Study in Brazil found that housing access lead to 33% higher birth rates among 20-25 year olds: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5046571 . Housing affordability is probably a big factor.

Shrinking populations should make housing very affordable

somehow, it doesn't work that way. For example, Latvia lost 30% of its population but housing didn't get cheaper.

yup, and we just lost 10,000 homes in California. We will be losing housing every year. Where I live they just build mansions.

We don't want to wait until we're in freefall to correct the decline.

There will never be a free fall. You guys are watching too many dystopic movies.

We don't know if there will be a free fall, that's the most central tenet of this issue. You are living in wishful thinking, it's uncharted territory, there is no "knowns" to base your statement on.

Even if one tries to apply first principles it's not something that can be derived easily to hold your statement as fact.

I wonder if people on Easter Island were telling each other this.

Maybe if they were more open to immigration culturally, a lot of people would happily integrate to their society.

There aren't enough babies worldwide -- TFR is rapidly falling even in poor countries. Immigrating our way out of it doesn't scale to the world.

Immigration won’t save us.

The birth rate is declining faster than expected across the whole world. There aren’t going to be enough young migrants to go around and keep pumping up the numbers.

Immigration is just a band aid. It won't make Japanese people have more babies.

i don't have the numbers, but i started seeing Indian clerks at 7-11 there. never seen them when i lived there a couple decades ago

Free day care is amazing. If that doesn’t make a dent then I am not sure what will.

Probably free daycare and relaxing immigration would be best to increase population

> Free day care is amazing. If that doesn’t make a dent then I am not sure what will.

France has a subsidy program for kids. It's not helping much. Current fertility rate is 1.85 (2.1 is breakeven).

The only thing that seems to work is a religion that keeps women home pumping out babies and taking care of them. Islam and Haredi Judaism do that. There's a Christian "quiverfull" movement in the US, but it's not big enough to matter.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiverfull

1.85 is actually the highest in Western Europe and higher than Canada and USA.

But we had 2.1 not so long ago.

The issue is non-market housing used to be roughly 30% of the renting market, applying downward pressure on rent prices and thus, house prices. It's now less than 20%, with 95% being 'HLMs' (and a big part of those were from 'loi Pinel' that ended this year). We need to get back to a high percentage of non-market housing.

My father used to be the co-director of a 'chantier d'insertion' where he was teaching basic woodworking/painting/construction/DYI and also artistic skills to people (mostly men) outside of the workforce (from the 16yo dropout to the 54yo ex-farmer), and they did own a few buildings they restored, to help house everyone (they also had people teaching mechanics, electric, plumbing, gardening btw). The local city council changed it's political side, the initiative was shut down and the non-market houses bidded on. The GDP of our city that year probably skyrocketed.

PS: not on the subject: he still had time to clean up an ex-slaughterhouse with his guys, and organize an art exposition inside, with 'mort aux vaches' tagged outside with blood-looking paint, which, considering the new mayor was from a military family, had a not subtle double meaning.

Poland has 0 (zero) tax up to 50k$ per household for families with 4 kids. And there many other benefits afaik. And it is a highly religious country. It's fertility rate is 1.4-1.5.

Industrialized and highly educated populations will not go back to 2.1 and higher, it just doesn't work like that in the current social environment.

Able to live on one salary comfortably?

it's just a form of subsidy, $500-$2000/month worth depending on where

paid for by the people who don't have kids

not very different than just giving out cash or tax credits

Just like pensions, that are from the people that have invested in kids to those that didn’t.

maybe? how is this relevant. My point is this is not very different from what other countries are doing with cash subsidies or tax credits, perhaps with a PR angle of a human touch of a "free daycare". Worth trying of course, who knows what ends up working, so far nothing has worked. But looks pretty bleak. South Korea, one of the richest nations, no excuse for lack of money, plummeting to 0.72 in peaceful, non-Black-Death times. Something is majorly off.

I think relaxing immigration for more women immigrants to provide childcare would be fine with most Anericans.

Soviet Union's birth rate did not really rebound the way other nations did even provided the award. Granted, immediately after WW2 there was a large boost which is when this award program started, but fell to just above replacement soon after. I would not draw too much on this social standing/admiration aspect.

Funnily enough, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Heroine was reinstated in 2022. Russia's current birthrate is ~1.5. Ukraine has something similar as well, they're doing quite poorly, even before their war at ~1.3.

My radical take on all this birthrate stuff is that the single most effective way to boost the birthrate is to entice boredom in any way you can. The internet was a great invention, but the great cost was our attention. It's likely out of the bag that we can't revert to a minimally networked world though. I would (and do) certainly fight against attempts to ruin the internet myself.