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In many non-western countries the social framework is completely different.

- People have kids as retirement plans.

- There's religious and instituional pressures to have more kids. Most people don't think about how they're brainwashed by instituions that have a political motive to expand their group size. The end result is that someone that doesn't have kids is heavily scrutinized. Made even worse in societies where your 'face' and reputation are everything since things like the legal system might not be as strong.

- The minimums for raising a kid in the west is much different. You simply can't just have 8 kids and send them off their chimney sweeping jobs when they turn 12. You can't just have the kids, and wander off to the bar all night while their 13 year old sibling watches them.

- Western countries also put a lot of emphasis on sex education and provide resources like contraceptives.

There’s more than just a bare price tag here though.

It’s also about risk. In developed societies, it’s still somewhat reasonable (though this is starting to wane) for a couple with dual incomes to be able to establish themselves well enough that the risk of being put out on the street is minimal. Once even a single kid enters the picture however, this changes; the required income level for both parents to both provide the desired quality of care for the child and achieve reasonable insurance against financial disaster is quite high and well above the earning potential of a huge percentage (probably the majority) of the population. How much the parents are willing to sacrifice has little bearing on this.

The impoverished aren’t as affected by this because they’re already living on knife’s edge, and having kids won’t change that much. A poorer population boosts birthrates but making people poorer is not how nations should go about fixing their population problems.

Aside from that, I feel that it’s a mischaracterization to pose giving up on who a person had been prior to becoming a parent (career goals, etc) as “small”. It’s anything but minor and among the biggest course changes a person can make, and in a well functioning society one shouldn’t need to choose between the two — one should be able to continue to pursue their goals mostly unencumbered and be a parent, and the only reason this isn’t possible now I believe comes down to the benefits of the vast productivity improvements of the past several decades only being reaped by a select few at the top.

> but the highest fertility rates are pretty consistently recorded in impoverished and conflict-torn countries.

The difference is that (in addition to birth control) in those situations having children does not really make a material difference (barring extreme food shortages). There's no career to heed, usually no mortgage or daycare to pay, there's no cars so no need to worry about getting that SUV, education is also not always a primary concern. The family just makes do with where they would have lived and pack in a few more kids. The main extra cost is feeding a few more mouths, which is usually manageable. But sometime down the line the children can help around the house or supplement family income.

> but the highest fertility rates are pretty consistently recorded in impoverished and conflict-torn countries

Lack of birth control.

> The problem isn't that people in the West need to make greater sacrifices to raise children.

The problem is that the standard that you’re expected to meet in raising a child is significantly higher. Is it biologically required that you have full time coverage of someone watching your toddler? No. Is it legally required? Yes. Do most grandparents want to be live in caretakers to young children? No, they have better things to do. Do you have to pay a fortune for the service? Yes.

Is it biologically required to meet a certain standard of living to raise a child, a standard that generally requires 2 parents salaries in the west? No. Is it legally required? No, but you might sets them up for failure later in life, and means they’ll struggle too when they get to be your age.

The whole thing is people who want to be parents have a drive to make sure their kids live at least as good a life as they did (or at least should).

If that seems financially hopeless in the west… we have effective birth control and can delay until it is possible.

Sometimes the point in time when you are financially stable enough to have children is also the point at which you are biologically unable to have them (everything is more difficult after ~35 or so). If there’s no promise of financial stability any time is as good as any other.

Fixing the “problem”is a complicated mix of social/psychological problems and financial problems related to wealth inequality. Blaming millennials or whoever for being selfish is a bad take.

> Do most grandparents want to be live in caretakers to young children? No, they have better things to do.

It’s also often not feasible even in cases where grandparents (or other relatives) are willing, due to the modern necessity for people to move to where employment prospects (and/or other economic factors, e.g. housing costs) are best, separating families with great distances.

> Blaming millennials or whoever for being selfish is a bad take

The OP did not blame them or call them selfish. He just pointed out that we have tried a lot of proposals to make it easier for parents and they have not solved the problem. People over focus on the financial side without taking into account the emotional side.

(OP quote: "I'm not saying this to judge people, but I think the fallacy here is that we assume things would improve")

> where raising a child requires sacrifices much greater than it does in the West

This part ain't correct, if you actually traveled properly in such places you would find much better community/family support for raising kids compared to typical western young couple situation. I ain't saying every single young family is better off like this, but on average the difference is often staggering.

What I mean - for us, both having high intensity jobs that required 17+ years of hard studies and moving across various parts of Europe, going from couple/married but without children into having 2 small kids a massive shock in every single aspect of life since we raise them largely on our own, families are very far. Families in such places face on average significantly less shock in such situation, mostly they continue in their lives as before (the guy) and women take care of kids for some time as is expected. Of course this is slowly changing into that western model as people get better white collar jobs in big cities.

> if we offered longer parental leaves, child subsidies, state-run childcare, or whatever - but in every country such programs are implemented, they don't really make any difference

Exactly, countries like Sweden have implemented a lot of policies to help parents. The current fertility rate is 1.8 (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SWE/sweden/fertility-r...).

the current fertility rate is falling, though: https://population-europe.eu/research/policy-insights/why-ar...

also, take in account that immigrants from poorer countries can usually boost fertility rate of their new country... but the general trend reverts to the local (previous) average as soon as the new citizens get accustomed to the local society and habits.

> where raising a child requires sacrifices much greater than it does in the West

Does it? I would argue that, in societies where a woman is not expected to work anyway (either due to cultural limitations or lack of jobs or both), the relative sacrifice required to raise a child is less than in the West.

Add to that that it's more common in those societies to have multi-generational households, with readily available (and also jobless) grandparents.

The expectations of what should be provided to a child are also much smaller, for better or for worse.

High rates in poor places are easily explained by lack of birth control.

The thing to compare is societies with birth control and higher rates of reproduction vs those with lower. Comparing with or without easily accessed birth control doesn’t tell us much.

Why, for example, is South Korea’s birth rate so much lower than France or the USA?

Very authoritarian cultures that forbid birth control are also less relevant.

In impoverished and conflict torn countries, there isn't much worse that the situation could get with kids and the mortality rate is higher, so there's less interest in family planning. On top of that, most such countries are ones where there is significant cultural pressure to have children early.

This also translates to other things, if people are having families in their early 20s, the third generation has relatively young grandparents. If they're having them in the late 20s, early 30s, the third generation has grandparents who are in their 60s and not as capable of chasing after toddlers all day.

Being expected to give up on career goals also comes down to the same issue, when you're primarily focused on staying afloat, your career goals are also just to not have things get worse.

Famine or war would not reverse this in the West, unless it was at apocalyptic levels such as to cause a total cultural reset back to a society where women are seen as child factories first.

> It's that they no longer want to make small ones.

Moralization of having kids (and birth control) also has a large impact on this—it's not uncommon to hear younger folks say they don't believe it's ethical to have kids.

> the only tried and true way to fix fertility is

It's funny that you describe fertility as something which needs to be fixed. I see it as a very fortunate thing that humanity is voluntarily choosing to stop expanding its population in a situation of global ecological overshoot.

There are two groups of people who consistently have children: People who can afford it, and people who have nothing to lose by not affording it.

In the middle is a group who would actually lose a lot by having children, so they don't.