I think they're still relevant but in a different way. Upper-class parents have higher expectations for the amount of extracurricular education and activities their children are going to do and it's infeasible for them to do that with many.

"Able to have kids" isn't the only economic factor. "Incentivized to have kids" is another.

Kids used to be cheap labor plus a retirement package. Now they are an expensive hobby. With privatized costs and socialized benefits (or, if you prefer, benefits that get sucked to the top of the social pyramid), kid production stopped making sense for kid producers and we are seeing a supply shortfall. If we fix the incentives we can fix the supply shortfall. Even a partial fix is probably sufficient -- people enjoy having kids, they just need the personal economic consequences to be less of a flaming trainwreck.

I can't even pay for my own food now, let alone for kids.

The social safety net will cover that. SNAP, WIC, CHIP, Medicaid, school, are all covered. All you need is subsidized housing and to know where the different charities are that have free food and clothing.

If you look at the link I previously posted, the under $10k a year group have the highest birthrate. So it can be done.

Hmm, sounds like forbidding pensions would fix that (make older people rely on their kids).

Cheap labor is no more, especially in the age of highly specialized jobs requiring education (manual labor is greatly automated now, especially in agriculture, compared to 100 years ago).

How else would we incentivise it? Money payouts on birth don't work -- only poor people would make good use of it, middle class would see the payouts too small for them anyway.

Depends on the payout. I’m decidedly middle class, as are practically all my friends, my large family would probably qualify as „rich“, but I and everyone I know are still weary of the financial burden of having kids. Although my personal theory is that it is not so much the cost, but the lost income potential and career opportunities for women that keeps people from having (more) kids.

> Hmm, sounds like forbidding pensions would fix that (make older people rely on their kids).

Then instead of having kids people will work on saving money for the old age.

Again speaking for the devil, historically it was solved by inability to reliably save money.

'"Able to have kids" isn't the only economic factor. "Incentivized to have kids" is another.

...

people enjoy having kids, they just need the personal economic consequences to be less of a flaming trainwreck.'

You start out saying one thing and end up saying something different.

The point is, even when people have the money, they don't want kids, or at least not very many. If people truly want kids, then they are already incentivized and just need to be able to.

Parents already get tax breaks for kids. Primary and secondary education costs are mostly covered via taxes, whether one has kids or not. So there are already economic incentives, they just aren't a net benefit to the parents. I don't believe making them a net benefit is the right course of action since that has potential problems as well.