These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.

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.

  • @YoBuckStopsHere
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    -1910 months ago

    Do you suggest that the world’s population revert to a Quaker lifestyle? Seems really boring.

    • @hedgehogging_the_bed
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      1410 months ago

      You probably meant Amish. Quakers lifestyle these days is just being really nice most of the time, in my experience.

      • @YoBuckStopsHere
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        -710 months ago

        Not, I meant Quackers. The Amish are horrific people.