Are We Doomed?

Socialist Romania did all that during communist rule and it exploded spectacularly 30+ years later when communism ended, that we're still feeling the negative backlash effects today.

The answer to birth rate issues, is not more forced government intervention, but less to none of it. The reason we're in a mess in the west is the governments putting too many thumbs on the economic and regulatory scales for far too long, manipulating the natural order of life. Modern industrialized highly skilled societies are detrimental to human biological reproduction.

If you built an economic system where kids need to leave the parents' village to go spend time grinding studying and upskilling till their mid 20s in a big city and then working till their mid 30s before they afford to move out of shoebox, with their parents nowhere near to help with childcare, you can't be surprised demographics collapse. As per the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child.

You can't fuck with mother nature and not have it fuck you back. It's Newton's Third Law.

Plus, contrary to Reaganomics, the economy can't grow infinitely and neither can the population. Everything created by man eventually has a plateau and an end. So then why not reform the dated and broken "infinite growth" Ponzi-scheme economic system now towards a more sustainable model, instead of delaying its inevitable failure with stuff like 50 year mortgages and unlimited migration?

This is pedantic. Do you understand what "at the same time" means? By the time birth rates plummet below replacement rate in Africa, they would have risen well above replacement again in Europe and North America.

> Except Africa can't fill the gap for everywhere else, and if immigration is the "solution" then what do you do about Africa after it's been sucked dry of its prime labor force? Just leave all its poor elderly to die on their own?

We won't need to import labor from Africa when they have their own labor shortage because the birth rate in the US would have already recovered. The labor gap won't hit everywhere at the same time. That's why immigration works. In fact, Africa might need to import labor from America when the gap hits them.

The simple answer is that our current way of life (in the west at least) does not accommodate kids. We USED to have kids because they were an economic benefit to agrerian cultures, but have since become a burden since our society does not make time or resources for them, least of which is physical space when you consider urban life.

IF we want to increase the birth rate again, we need to shift our lifestyles away from being as career centric as they are today. We could for instance, remove the stigma of working part time or having a stay at home parent. We could encourage people not to grind long hours to climb the corporate ladder. Actually fix the housing problem without bending to NIMBYists and investors and provide affordable/accessible childcare.

Since children are the future tax-base and labor force of a nation, pay parents for raising kids, like its a job. It is kind of gross to view children in this perspective, but if we are talking about economics, well-adjusted children are just as much an input just as much as energy is.

Technologically speaking, we as a species are basically magic at this point, so I reject the notion that strategically recovering the birth rate is impossible, rather there is no will to.

Even North Korea has to encourage women to give birth[0]; the Kim dynasty can’t simply issue an order and shoot anyone who disobeys. It simply doesn’t work that way.

[0]: https://www.voanews.com/a/north-korea-s-kim-calls-for-women-...