is a very bif effect. Nations don't do that because they don't think its an important-enough public need to warrant that approach.
We hesitate at being dependent on others or having others help us. In the us, no matter your political side, the idea of finding meaning only through service to others is not only in short supply it's actively demonized.
For now, it's easier to kick the can down the road.
Not...really.
> UN report on Japan's birth rate policy attempts:
And details defects in the specific policies (notably, these defects are, one who is familiar with policies of the type will notice, ways they fall short of the support policies in many European countries that aren't even specifically trying to boost birth rates.)
E.g., a paid family leave policy with low payments and lacking legal force, so many employers haven't actually implemented it.
This is a government making a pro forma show of “doing something” about a problem, not a serious policy effort.
Do you have any examples or even just any precedents how decades of declines and lowest birth rate in the world have been easily and successfully turned around, or this is all just hypothetically probably not hard?
Ethnicity is more memetic than genetic.
> Look at Norway and Sweden, the people in those countries long ago decided their culture was not worth preserving.
Culture isn't transmitted by reproduction but by socialization. Immigration tends to involve socialization; indeed, the usual observation about future generations of immigrant populations aligning to preexisting native low birthrates in the developed world is evidence of either culture transfer (meaning reproduction not key to preserving culture) or that birth rates are a product of material incentives not culture (indicating that reversing low birth rates at need is a matter of changing material incentives, not culture.)
Either way, the low current birth rates = irreversible drive to cultural death claim is inconsistent with the evidence.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/06/why-does-iran-ha...
Can you go into more detail on that? In some respects "demographic suicide" solved with immigration has many (but not all) of the characteristics of colonization, and I think it's a reasonable speculation that colonized and diminished cultures would be unhappy with more than just the coercive aspects of their colonization, and that a non-racist person could have reasonable anxieties about their culture becoming diminished and dying out in the future. Though I suppose racists probably see an opportunity to exploit those anxieties to spread their racist ideology.
A typical example is a two-step argument equating race/biological heritage with culture and/or ethnic identity coupled with appeals to an imperative to preserve culture and/ot ethnic identity.
Something like this:
Honestly that comment doesn't read "racist" to me. Maybe the disconnect is taking "culture" too literally, or using "culture" when one really means "people" (i.e. a combination of culture and ancestry/descent). Also even though an entire culture can technically be transmitted memetically, that's practically not the case except in cases of early childhood adoption. Immigrant populations may tend to take on certain cultural characteristics (e.g. economic and political ones) of the population they get socialized into, but those characteristics may not actually be the ones particular individual cares the most about preserving (e.g. culture in a narrower non-anthropological sense, like religion and and attachment to certain literature).
And even assuming a full memetic replication of a culture, I don't think the last member of a colonized people would be entirely happy that his people went extinct even if some of the colonizers fully took up his culture.
The excellent blog ACOUP has just had a five-part series, "The Queen's Latin", in part describing mass cultural transmission from Rome to various ethnic groups in Europe. TLDR: it helps to have a culture that readily accommodates different religions and other regional variations.
Cultures are not fixed for all time; they change all the time.
So for many of these countries you're asking for a lobotomy.
We're also not great at scaling trust.
"We the people of Rojava in Northern Syria: Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Turkmens, Armenians, Chechens, Circassians, among them Muslims, Christians, Yazidis and various other creeds and sects, declare that the nationalist State has placed Kurdistan, Mesopotamia and Syria at the heart of the chaos that is afflicting the Middle East and has brought acute crises and suffering upon the people. ... The Democratic Federation of Northern Syria is founded on a geographical concept"
(https://www.scribd.com/document/441234886/Social-Contract-of...)
And yes, trust doesn't really scale well, which is why centralized governance in general is a big problem. But there are known techniques to decentralize it in ways that can still scale, e.g. council democracy.
Yes it is. The only first-world nation with replacement birth rates is Israel.
Caucescu famously tried to increase the birthrate and that backfired spectacularly. Sweden tried to do a lot of stuff, still doesn't work. Japan also tried.
Its kind of amazing how often people make judgements based on extrapolating demographic trends over much longer terms than there is any reason to think that they will hold, and then as soon as they fail turn around and do the same thing based on the new demographic trend.
Encouraging births isn't hard if a government decides its important.
OTOH, most of the arguments I’ve seen for it actually being important (in the near term) are the kind where you scratch the surface and underneath is pure racism, so I’m not all that concerned.