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

Reply to comment by YWAK98alum 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

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 They've been replaced by apps which are explicitly designed to insert the market into previously non-market areas of life.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