These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
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If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.
In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.
Sounds like a good reason to tax the wealthy and corporations at a higher rate. You could even have a global proportional tax rate if the will was there.
When you’re looking at recurring expenses like welfare, you need the incoming money to be there as well for the math to work. The wealthy and the corporations aren’t an unlimited pot, particularly at the scale of national welfare. Social security spent 1.5 trillion dollars in the 2023 fiscal year. You could entirely liquidate Apple, pretend that doing so wouldn’t collapse its value, and that would pay for less than two years of Social Security, to say nothing of other welfare programs, and this is just America.
You also have to consider that lower population growth can also result in lower corporate profits, causing there to be less money available for you to tax in the first place. At the scale of an entire country’s population, taxing the wealthy doesn’t go as far as people think.
That may be a problem… but our global carbon footprint is a much bigger problem, and part of what can help reduce that is reducing the size of the population.
A cursory search suggests that global population is expected to peak sometime around 2090, so an actual reduction in population really can’t be a primary component of our mitigation strategy relative to a general shift towards green energy. By the time we reach that point, we’ve either solved it or solidly doomed ourselves, population be damned.
Don’t argue with economically illiterate people, they’ll never learn.
Eh, depends on the source and intentionality of the illiteracy. I’ve had good conversations with Mr. FlyingSquid before, and I was myself a lot more ignorant in the past. A lot of people genuinely don’t know what they don’t know and believe, for example, that it’s possible to create a UK-style NHS by simply taxing the billionaires and corporations a little bit more. When you see stats about wealth inequality, it’s easy to find yourself believing that they can do essentially anything, and people are bad at intuitively understanding the scale of national populations.