[jemmyw]

People who want to have kids have kids. There have been worse economic conditions, and far worse living conditions for folks in the not very distant past and they still had large families.

There has been a slow burn change to social pressure and autonomy. It seems like women don't want to have a large family, or some a family at all, if the choice is there. The rationale about why they put it off are unlikely to be worth much.

I think every economic remedy will fail. But it'll probably pick up again because I imagine social pressure will turn. All this noise people are making about it right now is the start. Personally I see that as a negative, we should be celebrating a downward population trend. We had so many years of warning about the effects of an ever larger population and now get hand wringing the moment that looks wrong.

[api]

My take for a while is that if the low birth rates persist and do become a critical problem, we might just have to do a boring thing that we do for other areas where the unregulated market or society doesn’t produce enough of something or doesn’t solve a problem. We might just have to subsidize it and basically pay people to have kids.