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.
What is happening now is another adjustment, like the ones you mentioned in your post. Over a million people in the US died of Covid since 2020, and a lot of them worked some sort of job. And the people still around are no longer willing to sell themselves to a company 80 hours a week, so unions are starting to pop up.
Most of the people who died were old and didn’t work. COVID is much, much more likely to kill someone in their 70s vs in their 40s.