Apparently households with a yearly income of one million dollar and above are the only ones exhibiting above-replacement level fertility. The most immediate explanation, namely, the availability of hired help to facilitate parenting, is partial at best: hired help is available also to affluent households well below the one million threshold, who however exhibit a markedly lower fertility. A plausible explanation is that only the truly rich feel secure enough about their status to afford the handicap in the ‘meritocratic’ competition for status implied by having and raising children. In fact, at the top end of the income distribution the currently prevailing low status associated to raising children may invert, in line with the concept of ‘counter-signaling .’
The new reproductive technologies allowing a reduction of the downside risk of having children are likely to become available first to the rich. This should further raise their fertility: the rich would have smarter kids and more of them.
When you get to the level of truly rich, the wife doesn't have to work. And if she does work, it can be a fun make-work job that doesn't really need to make money. True status is that your wife has a "business" losing $10k a month or some dumb NGO thing or she's a high end "tradwife".
The real fertility crunch is two people in highly demanding real careers. If that's what it takes to afford real estate/childcare, you aren't going to be having many kids.
The truly rich are too small a demographic group to supply eugenics on their own. You need to get the UMC fertility rate up.
Note that the real problem here is that sending the wife in an UMC couple to work for money is a zero sum game. You do it and the other couples do it and then you all try to bid up the same real estate, same degrees, compete for the same careers, etc. It's a Red Queen Race.
You gotta find a way to make the goods involved less rivalrous, and you've got to normalize the disposable income between breeders and non breeders (basically, tax non breeders more and breeders less) so that having children isn't seen as a way to get one up on others in the Red Queen Race.
Who is the "you" in this? Are you answering the question "if you were dictator how would you raise fertility?" That isn't the question I am asking in the post, as I say at the beginning.
From the Baby Boom to the current Baby Bust, GDP/capita increased by something like thousands of %. Women went from spending nearly their entire lives in domestic service to almost none. We got the washing machine, jet travel, and Amazon delivering whatever I want from the whole world in two days.
And fertility fell.
What are the odds that Zoom, Chat GPT, and artificial wombs are going to change that?
All of the productivity those nerds, engineers, and business people came up with got redirected straight into Red Queen Races. We didn't get Keynes's 15 hour work week prediction. Star Trek didn't happen. You can blame the government for much of that if you like (I sure would), but that still means that *somebody needs to change the government*.
"You" is "us". And yes, we need to find a way to change the incentive structure because as mere individuals no matter how much we increase material prosperity we just end up in a no holds bared knife fight for positional goods so brutal we rob our own wombs to pay for it.
From 1950 to the present real GNP per capita has increased about five fold. That's a lot, but not thousands of percent. Real per capita income has gone up about as much.
In the grand scheme of things, where people on the Malthusian edge had eight kids and rapidly repopulated after every demographic disaster, does this insight matter?
Currently, people support regulations that curtail the supply of housing. I like to think it's not too far-fetched that public opinion will shift the other way some day. Both participants in the VP debate at least paid lip-service to the idea that more housing would be a good thing. Then again, if they are to be believed then half of all new homes will be given to illegal immigrants by the Deep State, and the other half will be bought up by speculators and left vacant 🤷♂️.
This is already happening, except that the "sustainable communities" crowd who are pushing it won't leave the properties empty. Blackrock (the main investor group involved) will bulldoze the houses and rebuild super-dense apartments which they will own forever, while continuing to use the urban-planning agencies to keep out competition. This is part of the WEF "Great Reset" to make us all serfs.
Some people foresee that remote work will lead to deurbanization. Personally I have been considering moving to a less urban/expensive area now that I am mostly working from home and thus no longer have much of a need for living within walking distance to the office.
It's clearly possible to have a large family under current circumstances — some people do, not all of them rich. The question is what changes might make it more likely. Martin is suggesting one change that would. My guess is that the effect would be small but I could be wrong.
In an earlier post, on homelessness, I calculated that from 1965 to 2023 the cost of housing per square foot, inflation adjusted, stayed about the same — houses got more expensive but also bigger. Over that same period real income increased substantially, so housing became more affordable while birth rates fell. Of course, it is possible that making it even more affordable would push them up, but the idea that more expensive housing is the main explanation for low birth rates does not fit the evidence.
"Housing" is a hard good to measure. Housing is cheap where the jobs aren't, and expensive where they are. Also, the fact that there is "cheap housing" in the "bad part of town" may influence *metrics*, but isn't useful when the kind of middle to upper middle class people you want to have more kids are doing their budget. My nephew in CA shows me his budget and its pretty obvious housing is a big reason he's not starting a family, it doesn't matter if there are cheap options in West Virginia or the Ghetto.
The real problem we have is that having outlawed discrimination base on not price, people have used price as the way to keep out the underclass and other dysfunctionals. Real estate is expensive because that's how you make sure your neighborhood and schools only have the right kind people in them that don't cause problems.
We get more building in Red States in part because they do a better job ameliorating the externalities of dysfunctionals. When you don't have to worry so much who your neighbors are you don't have the same incentives to be a NIMBY. This is why I don't have much hope for the blue states, they think they can end zoning by making a substack post and convincing a state legislator rather then addressing the root causes.
The only succesful example of 1st world country with high tfr is Israel, where religious identity plays a big role. The only succcessful examples of sub-groups in the 1st world with high tfr are religious groups (trad caths, orthodox jews, some evangelical sects).
Seems clear the only real solution to boost fertility will have to involve cultural or genetic selection for religion, though it's necessary but not sufficient condition (many religious groups DONT have high tfr). so likely religion PLUS focus on family/kids.
Whatever else happens, the world of the future will belong to those who are there. The 'children' of the childless won't be there.
If instead of shoving everyone into 15-minute mega-cities, most people (using work-from-home, drone delivery, etc) move to less crowded spaces those who desire and have children may have at least one more than they would have. Maybe those who woud have had one or none if a 15-mnute city will be in exurbia and have 2 or more.
In addition, having more people with children outside of cities (this is happening now, really), with AI and connectivity and work from home, some sort of home schooling with diferent parents guiding different classes may well make having children less burdensome and more fun.
Confession: I NEVER found my children to be a burden. Rather they have always been a blessing.
I get the housing prices are a real problem and most families feel the need to have two incomes, but there are alternatives!
Even making much lower incomes, if you live in a rural or semi-rural area you can afford a lot more with less. The median home listing in my county is $160k right now. Even if that's a small house with a small yard (signs of a poor housing for people in my area) that's probably bigger than most housing in cities and infinitely more yard. Some Googling says that a 30 year mortgage on that kind of home is about $1k/month, or less than a third of the median rent in NYC. The median home size in my area is 1,700 sq. ft., compared to around 600 in NYC.
NYC's median household income is a little under $80k, while where I live household income is just under $60k. The difference in standard of living totally makes that worthwhile - you feel richer while making less.
I think that was kind of the underying theme of my post. If you want more children, there are going to be places where they will be 'cheaper' and your life will be richer.
Work at home is not going away. My wife has been doing pretty much the same job since late 2020 for the same company. Since Covid she has worked from home. So have most of her co-workers, and her company is thriving. It has a building that was designed to hod about 500 workers in a nice, upscale suburb. But now they're getting more work done by workers at home and ony having some 50 workers in the buiding. So they're renting very good office space to several other small companies that have a lot of off-site empoyees. The company has a new revenue stream.
Meanwhile, my wife is more productive, AND she can schedule her time to do other things she wants to do. So we moved to be closer to her famiy 2 years ago.
I think that, will lead more people to move to places where they can get more of what they want. I also thin a lot of these people will be professionals who want better education for their children, and wil find than among them all theyhave the knowledge to use "pods" to homeschool from K-12. And they will do so, and it will attract others. And homeschool pods mean interaction among parents, so . . .
Maybe not next year, but check in 10 years from now.
In keeping with the quoting of ideas from SF stories... Clifford Simak's "City" starts out with a similar concept. All manufacturing was automated and comms were at modern levels (1952) story. Everyone had moved out to the country side.
However, in his story, instead of adopting the characteristics of folks who currently live away from cities, they became agoraphobic because they never left their homes and never visited anyone in person.
Agree about children. My Son is the best thing there's ever been in my life.
Women will do whatever it takes to get and keep their status high with other women. Motherhood no longer increases that status. Change that, and I bet the birth rate will increase.
I have no idea. I think female intrasexual status competition has gotten completely out of hand. Male attempts to intervene are the only thing that unites them.
Even TERFs focus on men in women’s spaces instead of the effects that “treatments” for Sudden Onset Gender Dysphoria have on girls’ fertility.
Take resources from non-mothers and give it to mothers.
People say money hasn't worked, but they've only ever tried like 10% the cost of raising a child and usually provided as in-kind services rather then cash.
The real problem is that parents can't vote for their children, and the childless have no shame voting for retirements they never had the kids to pay for.
A number of governments have tried financial incentives, to negligible effect. Hungary comes to mind.
Also, subsidies for mothers effectively cuckold unmarried men. Married couples would probably object to subsides for single mothers. Unmarried men would check out even more than many do now.
As I said, nobody has actually tried to compensate people an amount remotely close to the actual cost of child rearing. When I see a scale and method in line with the problem fail I’ll update my priors, but nobody has remotely tried for real.
Certainly I would favor the payouts to reward proper behavior and good breeding.
We don’t have unlimited resources. This is an important problem, but that doesn’t mean we should _waste_ money on it. There’s also the fact that, futile or not, government spending is easier to start than to end.
Talk about changing social values is mostly wishful thinking, because major changes in the form of a horde of migrants who won't assimilate is replacing us as we speak. Many of the groups involved are either Catholic or Muslim, both of which encourage large families. Thus the problem is solving itself, whether we like the answer or not.
Wages increase to the point where the labor supply curve bends backward (workers can afford more leisure). The opportunity cost of having children then falls, so fertility rises.
IIRC, US fertility rate was declining even before the Great Depression and WWII pushed it down, and the baby boom was the outlier.
One hypothesis to add to causes is that moving away from farming meant that children's work no longer brought value to the family. I'm sure ugly factories and antipathy to child labor contributed.
As work and technology changes, could we find a place for 8 year olds to add to the family income?
I think that it is pretty clear that low fertility is not an incentive problem (all surveys I could dig up in various parts of the world indicate that people WANT to have more children than they end up having) and it is mostly not a heritable behavioral pattern (that is mathematically impossible). It must be some environmental change in the broad sense. Also, high-fertility communities also experience a fertility decline, it is just a bit delayed compared to the rest of humanity; I don't think that the increase of their relative weight will significantly offset fertility. They may well hit the same walls long before their cultural patterns become dominant, which, in turn, might not even happen precisely because of that.
To me, it seems like the immediate reason for declining fertility is the increasing age at which people have their first child. Both male and female fertility fall with age, though in case of women it is more dramatic. The reason for this is the depletion of ovarian reserve. The technical solution is to freeze eggs during the most fertile years (in the late teens and early twenties) and have them fertilized in vitro. The availability of this technology is increasing rapidly and it may well become very widespread, once it will become better known. Having frozen eggs might even become a signal making women more attractive as mates in their thirties and forties.
For one IVF is an uncomfortable process no matter what your age, so very few people want to do it unless its to conceive a child in the near future with a known partner.
For another having some eggs frozen somewhere doesn't get rid of the wrinkles or give you the energy to chase a toddler around.
Mostly, I think it gives people false hope. They ought to be focused on their biological clock, not trying to deny it. If it's an excuse not to be out there trying to find a partner, its unlikely to lead to more kids.
I love IVF for the eugenic possibilities and recommend it as opposed to natural birth, but its not clear it will safe society.
Lots of people believe that declining populations will lead to problems, for pretty obvious reasons. It sounds as though you believe the opposite. For what reasons?
So far as my post is concerned, it has nothing to do with wanting to raise fertility, since I am asking not how to raise it but what things might happen that would raise it. Just as when I raised the question on DSL, lots of people in the comments are answering the question I didn't ask.
I believe that, in terms of level and rate, wealth per capita would benefit from a decrease in fertility. If population growth falls, per capita wealth increases both temporarily and steadily. Moreover, the growth rate of wealth per capita can certainly decrease if the ideas created depend on the size of the population (Romer), but if the new ideas come from AI this is no longer the case. Regarding your question (What could increase fertility?) My answer is: the opposite of what made it go down. A demographic transition in reverse with a forgetfulness of medical knowledge. A sharp increase in the cost of raising children. These two events would make us return to preferring quantity to the detriment of the quality of children. But I don't think that's happening.
The change in pension insurance could lead to a reduction of the (profitable) ever growing retirement age limit (especially for grandmothers), so grandparents, if they are nearby, could take care of their grandchildren. The Swedish government try to solve this by providing grandparents with a paid portion of parental leave. But droping your kids at your mother-in-law when they are sick, or between yours and your partners shift is even more important, especially when they are of kindergarten age.
I am not sure what change in pension insurance you are referring to. Is this based on my point about social security running into problems? I would expect that to lead to later retirement.
I was referring to a change I would like to see in my country, which would be similar to the one in Chile. My mother-in-law would be happy to take early retirement and babysit her 5 grandchildren if it didn't significantly penalize her pension. She has to wait 10 years for regular retirement, and I don't plan to have children in 10 years.
I wasn't asking how as dictator you would push up fertility but what things that might happen would push it up. How are you planning to get yourself elected dictator?
Apparently households with a yearly income of one million dollar and above are the only ones exhibiting above-replacement level fertility. The most immediate explanation, namely, the availability of hired help to facilitate parenting, is partial at best: hired help is available also to affluent households well below the one million threshold, who however exhibit a markedly lower fertility. A plausible explanation is that only the truly rich feel secure enough about their status to afford the handicap in the ‘meritocratic’ competition for status implied by having and raising children. In fact, at the top end of the income distribution the currently prevailing low status associated to raising children may invert, in line with the concept of ‘counter-signaling .’
The new reproductive technologies allowing a reduction of the downside risk of having children are likely to become available first to the rich. This should further raise their fertility: the rich would have smarter kids and more of them.
When you get to the level of truly rich, the wife doesn't have to work. And if she does work, it can be a fun make-work job that doesn't really need to make money. True status is that your wife has a "business" losing $10k a month or some dumb NGO thing or she's a high end "tradwife".
The real fertility crunch is two people in highly demanding real careers. If that's what it takes to afford real estate/childcare, you aren't going to be having many kids.
The truly rich are too small a demographic group to supply eugenics on their own. You need to get the UMC fertility rate up.
Note that the real problem here is that sending the wife in an UMC couple to work for money is a zero sum game. You do it and the other couples do it and then you all try to bid up the same real estate, same degrees, compete for the same careers, etc. It's a Red Queen Race.
You gotta find a way to make the goods involved less rivalrous, and you've got to normalize the disposable income between breeders and non breeders (basically, tax non breeders more and breeders less) so that having children isn't seen as a way to get one up on others in the Red Queen Race.
Who is the "you" in this? Are you answering the question "if you were dictator how would you raise fertility?" That isn't the question I am asking in the post, as I say at the beginning.
From the Baby Boom to the current Baby Bust, GDP/capita increased by something like thousands of %. Women went from spending nearly their entire lives in domestic service to almost none. We got the washing machine, jet travel, and Amazon delivering whatever I want from the whole world in two days.
And fertility fell.
What are the odds that Zoom, Chat GPT, and artificial wombs are going to change that?
All of the productivity those nerds, engineers, and business people came up with got redirected straight into Red Queen Races. We didn't get Keynes's 15 hour work week prediction. Star Trek didn't happen. You can blame the government for much of that if you like (I sure would), but that still means that *somebody needs to change the government*.
"You" is "us". And yes, we need to find a way to change the incentive structure because as mere individuals no matter how much we increase material prosperity we just end up in a no holds bared knife fight for positional goods so brutal we rob our own wombs to pay for it.
From 1950 to the present real GNP per capita has increased about five fold. That's a lot, but not thousands of percent. Real per capita income has gone up about as much.
I guess I grabbed nominal rather then real, oops.
In the grand scheme of things, where people on the Malthusian edge had eight kids and rapidly repopulated after every demographic disaster, does this insight matter?
What about housing? I'm guessing there are people who would be more inclined to have kids if they lived in a place with more bedrooms.
What future changes would result in housing being less expensive?
Currently, people support regulations that curtail the supply of housing. I like to think it's not too far-fetched that public opinion will shift the other way some day. Both participants in the VP debate at least paid lip-service to the idea that more housing would be a good thing. Then again, if they are to be believed then half of all new homes will be given to illegal immigrants by the Deep State, and the other half will be bought up by speculators and left vacant 🤷♂️.
This is already happening, except that the "sustainable communities" crowd who are pushing it won't leave the properties empty. Blackrock (the main investor group involved) will bulldoze the houses and rebuild super-dense apartments which they will own forever, while continuing to use the urban-planning agencies to keep out competition. This is part of the WEF "Great Reset" to make us all serfs.
Some people foresee that remote work will lead to deurbanization. Personally I have been considering moving to a less urban/expensive area now that I am mostly working from home and thus no longer have much of a need for living within walking distance to the office.
Once upon a time kids -- all eight of them -- slept with their parents! There was a bed, but no bedrooms.
It's clearly possible to have a large family under current circumstances — some people do, not all of them rich. The question is what changes might make it more likely. Martin is suggesting one change that would. My guess is that the effect would be small but I could be wrong.
In an earlier post, on homelessness, I calculated that from 1965 to 2023 the cost of housing per square foot, inflation adjusted, stayed about the same — houses got more expensive but also bigger. Over that same period real income increased substantially, so housing became more affordable while birth rates fell. Of course, it is possible that making it even more affordable would push them up, but the idea that more expensive housing is the main explanation for low birth rates does not fit the evidence.
"Housing" is a hard good to measure. Housing is cheap where the jobs aren't, and expensive where they are. Also, the fact that there is "cheap housing" in the "bad part of town" may influence *metrics*, but isn't useful when the kind of middle to upper middle class people you want to have more kids are doing their budget. My nephew in CA shows me his budget and its pretty obvious housing is a big reason he's not starting a family, it doesn't matter if there are cheap options in West Virginia or the Ghetto.
The real problem we have is that having outlawed discrimination base on not price, people have used price as the way to keep out the underclass and other dysfunctionals. Real estate is expensive because that's how you make sure your neighborhood and schools only have the right kind people in them that don't cause problems.
We get more building in Red States in part because they do a better job ameliorating the externalities of dysfunctionals. When you don't have to worry so much who your neighbors are you don't have the same incentives to be a NIMBY. This is why I don't have much hope for the blue states, they think they can end zoning by making a substack post and convincing a state legislator rather then addressing the root causes.
The only succesful example of 1st world country with high tfr is Israel, where religious identity plays a big role. The only succcessful examples of sub-groups in the 1st world with high tfr are religious groups (trad caths, orthodox jews, some evangelical sects).
Seems clear the only real solution to boost fertility will have to involve cultural or genetic selection for religion, though it's necessary but not sufficient condition (many religious groups DONT have high tfr). so likely religion PLUS focus on family/kids.
Why would that happen? Is that saying anything more than cultural or genetic selection for high birth rates, which I discussed in the previous post?
John Kurtz presents an interesting argument blaming childlessness on liberalism; https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/liberal-societies-dont-have-children
I don't entirely agree with it, but it's great food for thought.
That was my take on his essay too.
Whatever else happens, the world of the future will belong to those who are there. The 'children' of the childless won't be there.
If instead of shoving everyone into 15-minute mega-cities, most people (using work-from-home, drone delivery, etc) move to less crowded spaces those who desire and have children may have at least one more than they would have. Maybe those who woud have had one or none if a 15-mnute city will be in exurbia and have 2 or more.
In addition, having more people with children outside of cities (this is happening now, really), with AI and connectivity and work from home, some sort of home schooling with diferent parents guiding different classes may well make having children less burdensome and more fun.
Confession: I NEVER found my children to be a burden. Rather they have always been a blessing.
I get the housing prices are a real problem and most families feel the need to have two incomes, but there are alternatives!
Even making much lower incomes, if you live in a rural or semi-rural area you can afford a lot more with less. The median home listing in my county is $160k right now. Even if that's a small house with a small yard (signs of a poor housing for people in my area) that's probably bigger than most housing in cities and infinitely more yard. Some Googling says that a 30 year mortgage on that kind of home is about $1k/month, or less than a third of the median rent in NYC. The median home size in my area is 1,700 sq. ft., compared to around 600 in NYC.
NYC's median household income is a little under $80k, while where I live household income is just under $60k. The difference in standard of living totally makes that worthwhile - you feel richer while making less.
I think that was kind of the underying theme of my post. If you want more children, there are going to be places where they will be 'cheaper' and your life will be richer.
Work at home is not going away. My wife has been doing pretty much the same job since late 2020 for the same company. Since Covid she has worked from home. So have most of her co-workers, and her company is thriving. It has a building that was designed to hod about 500 workers in a nice, upscale suburb. But now they're getting more work done by workers at home and ony having some 50 workers in the buiding. So they're renting very good office space to several other small companies that have a lot of off-site empoyees. The company has a new revenue stream.
Meanwhile, my wife is more productive, AND she can schedule her time to do other things she wants to do. So we moved to be closer to her famiy 2 years ago.
I think that, will lead more people to move to places where they can get more of what they want. I also thin a lot of these people will be professionals who want better education for their children, and wil find than among them all theyhave the knowledge to use "pods" to homeschool from K-12. And they will do so, and it will attract others. And homeschool pods mean interaction among parents, so . . .
Maybe not next year, but check in 10 years from now.
In keeping with the quoting of ideas from SF stories... Clifford Simak's "City" starts out with a similar concept. All manufacturing was automated and comms were at modern levels (1952) story. Everyone had moved out to the country side.
However, in his story, instead of adopting the characteristics of folks who currently live away from cities, they became agoraphobic because they never left their homes and never visited anyone in person.
Agree about children. My Son is the best thing there's ever been in my life.
Women will do whatever it takes to get and keep their status high with other women. Motherhood no longer increases that status. Change that, and I bet the birth rate will increase.
What future changes would increase the status of motherhood?
I have no idea. I think female intrasexual status competition has gotten completely out of hand. Male attempts to intervene are the only thing that unites them.
Even TERFs focus on men in women’s spaces instead of the effects that “treatments” for Sudden Onset Gender Dysphoria have on girls’ fertility.
Take resources from non-mothers and give it to mothers.
People say money hasn't worked, but they've only ever tried like 10% the cost of raising a child and usually provided as in-kind services rather then cash.
The real problem is that parents can't vote for their children, and the childless have no shame voting for retirements they never had the kids to pay for.
A number of governments have tried financial incentives, to negligible effect. Hungary comes to mind.
Also, subsidies for mothers effectively cuckold unmarried men. Married couples would probably object to subsides for single mothers. Unmarried men would check out even more than many do now.
As I said, nobody has actually tried to compensate people an amount remotely close to the actual cost of child rearing. When I see a scale and method in line with the problem fail I’ll update my priors, but nobody has remotely tried for real.
Certainly I would favor the payouts to reward proper behavior and good breeding.
We don’t have unlimited resources. This is an important problem, but that doesn’t mean we should _waste_ money on it. There’s also the fact that, futile or not, government spending is easier to start than to end.
I’ll admit we have limited resources when we spend as much on people under 18 as we spend on people over 65.
We already do that. The tax rate for married couples is half that for single people. It’s the big reason gays pushed for gay marriage.
What are you talking about?
The tax brackets are all the same. Married filing jointly is just two single incomes put together.
"It’s the big reason gays pushed for gay marriage."
Lol, no.
Check the tables again.
12% $11,601 to $47,150 $23,201 to $94,300
22% $47,151 to $100,525 $94,301 to $201,050
24% $100,526 to $191,950 $201,051 to $383,900
32% $191,951 to $243,725 $383,901 to $487,450
Talk about changing social values is mostly wishful thinking, because major changes in the form of a horde of migrants who won't assimilate is replacing us as we speak. Many of the groups involved are either Catholic or Muslim, both of which encourage large families. Thus the problem is solving itself, whether we like the answer or not.
If parents had more energy(not in physical sense), eg energy drinks or cheaper weight loše treatments.
I would say you are veering dangerously close to eugenics in your suggestion for selecting 'desirable ' characteristics
Wages increase to the point where the labor supply curve bends backward (workers can afford more leisure). The opportunity cost of having children then falls, so fertility rises.
Good one.
IIRC, US fertility rate was declining even before the Great Depression and WWII pushed it down, and the baby boom was the outlier.
One hypothesis to add to causes is that moving away from farming meant that children's work no longer brought value to the family. I'm sure ugly factories and antipathy to child labor contributed.
As work and technology changes, could we find a place for 8 year olds to add to the family income?
Provide something like $10k per kid in cash benefit. Scale it with income for eugenic reasons.
Provide full school choice (ESAs), another $10k per kid and doesn't even cost anything extra.
This can easily be paid for, the problem is political.
I started the post by explaining that my question was not what could be done to raise fertility but what might happen that raised it.
I think that it is pretty clear that low fertility is not an incentive problem (all surveys I could dig up in various parts of the world indicate that people WANT to have more children than they end up having) and it is mostly not a heritable behavioral pattern (that is mathematically impossible). It must be some environmental change in the broad sense. Also, high-fertility communities also experience a fertility decline, it is just a bit delayed compared to the rest of humanity; I don't think that the increase of their relative weight will significantly offset fertility. They may well hit the same walls long before their cultural patterns become dominant, which, in turn, might not even happen precisely because of that.
To me, it seems like the immediate reason for declining fertility is the increasing age at which people have their first child. Both male and female fertility fall with age, though in case of women it is more dramatic. The reason for this is the depletion of ovarian reserve. The technical solution is to freeze eggs during the most fertile years (in the late teens and early twenties) and have them fertilized in vitro. The availability of this technology is increasing rapidly and it may well become very widespread, once it will become better known. Having frozen eggs might even become a signal making women more attractive as mates in their thirties and forties.
This isn't a solution.
For one IVF is an uncomfortable process no matter what your age, so very few people want to do it unless its to conceive a child in the near future with a known partner.
For another having some eggs frozen somewhere doesn't get rid of the wrinkles or give you the energy to chase a toddler around.
Mostly, I think it gives people false hope. They ought to be focused on their biological clock, not trying to deny it. If it's an excuse not to be out there trying to find a partner, its unlikely to lead to more kids.
I love IVF for the eugenic possibilities and recommend it as opposed to natural birth, but its not clear it will safe society.
But why on earth do you want to raise fertility?
Lots of people believe that declining populations will lead to problems, for pretty obvious reasons. It sounds as though you believe the opposite. For what reasons?
So far as my post is concerned, it has nothing to do with wanting to raise fertility, since I am asking not how to raise it but what things might happen that would raise it. Just as when I raised the question on DSL, lots of people in the comments are answering the question I didn't ask.
I believe that, in terms of level and rate, wealth per capita would benefit from a decrease in fertility. If population growth falls, per capita wealth increases both temporarily and steadily. Moreover, the growth rate of wealth per capita can certainly decrease if the ideas created depend on the size of the population (Romer), but if the new ideas come from AI this is no longer the case. Regarding your question (What could increase fertility?) My answer is: the opposite of what made it go down. A demographic transition in reverse with a forgetfulness of medical knowledge. A sharp increase in the cost of raising children. These two events would make us return to preferring quantity to the detriment of the quality of children. But I don't think that's happening.
The change in pension insurance could lead to a reduction of the (profitable) ever growing retirement age limit (especially for grandmothers), so grandparents, if they are nearby, could take care of their grandchildren. The Swedish government try to solve this by providing grandparents with a paid portion of parental leave. But droping your kids at your mother-in-law when they are sick, or between yours and your partners shift is even more important, especially when they are of kindergarten age.
I am not sure what change in pension insurance you are referring to. Is this based on my point about social security running into problems? I would expect that to lead to later retirement.
I was referring to a change I would like to see in my country, which would be similar to the one in Chile. My mother-in-law would be happy to take early retirement and babysit her 5 grandchildren if it didn't significantly penalize her pension. She has to wait 10 years for regular retirement, and I don't plan to have children in 10 years.
Anyone who is not paired off by 30 has to go to jail and sit there with all the other people not paired off by 30.
Why would that happen?
Being single after 30 would be illegal. It's just one law.
I wasn't asking how as dictator you would push up fertility but what things that might happen would push it up. How are you planning to get yourself elected dictator?
I don't need to be dictator, I just need the dictator to pass my one law.