How did we end up at a point where creating life (literally) is a „not good enough reason“?
it's going to be a sad, empty and quiet world in the west a few decades in the future.
A child has extremely high long-term ROI for the economy. But (for good reasons) you can't take out a loan in the name of a future child for a larger house now. Someone (aka) the government needs to be future-sighted enough to make the investment. Unfortunately, governments are run by people who will individually not reap political benefit for good outcomes 30+ years in the future.
I think the incentives could be fixed in a simple (not easy) way, by not letting childless people benefit from the safety net spanned by children of other people.
Yeah this is the only serious fix, but once childless people become a large % of the electorate (aka it's a real problem), they can vote against assuming responsibility for the problem they created... and your country is basically in an inescapable doom loop.
That road is extremely grey and has a lot of really difficult edge cases you'll need to sort out.
Also - if we just need a next generation in the workforce immigration is an excellent option for the time being.
IMO thats btw. one of the downsides of the EU, eliminating the differences/competition between countries stalling this kind of evolutionary truth seeking process
Study proposal: Are there more family-friendly policies in hereditary monarchies (which have longer incentive horizon than democratically elected politicians do)? Are birthrates higher in kingdoms?
But the more we fight the second proposition, the more we reinforce the first.
Trying to make kids less expensive still treats this as a financial calculation.
When you ask “why have kids?” there needs to be a real answer, and I don’t think “the economic public good” is going to convince people.
They don't want you to sleep around, and in some religions they don't want you to use birth control, but there's not a lot actively saying you need to have kids.
Sometimes having children is strongly implied for those who follow the path of marriage (and may officially even be the purpose of that), but there are typically also paths where people are expected to remain celibate.
Arguably, say in the Catholic church, there is too much emphasis on the latter, what with celibate clergy and everything. In LDS I would say family is more of an ideal. This extends even into the theology. Catholics say "'til death do us part", but LDS say husband and wife go to heaven together and stay married there forever. Hinduism overall seems less obsessed with correct behavior (it has dharma, of course, but no simple hell thing), but it also provides both householder and ascetic paths.
I think religions sort of take it for granted that enough people will want to get married, and that if you get married you'll have kids. Instead they're worried about self control.
Little did they anticipate that the superego would maintain its iron grip without help, that the rationally-planning ego would have the means and motive to skip kids entirely, and that the id would get so distracted with hatred of other people that it wouldn't even try to bring them together, even in unwise or destructive ways. But that's where we are.
Some of these beliefs still stretch into the modern day in really toxic ways - my sister-in-law (a tenure track professor) got a lot of flack from tenured professors who had deferred having a family until the window had closed when she had to duck out of a semester for maternity leave.