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.
When a menial worker complains their menial job doesn’t pay enough. Boomers sing “that’s not a real job” then expect those same people to have kids to support their greed.
Not to mention that when everyone decided they didn’t want to work those jobs, they all threw a fit that no one wanted to work anymore. Wow I can’t believe the industry that “isn’t a real job” full of “unskilled labor” doesn’t have people lining up to work at.
You used to be able to raise kids on that mind of job. Boomers are weird and seem to absorb all information given to them uncritically, so when the narrative changed and retail workers started having to hit food banks, they just rolled with it as if their own past wasn’t real.