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by spacebanana7 770 days ago
There's no recipe policymakers can follow to raise birthrates over extended periods of time. Sweden, South Korea and Poland have all tried generous financial supports that failed; the smaller Soviet republics tried authoritarian methods that failed.

Even nineteenth century France & Imperial Rome under Augustus don't appear to have been successful in raising birthrates, although I can't pretend to have great data for those examples.
2 comments
diordiderot 770 days ago
> generous financial supports

Hard disagree. The housing / labor markets systems are fundamentally broken and tossing what is effectively scraps at people won't cause them to have a second child in their one bedroom or move 1.5 hours away from their high status job

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spacebanana7 770 days ago
Intuitively that makes sense, but housing and labour markets don't seem to correlate much with fertility rates.

In a European context, France has much higher fertility than any of the Nordic countries despite higher unemployment and effectively the same housing affordability stats. More internationally the figures in Israel (pre Oct 2023) and Japan also go against the grain.

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mcntsh 770 days ago
Which generous financial supports are you talking about?
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spacebanana7 770 days ago
Extended maternity/paternity leave (especially in Sweden), child benefits (especially Poland), tax exemptions (e.g Hungarian income tax), subsidised or free childcare and more.
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mcntsh 770 days ago
Parental leave in Sweden is 80% of your salary and maxes out at 2500 a month for both partners... In Germany it maxes out at 1800. These aren't incentives since you'd be LOSING money by taking parental leave...

> child benefits

120-180 EUR a month per child doesn't even cover half the costs of a child.

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spacebanana7 770 days ago
The base case is to have no parental leave, not 100% of your current salary.

Historically that was the default when people had very positive fertility. In Israel & the US where fertility is higher there's even less generous setups than Sweden & Germany.

I suspect if you give people enough money they'll probably start having kids, but it's a very high number. Hungary is currently spending 5% of its GDP on fertility policies with little success [1]. Last year Poland's increase in its child benefit program alone cost 0.7-0.8% of GDP [2].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/04/baby-bonuses-f... [2] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/poland-approves-child-b...

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mcntsh 770 days ago
Well most people are struggling as it is, so obviously the prospect of increasing your responsibilities and also reducing your income doesn't seem worth it...

If governments were serious about falling birth rates they would invest in their people and give them reasons to have kids rather than saying "f- you" and just importing the workforce from poor countries instead.

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