[qball]

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

Well, they've all been symbolic measures... but that's all they can realistically do.

In terms of education reform (the "give young men and women their twenties back" part), constituents of the education-managerial complex will fight hard to preserve their positions (making the education system more efficient would put many out of work), and are a significant enough cross-section of the population that threatening them will have electoral consequences that no sitting governments could survive.

And that's before you get into the tax hike/redistribution schemes (the "parents need to be compensated just as much as other economic value-creators" part), which will impact everyone else, and irrevocably screws the folks that are now too old to have kids (who, coincidentally, are approaching peak voting age).

For those reasons, proper reform is and will continue to be impossible for the forseeable future.