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.
Less people means less waste and less fossil fuel consumption. This is not a bad thing.
-corpo douche, maybe.
It is a bad thing if you live in a country with a robust social system that is paid for through taxes and a below-replacement birth rate.
Like, we don’t need “more” people, but we need to keep the population stable to make sure the disabled and elderly can live well. Because someone has to bear the cost, and we can’t all be Norwegian.
Sounds like a good reason to tax the wealthy and corporations at a higher rate. You could even have a global proportional tax rate if the will was there.
Then let’s keep it stable at a lower number than it currently is.
“… robots…. We’ll make robots to do all the work. Then we won’t need the stupid poors.”
-rich guys