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Comment by nugget | Hacker News Reader

How do you ensure our society survives in such an environment? There’s a potential future where the birth rate in open and tolerant communities falls to near zero while the birth rate in closed, ultra orthodox (across numerous faiths and denominations) religious communities within which women are commanded to procreate remains high. If you watch a show like Handmaid’s Tale through this lens you can start to connect the hypothetical dots from here to there.

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I think the solution is probably to make having children more attractive with government subsidies and labor laws. E.g. free daycare, affordable education (including college), health care, a minimum amount of paid time off per year, etc.

Nobody should be forced to get married or have children if they don’t want to. But if we can alleviate some of the risks/down sides to having children, I think we will see more people choosing to start families and also having more children per family.

> to make having children more attractive with government subsidies and labor laws

This is a bad idea. Russian government have already tried that, and the result was that less wealthy people (mostly alcoholic and drug addicts) started to literally make children to receive subsidies and spend them on themselves.

It's fun to me how Google search results differ for "to make a child for subsidies" and for this same phrase translated to Russian, where it has already became a phenomenon.

Subsidies can be tied up to mortgage: the entire cost of housing can be made deductible from taxes, all expenses related to kids can be reimbursed (by IRS in April: you show checks and they give you money back). On top of that your income can be backed by the government for an extended period of time in case something happens to you, while you still need to pay for everything. You may ask where do we get money for all this? Tax on wealth. Many countries tax investments at 1% a year, not income, but investments. This won't bankrupt the rich people because investments usually make 5-10% per year and the government can take a small fraction of that. And no, the rich won't move their money abroad because safety that the US gives is worth a lot.

Many European countries have all those things and the birthrate is still falling.

Isn't it likely that those ultra orthodox societies would repeat the cycle and we'd still end up back here anyways? It's not like the current situation sprung up out of nothing.

Artificial wombs.

Making babies isn't the hard part.

Liberalism needs to evolve to incorporate the family and procreation into its philosophies and worldview if it wants to continue having an influence.

Seems like you’re saying liberalism is anti-those-things but it’s not, it is anti-coercion though and if that has historically been the solution to what you describe then I could see one drawing that conclusion.

How about men could stop doing the things that make women not select them?

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