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> when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels. I believe what could help here involves all kinds of non-market solutions which are hard to solve, and very not cool at the moment.

There is a huge factor in this which is well-documented to reduce the fertility rate: The first generation to become affluent enough to own property does so and then lobbies for policies that increase home prices. These policies create housing scarcity both for homes and rental units.

That saddles later generations with unreasonably high housing costs and makes them unable to afford to start a family, so the fertility rate drops. If you want more kids, build more housing.

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consumer451 5 days ago | parent [-]

As mentioned in this other comment [0], I find this to be one of the most interesting problems of our time.

> There is a huge factor in this which is well-documented to reduce the fertility rate:

If you have a moment, would you mind pointing me to this documentation? It sounds very correct to me, but I would love to have the receipts when I quote you in the future.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43699799

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AnthonyMouse 5 days ago | parent [-]

There are numerous studies showing that higher housing costs reduce the fertility rate, e.g.: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2024.102572

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consumer451 5 days ago | parent [-]

Thank you. This is excellent. I am really curious how we fix this in the future.

	▲	monknomo 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		My crank idea to fix both of the issues you mention is mandatory national service. This would provide everyone a common ground, similar to how widespread military service in wwii did. It would promote civic virtue by exposing everyone to how they personally can make the government useful. And it could be made such that we have our national service corp just build useful things, like houses. Additionally we could provide similar benefits to folks that go through national service as the military - healthcare, payment for college, etc.
	▲	adgjlsfhk1 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		one possible answer is removing property taxes and replacing them with land value taxes. property taxes dicensentivize development while land value taxes incentive it.