The main problem is that solutions would be very expensive and, unfortunately, politicians don't get (re-)elected to solve problems that manifest over the span of decades.
From my tangential experience (brother and wife live in Tokyo), there are a ton of programs that are extremely desirable from the US birthrate/childcare perspective already.
Base level of 8 weeks Maternity leave , with 6 weeks ahead of birth as well. And government pays a lump sum to help cover hospital costs per birth.
The community support and available activities.
Seesh the only things that seem negative are the Japanese type of xenophobic culture (my family is white, so their kids are mixed), and the small living space which leaves little room for privacy in like any point of their day.
From all I've read or heard about birth rate rise the measures that sociologists see as the most effective are: provide cheap housing and pay much more to families (i.e. mostly to women) with children to compensate for their loss of potential career. The latter has a twist that the payment should start (or significantly increase) with the birth of the second child (and continue to rise with the third etc). Paying for the first child does next to nothing to the birth rate. Some countries already do that, but the amount of money poured into this should increase by order(s) of magnitude to achieve the replacement level.
Or we can go full medieval - completely deprive women of education possibilities and financial independence, like Taliban does.
> the amount of money poured into this should increase by order(s) of magnitude to achieve the replacement level.
Exactly. And I found it being obvious after having thought about it, even while not having kids and I most likely will never have any.
Just from observing and talking to people with 0-2 kids (nobody I know has more...).
I know a couple with good income, living in Munich, which is one of the most costly cities in Germany, one Child. Avoidable pain points (finding daycare, you better start right after the baby was born, because they have multi-year waiting lists) and they feel the financial hit pretty hard.
> Is it easy to find high quality daycare for children?
Shinzo Abe mostly solved the daycare issues by both making it free and massively increasing availability. There are still some waiting lists but they went from a peak of nearly 30,000 in 2017 to under 3000 now.
Yep I would rank Japanese QoL higher than US or Canada. Skin color aside, they can even be xenophobic to second gen Japanese born overseas like Brazil.
Living space is quite good and affordable by Asian standards, you either live in mansion which is basically fancy apartments, or ikkodate which is single family home, albeit smaller than those in north america.
I don't think that's correct. Saying that "solutions would be very expensive" implies that there are actual solutions in existence. I've seen a lot of suggestions, and many have been implemented, some do slow down the dropping birthrate problem (countries with good maternity leave systems and regulated working hours are doing way better than those without), but nowhere have I seen any true fix presented, with or without a label "will work, but will be too expensive".
I argue nobody dared to try. Would be a significant undertaking for the whole society. It's manifesting way to slow so nobody sees the acute urgency, so politicians tend to think about other topic most of the time.
Also pretty hard with a society full of people that don't want to have children that they must pay a lot of money to people that have children. All that while also paying a lot of money to people that are too old to work.
What I'm asking is "..dared to try what?". What, excactly, would you offer? As I mentioned in another comment, those families in my own country which a) do not have any economical worries, and b) have great family leave support from work, i.e. no career problems whatsoever, and c) even more that I don't list here, they DO NOT WANT more than two children anyway. Because it feels fine with two. And then there's a problem, because that's not enough - there are a lot of singles out there, and most of them don't produce any children. You need more than two children per family, on average, to keep up the birthrate vs the death rate.
So, what is the solution that nobody has dared to try?
From my tangential experience (brother and wife live in Tokyo), there are a ton of programs that are extremely desirable from the US birthrate/childcare perspective already.
Base level of 8 weeks Maternity leave , with 6 weeks ahead of birth as well. And government pays a lump sum to help cover hospital costs per birth.
The community support and available activities.
Seesh the only things that seem negative are the Japanese type of xenophobic culture (my family is white, so their kids are mixed), and the small living space which leaves little room for privacy in like any point of their day.