Nations and companies try "financial incentives" for a bunch of fun stuff. It simply cannot be trusted.

Let's look at Hungary: loans unless you have 3 (!) children, maybe some housing subsidies that require you to match them with a huge chunk of your own money. Small wonder why that didn't motivate many people.

The problem is a country does not want to incentivize producing kids, that would be simple. Pay people $100k per child, and you’ll have a ton of children.

What countries do want is to incentivize production of properly raised, well mannered, productive children. And the type of person incentivized by a lot of cash to have a kid is probably not going to be the one to do that.

Never in the history of humanity has it been easy to have children. And there was never a government subsidy for it. You were never guaranteed that your kids would thrive. Not sure why it’s suddenly different.

I think the bigger change is: I don’t want my quality of life to go down one bit when I have a kid!