Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough?

No, it’s what’s left after taxes, before any actual spending on things like housing occurs.

> Gross disposable household income is the amount of money that individuals in the household sector can spend or save after income distribution measures.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/regionalaccounts/grossdisposa...

I have seen reasons like workspace discrimination, lack of parental leave, economic uncertainty and poverty in general used as reasons why young adults are not choosing to have children and it doesn’t quite make sense to me. Objectively along all those axis, societies have improved with time from the early 1900s and the birth rate keeps falling. Can someone help me understand why European countries keep trying to increase the comfort of their population expecting to increase birth rates? I understand social programs with payouts can be popular and perhaps paying to solve the problem is appealing to the population but I don’t see why we would expect those policies to actually increase fertility. I would understand if this was simply a case of government programs that people like even if they don’t achieve the desired outcome.

I think a much simpler microeconomic analysis explains the decline in fertility: opportunity cost. People in child-bearing age have too much other stuff with a larger expected payout than having children. For example, a lot of people might prefer to work hard to improve their socioeconomic situation or travel the word over raising children. Under this model, more government provided comfort won’t increase fertility because the vast amount of costs in child bearing comes from the opportunity cost. Even in a world without parental discrimination I would find it hard to argue that parents should automatically be promoted in their work but that may actually be the more significant cost. A parent may forgo promotion or other gains for parenting.

I am not sure what a better solution this problem is. We probably need to reframe childbearing in a different way through so that having children is not subject to this type of utilitarian analysis.

There have been planned economies in various degrees that have subsidized housing, willed industries into existence, that have not done better.

The real issue is that none of our societies have brought certain values into the modern world, particularly values like family and loyalty. And because we have nuclear families now, the neuroses of the parents get focused on the 1-2 children that they tend to have.

Because survival is the goal of every species. It's encoded into the brains of a healthy animal. A falling birth rate is the opposite of that, so from a philosophical point of view it's against our most basic and most important purpose of life.

From a more modern economical point of view a falling birth rate means that a lot of the luxuries we enjoy today are based on the fact that future generations will pay for them. Pensions is the obvious one, people from today won't have a pension tomorrow if tomorrow's young people are less than tomorrow's old people. But forget pensions for a moment, an even bigger issue would be health care. Health care is mostly consumed by old non working people and paid for by the younger working population, if the former hugely outnumbers the latter then it's not hard to see how our entire healthcare system will collapse.

This raises the next big issue: immigration and the loss of a nation's own culture. If a nation cannot fix the problem of the falling birth rate then the only way to sustain itself is by having to import huge amounts of young working age people from other countries, inevitable therefore changing the culture and demographic of the nation itself. You don't have to be a right wing lunatic to see that such a drastic slow shift of demographics will cause a lot of friction and issues over a long period of time before it settles again (essentially when one demographic was mostly replaced by a new one).

> The only ethical way to get to a lower amount of people is to have less children. We should see falling birth rates as a good thing, not a problem to be solved.

Well, a falling birth rate means the extinction of humankind, so it's hardly a good thing. What you mean is that you think that we need a temporary slowdown in births because you think that we have grown by too much too fast. Well, that is possible, I don't know for sure, but if you'd look at a graph of humankind you'd want to zoom out by 100x until you don't see every little blip in acute rises and drops and see a slow but steady growth, because anything else would suggest that we have a fundamental issue with our own survival. Now when our grandparents were born the world had not even 50% of the people we hav etoday, so there was definitely a huge influx of humans over the last 100 years and that is mostly explained through huge improvements in medicine and standards of living, vaccinations, etc., so perhaps there is a good argument to say that a short term fall in births is a good thing to soften the issues we see today from those drastic increases in population, but overall a fall in birthrates is not a good thing.