How might a modern baby boom occur?
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Also, not all education is the same, but that's already obvious in that so many people who thinks that the trades are for losers compared to a well rounded liberal arts higher education. On this aspect the modern higher education system produces people with higher awareness of social responsibility (whether they fully act upon that is another matter entirely), which great and all but this overly responsible and cautious mentality indirectly (if not directly) leads to delaying having children (and reducing the number of children if/when they do).
Uneducated/alternatively educated people tends to not have this burden of awareness.
So if anything free higher education would cause steeper population decline (especially if it causes an oversaturation of overly educated people) in a way that subsidizing education in the trades would not.
Uneducated/alternatively educated people tends to not have this burden of awareness.
So if anything free higher education would cause steeper population decline (especially if it causes an oversaturation of overly educated people) in a way that subsidizing education in the trades would not.
automation causes mass layoffs, yet standard of living remains( people now have time on their hands). AGI either invents fusion and cheap space acces or promisses it will do so in short order.
Theirs ongoing discussion that the human genome is weekening, People who should die in early childbirth get to live full lifes and reproduce, creating genetic inferior children, test are underway of gene manipulated babies that are much smarter, much stronger and will live far longer (without medical intervention) creating time pressure to get kids the old fashion way
Theirs ongoing discussion that the human genome is weekening, People who should die in early childbirth get to live full lifes and reproduce, creating genetic inferior children, test are underway of gene manipulated babies that are much smarter, much stronger and will live far longer (without medical intervention) creating time pressure to get kids the old fashion way
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Minion Printer that can replicate replacement humans overnight. Any time there's a seasonal labor shortage, just print more people. Any time there's unemployment, set it to "recycle" mode and march people back in...
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Giant Man Eating Rabbits
Banned
Pay every married couple $26,000 per year, per child up to the age of 18. That should do it.
As a child free person, I can't help but feel this might engender some negative reactions from folks without kids.
Giant Man Eating Rabbits
Banned
But having a child is a lifestyle choice isn't it?. You can either choose to have them or not.
A niece is up to three by doing valuable academic work from home, having a partner who's on very good tech-money and having an extended family who happily cover for need...
Else, you need reliable, affordable child-care, and no 'benefit trap' such that some-what bettering yourself does not cruelly cull your benefits.
Have seen and heard of too many cases where people refused up-doot training, promotions and/or extra hours because benefit thresholds would leave them significantly poorer...
Else, you need reliable, affordable child-care, and no 'benefit trap' such that some-what bettering yourself does not cruelly cull your benefits.
Have seen and heard of too many cases where people refused up-doot training, promotions and/or extra hours because benefit thresholds would leave them significantly poorer...
Which are those places and how free education and free healthcare contributed to their declining TFR?
What is the economic and social environment that makes a baby boom desirable? It's hard to get one just by passing laws. The ancient Romans tried passing morality laws and they didn't work very well.
The post-WWII USA baby boom happened for several reasons. Factories were converting from war goods back to consumer goods, so there were a lot of jobs available. Automation was limited and demand was high, so wages were good. Supply of labor was kept low by labor unions and immigration law; plus only about 1/3 of women worked outside the home and many of them quit their jobs when they got married. (Some jobs were only available to single women, so it wasn't always a choice.)
There were a lot of factory jobs: The USA in the 1950s was consuming half of the planet's raw materials and producing half of the finished goods. This was because they had fairly new factories and the rest of the industrialized world was still rebuilding.
There was also a building boom -- old potato farms were turned into acres of single-family homes, giving people room to expand. It was only a few hundred square feet, but you had your own back yard and the neighbors were ten feet away, not four inches. So people were buying the new, electric stoves and putting the new frozen foods into their new electric refrigerators. People bought new cars as often as people now buy new cell phones. Television was put on hold for the war, but now becoming more popular. That's a lot of durable goods being manufactured, transported, bought and sold.
By the 1990s, however, the economic incentives for two people to have 2+ children had decreased. Factory jobs weren't just going away; entire factories were packed up and shipped overseas where the labor costs less. Housing costs had gone up, and employment opportunities had gone down. Automation led to a shift towards a service economy.
So, how to turn this around? Something like tariffs on cheap-labor imports to protect jobs? It's hard to get and keep popular political support for something that keeps prices high.
There's the option of a repeat, a massively destructive global conflict (or natural disaster) that leaves one country relatively unscathed, but I think I'd rather have the long hours at low wages.
The post-WWII USA baby boom happened for several reasons. Factories were converting from war goods back to consumer goods, so there were a lot of jobs available. Automation was limited and demand was high, so wages were good. Supply of labor was kept low by labor unions and immigration law; plus only about 1/3 of women worked outside the home and many of them quit their jobs when they got married. (Some jobs were only available to single women, so it wasn't always a choice.)
There were a lot of factory jobs: The USA in the 1950s was consuming half of the planet's raw materials and producing half of the finished goods. This was because they had fairly new factories and the rest of the industrialized world was still rebuilding.
There was also a building boom -- old potato farms were turned into acres of single-family homes, giving people room to expand. It was only a few hundred square feet, but you had your own back yard and the neighbors were ten feet away, not four inches. So people were buying the new, electric stoves and putting the new frozen foods into their new electric refrigerators. People bought new cars as often as people now buy new cell phones. Television was put on hold for the war, but now becoming more popular. That's a lot of durable goods being manufactured, transported, bought and sold.
By the 1990s, however, the economic incentives for two people to have 2+ children had decreased. Factory jobs weren't just going away; entire factories were packed up and shipped overseas where the labor costs less. Housing costs had gone up, and employment opportunities had gone down. Automation led to a shift towards a service economy.
So, how to turn this around? Something like tariffs on cheap-labor imports to protect jobs? It's hard to get and keep popular political support for something that keeps prices high.
There's the option of a repeat, a massively destructive global conflict (or natural disaster) that leaves one country relatively unscathed, but I think I'd rather have the long hours at low wages.
I think this is probably one of the few realistic options given that the incentive programs of numerous countries have failed to reinvigorate birth rates. If developed countries continue to see their rates fall, it wouldn't surprise me to see artificial wombs embraced as a way of promoting growth. It's a somewhat dystopian concept, but it really doesn't strike me as unrealistic to think that nations might manage their population growth similar to inflation, creating targets and adjusting policy to meet them. I can't speak to the exact technological leaps needed to get there, but much like human cloning and genetic modification, ethical considerations seem to increasingly be the largest limiting factor on the development and implementation of this type of technology.
where people cannot afford to live and where someone earning the median salary has no hope of affordign a family home ... what do you think?
Who are the parents? Not the incubators. The people who have to raise the children. Historically creches haven't had brilliant results.
These scifi responses miss the point. The problem isn't having children. It is having the resources and motivation to raise children.
Well if you want to go the dark side route, you could just ban all abortion and contraception besides people fitting certain situations with women facing legal consequences for violating like Ceausescu's Romania did. It raised birth rates in Romania with varying negative consequences so it does work in a totalitarian situation
Bingo; as a new parent both my wife and I agree that the pregnancy and delivery were way easier than taking care of the kiddo after it arrived. I think that eventually we'll hit an upswing in birth rates; pre-industrial populations and birth rates naturally grew and shrank all the time. I doubt it'll happen anytime soon in the modern world though thanks to both the social factors making people more isolated and autonomous and the economic factors (less money and more time) that make it harder to raise kids.
For perspective, we did the math, and just feeding a child in its first year is ~20hrs a week, equivalent to a part time job. And if the mom has to pump as well, that basically doubles the time and brings just providing sustenance up to a full time job. Raising kids is a massive time commitment, and much of that time is dull, repetitive, and done at hours when you'd rather be sleeping. The whole first few months are basically low-grade physical and emotional torture on the parents. In a society where both parents have other interests, options, and careers it's difficult to balance them with the sheer time needed to raise children, especially in a job market that isn't exactly kind on people who drop out of their career for a half decade or so to be full-time parents. Government interventions like guaranteed family leave and subsidized childcare can help blunt the pain, but there's no top-down intervention that can restructure the private economy or social mores to be more flexible around childcare, let alone make those who value other aspects of life more decide that what they really want is to spend their time raising kids. What's needed for a future baby boom is a simultaneous and massive ground up shift in societal attitudes towards and people's economic ability to have kids at the same... something that's not really visible in the foreseeable future.
The problem with banning contraceptives is that you don't actually need modern contraceptives to crater the birth rate. The first country in the world to undergo a major demographic transition was France, and they did it in the 19th century, which is obviously long before modern contraceptives, the pill, modern condoms, legalized abortion, IUD etc. Yes, the pill makes things really convenient, but French peasants in the 19th century were able to figure out how to control their fertility. Romania tried banning contraceptives, and the birth rate rose markedly at first and then went back down to the baseline.
Ideas about paying money have generally not worked either, they've been tried by a variety of countries. Generally you get an initial boost and then things settle back to normal. The most recent one was Hungary which passed some ambitious pro-natalist packages a few years ago, particularly focusing on things like housing, and you can check the results for TFR easily enough - it went up by something like .1, from 1.45 TFR to 1.55. Lots of countries have had cash bonuses to mothers for births and it's useless. This is pretty logical - yes people today will talk about it is financial burdens which are preventing them from having kids, but their ancestors pumped out a dozen kids in grinding poverty which is utterly alien to contemporary society. France has a lot of programs that support fertility and their birth rate is something like 1.9, which is better, although it is partially due to higher fertility among immigrant populations - not completely, I think I remember that among native-borth cohorts it is something like 1.7, which is still higher, but in any case neither of those numbers is above replacement rate figures and so doesn't really classify as a baby boom to my eyes.
The bigger issue is why people should have kids, since children, other than emotional support, provide no real benefits. Children previously were relatively low cost, the time to take care of them was limited, you had a bushel of them so they took care of and watched over each other, in the countryside they would be contributing light labor within a few years, in the cities would often be apprenticed off, and they provided the only real system of retirement. Nowadays, you have to take care of children for at least 18 years, and even if you make them work as early as possible at least 15 or 16 years of complete support, expenses like healthcare, housing, childcare etc. have exploded, and for a lot of parents who send their kids on to college it's probably something like 25 years of taking care of them and education will cost a huge amount. Plus now there are retirement systems, and Americans tend to just dump their parents into retirement homes anyway.
Events like the post-war baby boom can be better thought of in terms of a demographic correction , since the previous 30 years in the Western world had been a time of such stagnant demography, with major losses in wars and depressed fertility throughout the Interwar. In this sense, there was no baby boom, just a catch-up after years of stagnation. Similarly, you can see how in Europe the two countries with the highest fertility are France and Ireland, who had the worst demographic experiences of the 19th centuries. A similar baby boom might happen in the context of another period of major growth and expansion after a period of doldrums and war.
If you want a baby boom without this, simply people tomorrow deciding to have far more children, you would need a change in social attitudes. I wouldn't be surprised if this happens eventually, the unprecedented thing with modern contraceptives is that it is an individual choice, as compared to pre-modern fertility control which was exercised via social control such as infanticide, economic constraints over marriage, delay of birth, excess population to convents, etc. while nowadays women decide themselves whether they want children or not and control how many they have. Eventually this will self-select for population groups and to a more limited extend individuals with more children, as you can see with the Amish or the Dutch Bible Belt.
But in any case, future demographics are extremely hard to predict. People in the Interwar were talking about the demographic extinction of Europe and North America, and then a few decades later there was a major baby boom. As mentioned, there are major scientific developments in the tubes (pun?) which could change everything, although of course they could flop as well.
Ideas about paying money have generally not worked either, they've been tried by a variety of countries. Generally you get an initial boost and then things settle back to normal. The most recent one was Hungary which passed some ambitious pro-natalist packages a few years ago, particularly focusing on things like housing, and you can check the results for TFR easily enough - it went up by something like .1, from 1.45 TFR to 1.55. Lots of countries have had cash bonuses to mothers for births and it's useless. This is pretty logical - yes people today will talk about it is financial burdens which are preventing them from having kids, but their ancestors pumped out a dozen kids in grinding poverty which is utterly alien to contemporary society. France has a lot of programs that support fertility and their birth rate is something like 1.9, which is better, although it is partially due to higher fertility among immigrant populations - not completely, I think I remember that among native-borth cohorts it is something like 1.7, which is still higher, but in any case neither of those numbers is above replacement rate figures and so doesn't really classify as a baby boom to my eyes.
The bigger issue is why people should have kids, since children, other than emotional support, provide no real benefits. Children previously were relatively low cost, the time to take care of them was limited, you had a bushel of them so they took care of and watched over each other, in the countryside they would be contributing light labor within a few years, in the cities would often be apprenticed off, and they provided the only real system of retirement. Nowadays, you have to take care of children for at least 18 years, and even if you make them work as early as possible at least 15 or 16 years of complete support, expenses like healthcare, housing, childcare etc. have exploded, and for a lot of parents who send their kids on to college it's probably something like 25 years of taking care of them and education will cost a huge amount. Plus now there are retirement systems, and Americans tend to just dump their parents into retirement homes anyway.
Events like the post-war baby boom can be better thought of in terms of a demographic correction , since the previous 30 years in the Western world had been a time of such stagnant demography, with major losses in wars and depressed fertility throughout the Interwar. In this sense, there was no baby boom, just a catch-up after years of stagnation. Similarly, you can see how in Europe the two countries with the highest fertility are France and Ireland, who had the worst demographic experiences of the 19th centuries. A similar baby boom might happen in the context of another period of major growth and expansion after a period of doldrums and war.
If you want a baby boom without this, simply people tomorrow deciding to have far more children, you would need a change in social attitudes. I wouldn't be surprised if this happens eventually, the unprecedented thing with modern contraceptives is that it is an individual choice, as compared to pre-modern fertility control which was exercised via social control such as infanticide, economic constraints over marriage, delay of birth, excess population to convents, etc. while nowadays women decide themselves whether they want children or not and control how many they have. Eventually this will self-select for population groups and to a more limited extend individuals with more children, as you can see with the Amish or the Dutch Bible Belt.
But in any case, future demographics are extremely hard to predict. People in the Interwar were talking about the demographic extinction of Europe and North America, and then a few decades later there was a major baby boom. As mentioned, there are major scientific developments in the tubes (pun?) which could change everything, although of course they could flop as well.
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