[julianlam]

Every time this sort of news pops up, I think "why aren't they incentivising and subsidizing fertility treatment"?

You want to raise the fertility rate, yes?

You could convince an entire population to have more babies the hard way (social or economic pressure).

Or literally just let the people who are already trying, but can't for some physiological reason, have one. They already want children, if they're pursuing fertility treatment, they're already decently well off, too.

To me it seems like a very obvious, targeted solution!

[s1artibartfast]

Fertility treatments have a small impact.

For example, Israel has universal fertility benefiots and this is predicted to contribute ~0.03 TFR. The US and would need a an effect 2,000% (20x) larger to reach replacment. Many EU countries would need an effect 30X stronger.

The bigger challenge is the people wanting to have children in the first place. This is driven by social values, preceived preconditions, and when in life those conditions are met.

I was just hanging out with some friends for the 4th of July. Their immigrant parents chose to have a child while in college working on their Phds and residing in the US on student visas.

I dont know any of my peers that would intentionally make that choice due to the percarious and unstable position.

[thegrim33]

It makes sense, but it's probably pretty far down on the list of "what could we put money towards in order to increase birthrate". Could probably get a lot more result for the money by funding efforts to pair people together, make them want to have kids, make them more financially equipped to have kids, etc.

[ryandrake]

Or, why not lean in to falling birthrates and try to build a society that doesn't rely on the population needing to increase infinitely? Everyone just acts as though replacement birthrate is simply something we must meet or exceed, because of dumb "line must always go up" economics. Can't we envision a functional world where the global population is halving every 40 years rather than doubling every 40 years?

[balfirevic]

Barring not-yet-invented advances in automation, shrinking population means fewer and fewer people providing goods and services compared to the number of people that need them, which means worse and worse poverty for larger and larger fraction of people.

[ponector]

>> fewer and fewer people providing goods and services

Many of them are not needed anyway. Close half of the fast food joints. Or fire half of the IT people. Go back to levels we had in 2006!

[skeledrew]

> halving every 40 years

Sounds like a road to species extinction.

[throw-the-towel]

But who'd pay the pensions then?

[fragmede]

It's fairly obvious that to raise the birthrate, all you have to do is get rid of proper sex education and promote abstinence-only education to teenagers (because it doesn't work), and get rid of social media for them. Prohibit them from buying alcohol but give them plenty of ways to acquire it. Use teenage rebellious nature to socially engineer them getting drunk together. Teenage pregnancy is how to get them.

Of course this is absolutely abhorrent to the left, but the article is discussing the left's lowered birth rates, and giving teenagers, especially women, sex education that works can't be ignored. It's some Handmaiden's Tale shit to dupe teenage women into having kids so they're beholden to a man and their family, so they don't get an opportunity to have their own lives, and are instead merely baby making factories, but this is the future of the human race we're talking about here!

No one would ever admit to this being the plan out loud, but it's pretty obvious if you look at it from a societal standpoint, on the level of Dune or the Foundation series of sci-fi writing. Or Idiocracy.

[tastyface]

Actually, they do admit it: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/republicans-mad-teen-pre...

[ryandrake]

Much of the party seems to be obsessed with children's genitals and fertility. Why can't they leave all this on their little island?

[fragmede]

Is it so weird to think about the future of humanity? I want my children, and my children's childrens to have a good life as well.

[watwut]

They dont care about humanity. You can see that pretty clearly.

And conservatives were the punishing ones toward pregnant teens - the conservative answer to teenage pregnancy was to make her suffer as much as possible.

That is why it is especially appealing. The political groups that blamed pregnant teenagers and tried to ensure pregnancy destroyes their lives are complaining we dont have enough pregnant teenagers. And you can bet on them being cruel to pregnant teenagers again if that goes up again.

[swat535]

I don't know why this topic would be surprising for people. The elephant in the room is that right leaning people tend to be more religious (or have experienced a religious uprising).

Religion puts an incredible amount of social pressure on children, marriage and families. This is why most conservatives advocate for traditional gender roles, rally against abortion, etc.

My own personal experience of growing in a conservative Islamic country, then converting to Christianity after moving to the West is a testament of how social pressure has an impact on this.

My wife (from South America) was similarly raised in a conservative family. We have delayed having children but it has reached a boiling point where we have to absolutely discuss having kids now.

Yes, there are other factors like affordability that prevents left leaning people from having kids, but to me those are secondary reasons. This social dynamic is simply not there in Liberal circles.

[bdangubic]

thats the problem, it should be at the top of the list (all the way at the top) and nothing else should be close 100th

[mike_hearn]

It's obvious but not useful:

1. It's been tried and doesn't work.

2. The main reason people can't have kids is waiting too late (or being unable to find a partner and get married). This happens for social reasons. If you make it easier to wait longer and still have children, then people will just up the amount of time they wait and you're back to square one.

[zdragnar]

Fertility treatment isn't a guarantee. My brother and his wife ended up adopting after treatment failed.

The government paying for it also doesn't make it cheaper, it just moves the costs around.

A fairer, more effective strategy would be subsidizing the first year or so of the child's care- diapers, food, clothes, cribs, vaccines and such. That would benefit a lot more people.

[snapplebobapple]

Nah just bump every tax bracket of people over 25 with no children 10% and use the money to care for the vat grown replacement children they didnt have. Cut the taxes back when they hit their 2 kid quota and cut them further for additiinal kids

[dumberquestions]

25 is an odd choice, you incentivise them to have children but you're also making it more difficult for them to do so, and not enough will have children before 25. 30 or even 35 would make more sense.

[M95D]

What about freedom?

[snapplebobapple]

If the government can charge me a higher rate of tax because I am not a useless turd with no marketable skills then charging people more for failing to keep population at or above replacement is also not an infringement of freedom. While we are talking about freedom, have you looked at what happens to societies when population growth rates collapse? They tend to not stay societies for very many generations after that. They tend to get invaded and added to an empire that still has a positive population growth rate, or they collapse internally due to the weight of unfullfillable promises and infighting over the shrinking pie and get picked off at the edges. In that regard, policy to preserve the birth rate is a freedom enhancing choice if you think our current society is free. I personally think it's not that great but everything else is pretty bad, so it's the best of a bad situation choice, which makes it worth preserving.

[M95D]

Sound like a totalitarian regime to me. Look at which countries already tried it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_on_childlessness These were all communist countries with at least an intention/policy of providing social services for those children: free health, free education, guaranteed job after that, afordable or even free housing, etc.

USA has none of those. The rich will have a choice; the poor won't. And we already know that children of the poor tend to stay poor and the more children the are, the poorer they'll be. It will be a generation of poor with no hope of escape.

Then there's the slippery slope: What stops the government from increasing the tax to severe punishment levels or levels completely unafordable by anyone?

[snapplebobapple]

The taxation scheme on not being a useless turd is closer to a totalitarian regime than taxing people for not having kids is.

[bdangubic]

no one (I mean this, not one person on Earth) will be swayed to have a baby given your offer.

[zdragnar]

Changing the birth rate begins with changing the culture that discourages families of a certain size.

Such a program would be a good first step in stating that bearing and raising children is something we value as a society.

Coincidentally, I had a similar suspicion about the free/subsidized fertility treatments- the rate of people not having children due to needing medical intervention is small enough that subsidizing it would not meaningfully affect the birthrate of the country.

Unless, of course, you believe that being on the left politically makes people less fertile...

[bdangubic]

I was commenting on

> A fairer, more effective strategy would be subsidizing the first year or so of the child's care- diapers, food, clothes, cribs, vaccines and such.

And not anything political. United States is so fucked beyond repair when even commenting on birth rates turns into “being on the left politically”

[zdragnar]

Well, you proposed fertility treatments in a discussion on an article entitled "Falling fertility on the left as a key driver of US birth decline" so I had wrongly assumed you were engaging with that conversation.

We're taking two different approaches to the same problem. I suggested something that will change attitudes (though I will concede it would be only a first step, not sufficient on its own) whereas you suggested making medical intervention for fertility cheaper for patients.

Hence, my final line was a bit of a tongue in cheek remark on which of the two approaches was more likely to have an impact on the article's thesis.

[happytoexplain]

Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks like the paper just has a misleading title, and this is about having children, not fertility.

[skissane]

> Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks like the paper just has a misleading title, and this is about having children, not fertility.

I think the confusion is that “fertility” means different things in medicine vs demography

In medicine, fertility is about your ability to have biological offspring, not about whether you personally choose to make use of that ability

In demography, fertility is about how many children people actually have. The completed TFR (total fertility rate) of a population is the lifetime average number of children per a woman.

From a demographic perspective, the vast majority of differences in fertility are due to socioeconomic and cultural factors, medical infertility and the availability of treatments for it makes only a very small difference to overall birth rates

[skeledrew]

Far less need for fertility treatment for those trying in their more fertile years (late teens to early 30s); that's when for the most part things "just work".

[nielsbot]

don’t non-US countries already do this?

[mrweasel]

Yes, and it's not working, birthrates are still declining. The one factor that more than anything triggers declining birthrates are the level of education among women.

We're going to have to adjust to smaller populations, unless we wish to devolve as a society.

[skeledrew]

The economics is a sizeable part of the issue. Fix - or preferably replace - the economy so that it's super affordable+rewarding to have and raise children. And make it more acceptable socially to start a family from late teen years (when fertility is just about already at peak).

[nielsbot]

…or stop educating women!

I’m joking. But some religious types say it unironically.

[mrweasel]

That is sadly also true, hence my "or devolve as a society". Educating girls, and young women, results in fewer children, but it also yield richer and honestly better societies. You'd struggle to find a rich, first world country, where women don't receive proper education, but it's almost universally true for poor and dysfunctional countries.

[polski-g]

Because it encourages society to delay childbirth further. If two groups have kids at 20 and another society has them at 30, over those two generations the first would be twice as large as the second.

We know how to raise the birth rates: give money to men, discourage parental co-habitation.