[icandoit]

If high IQ jobs offered in-building day care as a perk this trend would completely reverse.

Convert the parking garage in the basement into a day care and you'll have phd-level employees for life. Changing jobs for even double the pay would be completely unaffordable.

The negative correlation between education and family size is a function of the cost of raising children in a city. If the cost is reduced then the correlation becomes nuetral or even positive. There is no such correlation in a rural setting. This is a bottleneck in the talent pipeline.

Consider this paper (from Indonesia) in which concluded that the relationship can change over time, as a function of policy:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831397/

[drakonka]

I do not think just adding a daycare will make having children suddenly make sense to many people - at least not enough to warrant such a blanket statement about it. Aside from simply not wanting any, there are so many reasons to not have children aside from daycare, plenty of them not negatable by policies or financial incentives.