An educational arms race demands that young "adults" stay non-productive and dependent for longer and longer, home affordability stretches further out from early career professionals, and parent-child relationships have become increasingly about the parent generously supporting the child as long as they can rather than just seeing them out of the nest safely. These are all cultural shifts that mimic aristocratic lifestyles, but ultimately engender inadequacy and helplessness in young adults who aspire to middle class life and make it a very reasonable choice for them to narrow the window in which they start building a secure family.
The several years, sometimes up to a decade of higher education is not necessary for a lot of professions. I myself could have become a good electrical engineer in half the time I did, because half my classes were absolute bullshit. I learned more about sociology and politics from friends than by the two-semester mandatory classes I had on it. And I certainly learned WAY more about entrepreneurship from HN than from my shitty "Entrepreneurship" classes, which were also mandatory.
Also notice that while I graduated in electrical engineering, I'm a software engineer now. So about 80% or 90% of what I studied is completely unrelated (unless I have to redo the electrical wiring of the office). However, after interviews I still sometimes have to show my bullshit diploma (which is ironically in a language they don't understand) to work in certain companies or to immigrate to certain countries.
Median wages simply don't let you afford children anymore. It used to.
We as a society simply don't care about people's ability to have kids.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
I readily admit the benefits are shit and only profitable if you're basically feeding them gruel and giving them little else, although sadly there are people who do this. If those at '$0' are the most fertile then they're (what initially could be described as paradoxically) going to have more income on average at 1+ kids due to increase in benefits, which necessarily turns things around at the lower end.
4 day work week? Work from home on every possible situation? Flexible hours on every company? Free and good schools like in Finland? Free childcare for the little ones? Good public transportation so kids can move freely?
I think companies and governments will hemorrhage money if we ever do something like this. Oh no. Anyway.
I'm in!
And that's ignoring the fact that Finland has a population of 5.5 million and that there is no evidence that their "solutions" scale to bigger countries.
What it does help with is the the "incredible financial burden of a child" as mentioned by the GP. That's what my answer is all about.
EDIT: Deleted my second point as I don't care. I don't see this discussion going anywhere interesting.
As to why it wouldn't work in federated countries, simply put: federation does not solve bureaucracy, and bureaucracy is the biggest enemy of scaling public solutions.
Easy. In the past, kids are basically free labor for the family business, e.g. you own a farm, more kids == more productivity.
Today, most kids from inherits nearly nothing from parent's job. They have their own life and objectives, but to get good jobs, kids need good education, and good education costs money. So kids == burden.
In modern day, society says it's selfish and bad to have kids for your own retirement. Your kids are supposed to be the tax-stock for everybody else to use up for their retirement. So you take on the lions shares of the losses to raise the kid and then society sucks up the tax money and distributes it to anyone on social security including those who didn't have kids.
This creates a massive "free-rider effect" where the incentive is not to have kids yourself, while enjoying the benefits of their labor and distribution payments in your own retirement. Why have kids when others can do the lions share of the investment and you still get your full share of social security money.
I think looking at a two dimension "elder social security" and "fertility rate" you are going to see a correlation, but it is confounded by lots of other things including "cost vs personal benefit of raising child", access to contraceptives, education level, etc. I think it would be absolutely wild if you could just look at the numbers for Korea and Japan and just nope out on this one.
I just don't think, that if it is a factor, that it has much impact, given that the worst countries do not have this factor; the child(ren) is still pretty much the extent of the social safety net. Japan is also notable in that they actually give significantly lower social security payments to women, especially unmarried or divorcees.
You don't think you could enjoy raising offspring of your own?
Grass is always greener on the other side I guess.
That's not a general thing, it's very specific to the US (and I'd guess even not generalised in the US as a whole).
Here in Sweden kids are free to roam, go meet their friends, take the public transit, etc. without parents having to be anxious and scared.
The paranoia in the USA is extremely exhausting though, I really feel for all of you.
Children can be farm labour from a pretty young age.