There's an argument that I think is basically correct that governments are largely free-riding on people's inherent desire for children. This is to say that the value to a government of an additional child is substantially above the incentive they offer the parents of that child.

And I think this is because we sort of have this assumption that society having more kids is a thing we don't have to incentivize, and so we haven't really thought about what is the actual cost/value of that incentivization.

I'd point to the biggest change being the destruction of extended family living in developed countries, and consequently shifting child care costs directly onto working age parents.

Historically, countries got it both ways:

- Working age parents contributed the bulk of their time to the economy (historically: male, more recently: both)

- Older family members, especially grandparents, contributed free child care

Now, geographic mobility and preference have decreased the rate at which grandparents are co-located and available. And, critically, having children later in life has decreased the number of years grandparents are able to help.

If governments provided a net-zero cost, high-quality option for childcare, I feel like it'd substantially change potential family decisions.

But that's one of the substantially-more-expensive-than-current-benefits options you're talking about.

Yeah. When my son was born I realized the geographic separation of the extended family in space is clearly unnatural. I don’t mean that in a moralizing way, just that it’s like walking on your hands rather than on your feet. Doable! You could get used to it! But it’s a hell of a lot harder than the alternative.

Throughout history childless people faced high risk of destitution in old age. That’s no longer true in most developed countries, and I don’t think anybody would want that to be changed.

> and I don’t think anybody would want that to be changed.

There are only 4 choices for developed countries:

1. be destitute in the old age - no one likes it

2. have children and prepare the next generation - barely happening

3. mass immigration - that changes culture and your native population may not like it. See: Italy (Meloni), France (Le Pen), UK (Brexit & immigrants), Sweden...

4. count on technology (AI, Robots) to take care of elders - it just seems dystopian if the youngest person in one's town is 17yo. Kind of like "Children of Men".

Mass immigration is becoming a zero-sum game. Japan's immigrants mostly come from China and Vietnam -- both of which countries have sub-replacement fertility themselves. Quite catastrophically so in China's case.

Now in mid-2023, the only countries with above replacement fertility are not "modern" societies in any sense of the word. e.g., even Bangladesh is now sub-replacement. Mass immigration from places with still-above-replacement fertility into countries like Japan and the UK is a recipe for disaster.

So #2 isn't happening, and #3 should be disfavored on ethical grounds. (Robbing Peter to pay Paul is at best ethically neutral; importing a natural underclass is to everybody's detriment and can only result in upheaval.)

#4 is the best option on the table.

Of course, there are additional ways by which the decline might be managed. Obviously pension and retirement schemes will need to be recalibrated, and older folks should be encouraged to move from the decaying periphery into large regional hubs where they can take advantage of support and medical services.

Historically, for most of the population in the majority of situations, children were an inexpensive asset, but things have changed. Raising children nowadays is outrageously expensive, and even owning a house that's an item of basic financial security for a family is already out of reach for a lot of people.

So the direct incentives that you claim that have never existed were there all the time, having a family with kids were the natural and expected thing to do. It used to go good and easy, but now all the economic incetives go against it.

I don't like to keep bringing back the old and tired trope of how the boomer discourse and worldview are completely out of touch with the reality, but when it comes to the debate about demographics it's completely impossible not to.

I am quite certain that there's no easy way for governments to raise TFR. Hungary and S.Korea have tried, with relatively generous grants and incentives for parents, but the results are at best equivocal in Hungary's case and null in S.Korea's. What they're doing clearly isn't working.

So there are two options left on the table, which are bad but not utterly unreasonable:

1. Huge cash payouts for parents of children coupled with extremely generous incentives, both far beyond anything offered today. e.g., a $100k to $200k grant per child upon birth, with all hospital fees associated with childbirth covered by the state, free access to government childcare, and extremely generous tax credits for parents.

This might result in the wrong "sort of people" giving birth to many children... but at this point it's the one thing that hasn't been tried, it would resolve the concerns you mention in your post in a totally general sense, and it could also be a way to raise underclasses from poverty.

2. Manage the decline by investing in industries that can support an aging population, in programs that aim to pull people from decaying small towns into regional hubs, and by renormalizing retirement and pension schemes.

If there's a third way that isn't crazy -- which is to say bad _and_ unreasonable -- I'd like to hear it. (Examples of crazy ideas might include buying newborns from parents and raising them in government institutions, breeding children in artificial wombs, totally unfettered mass-immigration schemes, etc.)

3. Get rid of the aspects of capitalism which make it too difficult to have kids.

It isn't crazy. The system we have now is crazy. The fact that we're mentioning artificial wombs instead of destroying capitalism is worrying.

But what are those aspects, exactly? And would getting rid of them not result in a system that's alien to modern sensibilities in developed countries?

To a certain extent, it seems to me that very generous benefits for parents -- _or_ a total restructuring of retirement and pension plans, with the reinvestment of some of the gains in pro-natal policies -- is "getting rid of the aspects of capitalism which make it too difficult to have kids." Or at least side-stepping those aspects. And these policies should be not impossible to implement. "Destroying capitalism" on the other hand...

> But what are those aspects, exactly?

If I was to encapsulate it in one word: pressure. Or insecurity. Pressure to work, pressure to make "sound" financial decisions, of which committing to a dependent is not "sound".

I'd say it's closely related: Force, the threat of force.

There should be options available to do nothing. We have private companies extracting "stuff" from the ground and privatizing the resulting profits. This is crazy. We throw out something like 1/2 of all food, which on average comes from hundreds of miles away so that food costs money, which if you don't have you starve.

We subsidize farms, the military, all kinds of things - but we privatize the profits.

There should be no threat of homelessness or starvation in our system. You want more than baseline, you have to work and compete. But we spend all this money to prop up this shitty system, I do not understand it.

> children were an inexpensive asset ... Raising children nowadays is outrageously expensive,

not only that but earlier, your kids mainly benefited yourself as your social safety net when your grew old. Now, your kids generally benefit the whole society. So the cost of kids has gone up and is privatized, while the benefits are socialized. No wonder people are opting out of having kids.

> And of course it’s strictly not true that direct incentives have been required throughout history

Have people forgotten that effective contraception is basically (with a few exceptions) a 20th century thing? I don't think HN really understands the sexual revolution at all.

The relevance of this claim being that people primarily had children as a byproduct of wanting to have sex, versus a desire to procreate?

Contraception shouldn’t change the number of people who intend to procreate.

> people primarily had children as a byproduct of wanting to have sex

Yes? Again, this is so obvious I'm surprised to write it out.

> Contraception shouldn’t change the number of people who intend to procreate.

And yet it clearly did, largely by giving people the option to not procreate without having to remain forever unmarried and a low-status part of their father's household.

It's also preconditioned on education for women, both in learning the mechanics and choices involved in procreation and giving them some economic options other than that.

None of this is new or surprising; it's been deliberate policy for years! Here's a discussion of the successful reduction in fertility in Bangladesh, for example https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17441730.2022.2...