[audunw]

> Haven’t seen any top down government interventions work at increasing TFR.

I believe this is because you won't see any effect until having kids is paid just as well as working any other job.

If you can choose between a regular job paying 100%, and an incredibly hard and demanding job paying 50%, you're going to pick the first option every single time. Increasing the pay to 60% isn't going to help. You need to be around 100% or above. And like with anything else in our economy, if you're not getting enough people to take that essential job, you need to keep increasing pay until they do.

So no matter how much government intervention, you're still only getting the share of people who want to have kids as a kind of hobby. Not because government intervention doesn't work at all, but because you get very little effect until you cross that threshold where having kids is a job that pays fairly.

I think parts of Northern Europe is close to that threshold, but there's still some ways to go. Parental leave needs to be a few months longer (there's often a gap between parental leave ending and kindergarten starting), kindergarten must be free, and financial support for parents needs to be quite a bit higher.

[dhruval]

Seems a bit extreme to have the government pay people to have kids on the level of a full time job when you consider that through most of human history people worked to support their kids / families and at much lower income levels.

Looking at Northern Europe seems their TFR is similar to the USA despite incentives.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

That is until the children were able to work for the family, so having children was literally an investment: pay upfront to have income.