Are there any books that speculate on how the world might look if current demographic trends continue?

I'm not after something extreme like Children of Men or The Handmaid’s Tale, where people are involuntarily infertile. I think a world where people choose to go extinct is more disturbing.

There are so many fascinating ideas to explore:

• collapse of the welfare state
• elderly voters dominating elections
• state use of artificial wombs
• higher-fertility North Korea liberating the South
• Haredi becoming the majority in Israel

Do you have any book suggestions?

This is a sincere question. Why should I care how many children other people have?

I can understand a sort of individualist natalism, where someone thinks that having children is good, and therefore one should have many children. However, there are a lot of posts here that are concerned about a declining birthrate, which is equivalent to being concerned that everyone else is not having enough kids. Furthermore, a lot of people here assert that this isn't a result of economics. Rather, it's an attitudinal shift: more people simply don't want children. What is a natalist to do? You can't make people want children that they don't want. You can't ethically force them to have children.

I mean, one can look at a declining birthrate, a number plotted over time on a piece of paper, and express concern. On an abstract level, that seems fine, but what one seems to imply is that the people that one interacts with daily have their priorities all screwed up and should be having more babies. No offense to the members here, but this seems off-putting in its intrusiveness.

Having a spouse that's staying at home and helps look after the house and kids can do a lot for fertility rates, but women obviously aren't going to be okay with putting themselves in a financially vulnerable position where they would be at the mercy of the man in the relationship like they were forced into for the last 6,000 years, and there's an increasingly large segment of the male population is unemployed, so if we encouraged men to be house husbands then we could see an upgrowth in the TFR again.

Here.

It popped up so I gave it a go. He yapped worse than 6 barbers and I only saw the half of it.

A few things. He criticised Reagan's decision to slash funding for school lunch (ketchup = vegetable), showed a clip of Jamie Oliver (no relation apparently) circa 2010 condescending the state of American school lunch and praised Obama for expanding and improving it via some Act who's name I forget.

Not a peep that during that time about the birth rate. How under Reagan the TFR rose as it did under Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush Jr etc.

Or how in 2010 the TFR was still higher despite school lunch being less than satisfactory.

And finally, since Obama passed the aforementioned Act the TFR has continued to crater yet American TFR is still much better than European TFR (not that school lunch is even universal in many beloved European countries).

He started mentioning states that weren't doing enough but I didn't get that far. I bet that the states he rates highly are all those with below average TFR.

There was also no mention of facts on child nutrition like stunting. I'll link it: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-stunting-ihme?tab=chart&time=latest&country=USA~NZL~CZE~TWN~SGP~JPN~CHL

For those unaware, childhood stunting is the best overall indicator of children’s well being and an accurate reflection of social inequalities. It is also the most prevalent form of child malnutrition.

Stuff such as increased pay and lower housing prices is a good start, sure, but the problem would remain that even two well-off middle class parents getting paid well would still be working too much to reasonably look after their kids. In order to make parenting more feasible, we have to either decrease the working hours to only 4 or 6 hours a day or so, or reduce the amount of working days to only 3 or 4 days a week.

Or polygamous, or polyandrous, or other types of poly. Like, I'm surprised Elon opted to donate his sperm to multiple baby mommies who live far apart instead of moving everyone together like old school Mormons. I'm sure some of the moms would agree to that. 🤔

It amazes me this hasn't come up more by politicians. Trump or Harris should be talking about it. They need to be sounding the alarm on how few children people are having. Especially Harris since she could propose government ideas to encourage people to have more children.

The only reason I think it's not brought up is because it doesn't buy any votes. But it's an issue and it should be brought up.

But maybe it's because it would bring up too many elephants in the room like people aren't dating as much because fewer and fewer men are seen as date worthy and remain single, and the cost of living makes it too expensive to have children which has been an issue before the pandemic.

Note: this is the very beginning of an idea that I haven't quite worked out in my head, and writing it down here is part of my process of sorting it out. As usual, my perspective is coming from a reasonable familiarity with the US tax regime, which means it may or may not be useful or intuitive to those in other countries.

So, in the US, there's two general types of tax-advantage investment accounts that people can open. Pre-tax and post-tax. Pre-tax accounts (such as 401k's) reduce your taxable income by however much you contribute to them (for example, if you make $100k, and put in $10k, your taxable income is $90k). Post-tax accounts (like Roth IRA) do not have this advantage, but they generally confer an advantage of being tax-free themselves (for example, in the same scenario, you still get taxed on the $100k you earn that year, but if that $10k investment goes to the moon and turns into $10m, you're not paying any taxes on that).

That, obviously, is a very brief overview, and others have explained it better. If my explanation is confusing just look up 'roth IRA vs 401k' and you'll find a better explanation.

Now, here's where my brain gets moving. We know that, without taking a side, there is a lively debate about how effective various subsidies to parents are for raising the birth rate. And it has been suggested that, perhaps, it would be better to subsidize grandparents, but how would that work? I think the tax-advantages of various accounts could be the key. Grandparents are often right at their peak earning years when they become grandparents. If you assume the average mother has their first kid at age 28, and the average person reaches peak earnings in the 45-55 age bracket (and for those that work until their late 60s, more or less plateaus), that kind of perfectly lines up for the average person becoming a grandparents right around the time that they're in their peak earning years.

When you're at peak earning years, your personal finance goals tend to be "minimize my taxes, maximize my savings." Lets harness that. Allow for grandparents (we're really targeting grandparents here, but you could apply this to parents, too) to deduct contributions they make to their grandchildren's tax-advantaged accounts (529 education savings accounts are the most common) from their taxes. In other words: that money is basically totally tax-free. The contribution reduces the grandparents' taxable income, and the grandchildren get the benefit of it tax-free as well.

This should be like catnip to middle class or higher earning grandparents, and can appeal not just to those that do want to leave something for their descendants but even those that are more interested in enjoying their retirement, and have a 'after me, the flood' attitude. It will also intrinsically be a inter-generational wealth transfer. Finally, it will also help the parents, indirectly, even if the grandparent-grandchild transfer is the main venue through which these advantages are seen, because it will be easing the burden on the parents to set aside money for their children.

And these numbers could be bumped up, if there's really a larger impact desired. For example, nothing says that the tax deductions have to match what is actually contributed to these accounts. You want people to really put money into them, say that each $1 contributed deducts your taxable income by $2 (or maybe even just $1.50, the number would have to be dialed in a bit). The money will flow into those accounts like crazy (and yes, you'd have to have very eagle-eyed individuals reviewing the legislation for all the possible loopholes, and I've already thought of a few myself just brainstorming this).

I see so many people in this sub who insist that the solution to declining birth rates is to make it more affordable to have kids. No one ever mentions the fact that our society made it taboo for minors to get pregnant, but we evolved over 1000’s of years to be able to get pregnant as teenagers. If the goal is more babies, not only do we need economic improvements, but we need a complete morality overhaul so teenagers will be encouraged to reproduce.

I joined a week ago and noticed the pinned rule. However after engaging and commenting on here the short time I have been here, this really seems like it is just a copy of half of the subreddits listed in the sidebar.

I'm all for debate and discussion but the direction of this sub seems very anti-Natalism in both votes and comments. I realize this is the default take for many just based on Reddit's overall demographics, and I know as the sub grows, it will get more attention, but I just thought it should be addressed.

I don’t altogether like what I’m about to suggest, but I think it’s an idea that could work to correct global population decline.

If future automation creates an economy where unemployment is the norm, and where the govt is responsible for supporting the unemployed population, I think there should be some state incentive for these people to have more children. Perhaps to significantly ramp up the UBI for each child, or something like that. Create a sense that the common person owes the nation which sustains them, and that the only way to repay is to have many children.

The title

I think the fact that it seems possible to raise prodigies through the power of nurture alone is interesting. Is anyone here thinking of trying to teach their kids to excell at something or other? What's your plan?

Examples of child geniuses who were raised to excell:

The Polgar sisters: Judit, Sofia and Susan (this is a really good article about a book their father wrote about his childrearing method https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-genius/)

The Phogat sisters: Geeta, Babita, Priyanka, Ritu, Vinesh, and Sangeeta

John Stuart Mill

Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira

And of course many well known figures like Mozart benefited from being tutored from a young age.

People talk about falling fertility rates like it's as major concern and then discuss the best ways to reverse it, while being completely wrong about the solutions. It's not housing prices, or welfare, or higher taxes on the wealthy that will reverse declining birth rates. The most egalitarian, well-off countries in the world have some of the worst birth rates. If you somehow figured out how to give everyone in the western world a million dollars without any negative inflationary effects right now, it would at most barely increase the birth rate by a blip, and most likely actually decrease it.

The simple fact is that high birth rates are associated with, frankly, dystopianism. The countries and cultures that are willing to keep their citizens poor, uneducated, highly religious, nationalistic, and embrace authoritarianism, will be the cultures and countries with the highest birth rates. These are countries and cultures that treat women like livestock, men as disposable tools of war, and have very little in the way of human rights or welfare. It's not a good thing, but it's the way the world is headed, and no western country has ever figured out how to prevent it.