YWAK98alum t1_ixcspds wrote on November 22, 2022 at 2:01 PM

Reply to comment by Effective-Dig8734 in ‘Without enough Latvians, we won’t be Latvia’: eastern Europe’s shrinking population | Latvia’s population is 30% smaller than it was in 1990 and by 2050 numbers will be in decline in over half of Europe’s 52 countries. by mossadnik

It's even more than that. Many developed countries are richer, at least on paper, because they reproduced less. It frees more women for work in the part of the economy that shows up in GDP statistics.

The fundamental challenge of states and nations trying to reverse demographic decline is to be able to offer a strong quality of life on a lower GDP per capita. One in which a lot of GDP goes "off book" as parents (probably mostly women) work for their families instead of their employers. (GDP is a bad measurement for this because a stay-at-home-mom who cares for three kids adds nothing to measured GDP, but if they send their kids to daycare and pay €3000/mo, then measured GDP increases by €36,000 for the year for the exact same child-rearing.)

And that's a tough challenge, and most developed countries' natalist solutions right now are only tinkering around the edges. We're not at the level yet where we would say, for example, "we will give you a small family-sized home in a good neighborhood when your first child is born and you can live there rent-free until your last child is grown, even if you have four kids spread out so much that that's a period of 30+ years."

NYD3030 t1_ixcuklc wrote on November 22, 2022 at 2:15 PM

I think your suggestion is the level at which we'd need to change society to have a measurable impact. Western societies are increasingly market oriented and people are trained to make every decision like little economists. If you want to raise birthrates radically, being a mom needs to pay better than maybe 70% of jobs you could get otherwise.

YWAK98alum t1_ixcvu8t wrote on November 22, 2022 at 2:25 PM

We can go in both directions on this: make raising a family more economically attractive, but also try not to condition people to think about everything in economic terms, or at least to think beyond mere GDP terms. I've known families that have belatedly come to that realization when they had a third kid (though of course fewer families are reaching that milestone), that it actually saved money for the lower earner (generally the wife) to stay home rather than pay for both daycare and all the other things that they had to pay for in order to support her working outside the home.

NYD3030 t1_ixcy1nt wrote on November 22, 2022 at 2:42 PM

I would like to condition people to stop thinking about everything in terms of individual economic maximization, but I don't see how. All the old institutions that did this - religion, civic life, clubs, societies, even organized labor - are gone. They've been replaced by apps which are explicitly designed to insert the market into previously non-market areas of life.

I don't know how to undo that, and I'm not sure your average 25 year old even wants to. So yes, I agree with you. I'm just pessimistic that it will happen, so we need to lean heavily on the purely economic levers.