It's even worse when you look at the studies of child outcomes based on if their mother stayed with them during their childhood vs working/daycare.

It is without doubt beneficial for children to have their mother with them in early childhood. This work over all else society is harming the next generation and ripping new mothers away from their babies a few weeks/months after birth.

> I think small scale entrepreneurship might be a solution to the current corp craziness.

That would mean breaking up big tech and prohibiting firms above a certain size from buying competitors.

Otherwise, there're huge swaths of the economy that used to be accessible to entrepreneurs that now aren't economically viable (without an attached unrelated business pumping in cash).

in at least some european companies, contacting employees during off hours is already illegal.

what we need is better protection for employees, and especially for parents.

in my vision childcare times are counted towards pension times. stay at home times are required to be taken by both parents equally, so that their careers are affected equally and there is no question on who has to throttle their career because it's both.

that still leaves a career difference between those who have children and those who don't. not sure what to do about that other than serious tax benefits for every child. in germany you get 250euro per month per child in cash until the child is grown up. unconditionally. that's a start, but may not be enough. somehow the income difference needs to be made up. not having children should simply not have benefits in terms of income and career.

just throwing out ideas here: how about preferential hiring for parents? but that's difficult to enforce. same goes for promotion.

actually, with automation taking over jobs maybe the simplest solution to equalize career chances is to reduce everyones working hours. if working time is limited to 20 or at the most 30 hours per week, then childless people get more free time, but parents get more time for their children without having to throttle their careers.

Could you share, if only for reference and comparison, where you live? I'm assuming, because of the missing work/life balance, that you live in the US?

It always seemed crazy to me that there still are societies and countries out there not offering more support to new parents, and even existing parents. It's literally what makes the country survive long-term, and without new children, you'll obviously end up in stagnation. So why not make it really easy and worry-free?

TFR of my town of million people with $3k percapita income is 1.5

i think you guys might be overestimating how much income generation is needed. govt employees live fine.

Doesn't explain countries like Japan, China, SK where drug use is extremely low and incarceration rates are far lower. Still no babies.

I find it really hard to buy that this is the reason people have 0 kids. Less sure, but if youre worried about cost youll just have 1 instead of 2 or 3. Seems to me that some people are just less interested in having kids now because theyd rather do other stuff.

Say what you will about Hungary but I think it came up with some great incentives for future parents: income tax cuts. If you have 4 kids you don't pay income tax for life.

> and people will start having many more kids again.

This has been my assumption, but now I question it. See

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1644264/

In this experiment, a mouse population grew quickly, then at high population density started falling quickly. But rather than recovering when the population decreased, it continued to fall until it was wiped out, in the presence of plentiful resources.

This keeps me up at night. Please someone tell me why it doesn't apply to us.

We already have an abundance of natural resources (at least... for the developed countries) The problem is that they aren't evenly distributed enough, to the extent that a lower population cannot counter the increasing wealth inequality.

By that point you would need an ubsurd amount of kids per family to recover the birth rates, also mentioning that your checks are paying for a growing elderly population and it becomes nearly impossible to recover.

Eventually the population will fall low enough that it can no longer support a society complex enough to produce birth control pills. At that point, people will start having kids again.

I don't believe that low birth rates have anything to do with "natural resources". That seems like a crank argument to me.

Overwhelmingly, across different societies, with different efforts to tweak variables, the result is that pregnancy and childbirth are risky and unpleasant enough that the average woman, given the choice, doesn't want to do it twice.

Fertility used to be higher because women used not to have that choice. At this point, if we want to grow or sustain populations, the only possibilities seem to be

1. Take that choice away from women. Not only would this be abhorrent, I'm not sure it's even possible without some sort of mass violence or horrific war.

2. Bribe women to have children, above and beyond the (economic) cost of having them. This seems difficult, and I genuinely don't know how high you'd have to go to get to replacement fertility. If you're not a woman, genuinely imagine how much you'd have to be paid to give birth to two babies you don't want. Then add the economic opportunity costs to that. Do we really have the resources to give that to half the population (because how do you know who wouldn't give birth without it)? Plus, a lot of men would be very mad.

3. Massive government investment into obstetrics to make pregnancy and childbirth dramatically easier on your body. This, to me, seems the most plausible, though there're obviously still major social barriers.

4. Develop sci-fi tech that removes or reduces the obligation for only women to bear children - either by inventing make pregnancy (halves the necessary average fertility, plus it's much easier to convince people who haven't done it before to have a baby) or artificial wombs. This is pretty far out, but I'm not aware of any actual hard limits on the possibilities. From my perspective, it's probably easier than stopping aging, which looks to have some genuine enthropic challenges.

Everyone (including me) is inclined to blame lower birthrates on their pet social cause (economic inequality, cost of housing, "The LGBT agenda", cars, cities, foreigners, the job market, social media, feminism, Marxism, conservatism, obesity, vaccines) but just as an example, the reduction US birthrates has largely been driven by a precipitous drop in teen pregnancy. As hormonal birth control and sex education has become more available, it's been easier and easier for women to prevent unwanted pregnancies without the cooperation or involvement of men, and birthrates have, predictably, dropped.

And I think it's probably going to be pretty hard to put that genie back in the bottle, unless you can get women to vote against their own right to vote and weather the inevitable storm caused by telling 50% of everyone they're not really people anymore and should just do what they're told. Women tend to be less violent and less physically imposing then men, but I don't think they're actually much less capable of causing destruction with, like, a petrol bomb, and I think we would probably find the line that overcomes that tendency pretty fast if we went down that path.

Dating apps allow women to more easily access men of higher value while higher value men can access a greater number of women.

I think kids born now will inherit a much better world than in the past.

What sort of world did a child born in Europe in 1900 or 1930 inherit? What about a black child born in the US in 1950, or South Africa in 1960? What about a child born in China in 1950 or (what is now) Bangladesh in 1960 or Sri Lanka in 1970? Their children and grand children will have a much better life.

> 4. a GATTACA-type future where the super rich figure out a way to birth super humans with perfect genetics and top 0.001% IQs. All of those make the future look so unappealing.

If everything goes alright for them. The thing is that we don't know about knock-on effects and monkey paw results - we can switch this gene on, your child has IQ 190, but later parents will figure out that it has social intelligence of a rock. Or we can switch this gene on, your child is now able to compete with marathon runners, whoops heart attack at 32 years.

The article lists several examples of government programs from different regions that pay people to have kids and their efficacy.

Wealthy MENA countries functionally does this, and their TFR is either below replacement or trending to below replacement. And they have other pushers like religion and cheap migrant labour / nannies to incentivize large families.

The TLDR is I think state demographic planning cannot positively incentiivize >2 kids. Unless cohort is extremely trad/religion pilled to have as many kids as possible.

At some point need to negative incentivize, i.e. taxes, limits on wealth transfer or additional burdens for not hitting family quota. Probably even more unsavory demographic programs, i.e. birth increased by 2% after roe vs wade overturned. But forcing people to start families is harder than forcing them abort.

The system at large hasn't been great at forward planning so the whole pyramid shape might collapse.

Elderly care is basically going to wipe generational savings from the 20th century off the map and all that wealth will be reallocated to PE.

Overpopulation is still a concern when considering biodiversity, groundwater loss, etc.

The latest UNEP report includes it - see page 37 from https://www.unep.org/resources/global-environment-outlook-7 -> https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/api/core/bitstreams/902187bf-ea...

"Among the major global environmental crises – climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation, and pollution and waste – population growth is most evidently a key factor in biodiversity decline. This is largely due to increased demand for food production, which leads to agricultural expansion and land degradation (Cafaro, Hansson and Götmark 2022). As the population grows and consumption rises, fewer resources and less habitat are available for non-human species (Crist 2019). Overpopulation occurs when the total human population multiplied by per capita consumption surpasses the capacity of sustainable ecosystems and resources. Although the global human population continues to grow, per capita consumption is increasing at a faster rate. To the extent that people are disrupting natural habitats and degrading ecosystem services for future generations, despite regional heterogeneity, some research suggests that most of the world’s nations may be considered overpopulated (Lianos and Pseiridis 2016; Tucker 2019)"

Specifically going back to 70s overpopulation concerns, thing shifted with the Green Revolution / Norman Borlaug but it came at the cost of reducing groundwater supply and reducing agricultural diversity. See 'The Globalization of Wheat' and https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/groundwater-and-c...

I see slowing birth rates as a net positive.

People in these comments are considering to enslave women like The Handmaid's Tale before even asking if it’s a problem.

It's possible to have both overpopulation(too large of a population for a given metric like water, energy, pollution, etc) and demographic collapse(too many old people, not enough young workers). It's not intuitive but they are separate phenomenon.

The reaction to overpopulation concerns probably discouraged people from having kids but it's unlikely to be the main cause.

Without enough children, who will be taking care of you when you are older?

All of society and industrial functions require young people.

Less consumer demand means fewer jobs. When people can't find good well-paying jobs, they become pretty unhappy, and they won't be magically enlightened and out of misery by being told it's the capitalist wheel turning.

Capitalist concern is human concern.

One is a problem of humanity, the other of capitalism.

Capitalism needs constant growth

There's nothing wrong with a sinking population as long as the following is true:

- no replacement brought from outside to combat the decline - no obligation for the "society" to take care of non-ancestral elderly

I'm sorry... the very feminist South Korea?

In other countries women are more able to do both. You have to reckon with the wage decrease for mothers being especially high in south Korea at least?

It does not appears to be much better in North Korea either

https://news.sky.com/story/kim-jong-un-wipes-away-tears-as-h...

Why is this particularly a problem for women? Seems like this would apply to both genders?

Please elucidate, my personal takeaway from this post was how women are treated unfairly which leads to lower birth rates. The article goes into depth about this.

Kibbutzim in Israel from the 40s-80s tried a fairly radical project of communal child-rearing. It failed when the generation raised there rejected the choice to continue the project.

Viz: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/feb/19/kibbutz...

We already have daycare and schools, that take care of kids for 8h. And then there's the thing that usually parents like to spend time with their children.

It would be simply better (probably harder) to improve society so one could have a great work-life balance.

Like an orphanage? I think people like raising their children

The German Democratic Republic had state-run universal daycare from ages 0 to 18 (Krippe, Garten, POS, FDJ). It was commonly seen as a bad thing by western societies, because it gave ample opportunity to indoctrinate.

PS: POS and FDJ are not really daycare but school and youth org, but they provided services exceeding what we connect with those ideas.

  Why not have dedicated facilities that handle raising children professionally?

Who pays for it? How often can the parents see the kids? How much influence can the parents have on the kids? How does this differ from schools?

Yes various societies have tried it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s%E2%80%931990s_Romanian_o...

This is the main topic of Brave New World.

If we established a decent universal basic income, some families could opt spending time raising kids instead of working.

So why would you have children? I love spending time with my kids. What is the point of having them if I do not see them?

I feel really lucky I worked from home and home educated my kids, and feel most people already miss a significant amount of the joy of having kids because of work and school. Your idea would make a significant part of it into all of it.

In New York, we are trying to implement universal childcare.

>Anyone tried to move away from this model where there is two people of opposite gender, living together as a family, working, and raising child(ren) at the same time? Why not have dedicated facilities that handle raising children professionally?

People in general have a built-in biological incentive to treat their own biological children well. People child-rearing just as a job generally treat children worse than biological parents, and the empirical evidence supports this (e.g. the earlier children enter paid childcare, the worse their outcomes on average). Only a small minority of extremely moral people treat other people's kids as well as their own biological children.

Why would one have kids in first place if its to only send them off to a 'dedicated child raising facility'?

Even in some dystopian future where there are dedicated facilities that raise people, I can only think of labour and military being raised.

I'm 99% certain you don't have kids. The remaining 1% is reserved for the possibility that you do, and you just hate them and everything they stand for.

Otherwise you would realize what dystopian hellscape of an idea you are suggesting.

Nitpicking but I hate how "career" is always used when talking about women's choices, when it's just a damn job. Most women work because they have to. It's not a "career".

While a little weird to think about seriously, I always liked the model in The Dispossessed.

>Why not have dedicated facilities that handle raising children professionally?

Because to even contemplate that means dismissing the entire notion of a parent child bond. Of course socialism, with it's inherent disdain of existing social structures have tried collective living, famously some kibbutzim in israel tried it, but most sensible people are horrified by such an idea.

I want to let it go but i can't. The suggestion that trained professionals would somehow do a better job of raising a child then parents would is terrible. It's one of the worst ideas i've ever seen here.

yes soviet union tried that.