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Comment by jp555 | Hacker News Reader

Good luck.

With a shrunken generation of family to help due to 30+ years of one-child policy, and almost no social support (China does not really have socialized healthcare in practice) there's no one to help take care of larger families. But there is a HUGE number of rapidly aging parents and grandparents to take care of.

Add a culture that puts accumulating wealth as the #1 virtue, and it becomes nearly impossible to reverse a low birth rate.

In Canada Quebec has been paying French families to have more kids for a very long time. Today Quebec has the lowest provincial birthrate in Canada.

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> Today Quebec has the lowest provincial birthrate in Canada.

Not remotely true. As of 2016 Quebec has a fertility rate of 1.59 children per women which is higher than the Canadian average (1.54), Ontario (the largest province by far, 1.46) as well as BC (1.40) and the Atlantic provinces (1.42-1.58).

See https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/91-209-x/2018001/article...

Ah that's new to me thanks! I recently saw numbers showing something different (wish I could find that link), and I was remembering this interview from 2019 - https://www.tvo.org/video/the-worlds-shrinking-problem

I found it interesting that the authors looking at the history of efforts to financially simulate birthrate found that it has never worked to reverse the decline. @21:15

Your comment is a bit bigoted, the government has been paying families, not "french families", to have more kids. This isn't segregated by language at all. Everyone gets their child allowance payments, whatever their origin.

It's not meant to be bigoted (that's you mind reading) - it's meant to give context to non Canadians. But I probably should have said "Quebec Families".

Is the origin of the policy a desire to preserve and increase Quebec’s unique culture (“French families”), or not? If so, is it bigoted to say so?

It had its basis in the anglification of Montreal and other cities. After 1763, Quebec was a French province ran by the Brits, and due to immigration policies and family sizes, cities like Montreal became more English than French. When the French came into power after Dominion, they and the catholic church incentivized French people to have more children. After a few generations of very high birth rates (think 4 or 5 children per women), Montreal was once again more French than English. Nowadays, that policy is extended to all families, regardless of language.

Source: Something we learn in Canadian History classes.

If you omit the part about the one-child policy I would think you were talking about the USA.

US has one of the best demographics in the Western world. Millennials are larger than Boomers. Plus the US can use immigration to decide what population they want. Countries not built on immigration cannot really do this in practice. see Japan.

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