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 They've been replaced by apps which are explicitly designed to insert the market into previously non-market areas of life.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.

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.

I think most of these things are already done in large parts of Europe and have had little effect, birth rates are still very low. The reality is that most young women would rather focus on themselves and their careers than surrender their autonomy for 20+ years to someone else.

I would agree with you if national and cultural identities were being replaced with some sort of internationalist, humanistic group identity. But I think instead we're experiencing global atomization where the old collective identities are giving way to hyper-individualism and identity based on personal consumption.