These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
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If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.
In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.
Hmmm I’d like to stay at home and I’m the man. We both earn about the same, she earns more. I don’t trust daycare workers. You optimize for what you value, if you value economics you’re simply not going to optimize for what’s best for the child. Because at all the cross roads where the biological needs or psychological needs conflict the economical value you’ll not be making those choices.
At a coarse level, children from families with more money are better off so I disagree. Daycare is a small part of a child’s life. Really 3-4 years out of 18 and of those, only 9-5 at that. In exchange, you afford a nicer, safer town with better schools. If your family chooses a stay-at-home parent, you won’t afford those places when competing against dual income families.
And that seems like a correction that needs to happen.
I think of this daycare idea like public school, you ever notice the high income rich areas have a good public school system whereas the low income don’t?
If you’re on the whole okay with a certain percent of kids failing then on the coarse level it does seem like a good idea.
Sure, but people wanting families are facing these decisions right now. They don’t want to wait for society to get its head screwed on straight. The root comment was “stay at home parents! no more daycare!” but sailed right over all the macro and micro consequences of that.