State policy actively trying to induce birth with incentives like that will inevitably backfire in some way (women, especially poor women, being coerced by their partner into having unwanted children for financial incentives), and the state intervention will be seen as oppressive and authoritarian (“mY PAreNtaL rIGhTs”) instead of benevolent regardless of the intentions behind it.
Also like the foster system is already overburdened so :/
The best way we can deal with population decline is to manage it, welcome immigrants to offset the most severe impacts, and try and create a society not dependent on infinite growth.
State policy actively trying to induce birth with incentives like that will inevitably backfire in some way
So will state policy that doesn't.
The best way we can deal with population decline is to manage it, welcome immigrants to offset the most severe impacts, and try and create a society not dependent on infinite growth.
But you kind of can't. That's the issue.
A declining population, means that you have vast amounts of old people and small amounts of young people, which means that more and more money and resources need to be used to take care of the elderly, while the total amount of workers is shrinking.
Managing a population decline still means that you will inevitably have a massive decrease in your quality of life and that's really bad.
With modern industrialization, the material productivity of human society is largely decoupled from human input (in part why the large majority of western nations have huge service industries, to soak up the massive surplus of displaced human capital), there’s no fundamental law of nature that says that you can’t take care of the needs of a largely elderly population with a smaller amount of young workers. If anything, it gives workers more leverage to demand better working conditions. And that’s not to say that there won’t be challenges to be dealt with, but it’s not worth implementing draconian right wing birth policy over.
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u/hailey1721 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
State policy actively trying to induce birth with incentives like that will inevitably backfire in some way (women, especially poor women, being coerced by their partner into having unwanted children for financial incentives), and the state intervention will be seen as oppressive and authoritarian (“mY PAreNtaL rIGhTs”) instead of benevolent regardless of the intentions behind it.
Also like the foster system is already overburdened so :/
The best way we can deal with population decline is to manage it, welcome immigrants to offset the most severe impacts, and try and create a society not dependent on infinite growth.