> To be effective at boosting completed fertility, policies must influence the decisions women make early in their reproductive lives. Interventions targeting women well into their childbearing years are less likely to have large effects, as many life choices will have already been made.
That implies offering child subsidies only to people in their twenties.
In some of the pro-natal online discourse there is an idea to mortgage the future earnings of children against current childless people. I think I have that right but, honestly, it's a bit confusing of an idea to me. I think these people are saying that we should get banks to give people money now to have kids, contingent upon the banks getting a percentage of the earnings of any resultant children.
Like, such ideas are wildly crazy, clearly. But that seems to be where the discourse is right now in the pro-natalism sphere.
They're looking for just about anything to get fertility rates to change. I've seen ideas float around about Mongolia and how they give mothers special parking permits and feathered caps (?) and how that's responsible for their birthrate anomalies.
The whole scene is just deliciously strange in the way that 1990's UFO boards were too.
What seems to me to be happening is that fertility in humans has a pretty steep fall off. We've attacked some of that with technology like IVF. But it's still very hard to have a healthy baby at higher ages. Like, miscarriages are really traumatic and you're going to get a bigger chance at them as you try when you're older. So it's not just biochem, it's mental too.
However, at the same time, we've increased the life expectancy by a lot, and we're set to do so even more this century. Now, a bit of a jag here. There's this thing called the marriage problem in mathematics. You can only court serially and the number of courtiers is fixed and you can't go back and court people again. So, how do you choose to stop and who with? You might have passed by the best spouse and then be left with a dud. The mathematically best solution is to court the first 37.8% of the courtiers and then marry the next person that beats the ones you've courted. (Look, I know I'm butchering this).
Anyway, my point is that as life expectancy is growing, you get to this point where when it comes to spouses and jobs and cities and all the big stuff in life, that 38.7% of the time you've got to 'calibrate' yourself, that point goes past your fertility window. People are trying to figure themselves out, and since that takes so long now, that point of being mentally 'settled' is past when you can have kids easily.
I'm not really sure we can fix that either. Family is central to being human, we're a social animal. So I think technology is really the only key here.
That implies offering child subsidies only to people in their twenties.
Imagine the outrage.