Yeah I don’t think an increase in fertility would do much to help dwindling populations. I think most are dwindling because as women become more educated and able to be financially independent they choose to have less children or none at all. Also, with inflation today it’s becoming less of an option for the middle class as both parents have to work full time while child care is a whole mortgage payment or more monthly. I don’t care if I have viable eggs until I’m 50 I’m still not able to support a kid financially. and I’m not directing this at you just adding to the conversation.

It has nothing to do with incentives, incentives like giving land or money to make children only work on the lower strata of society, the strata that already makes too many children. You think the reason why a successful lawyer does not make more than 1 or 2 children is because he/she is not getting enough money or wants a piece of land? The more educated and wealthy a society is, the fewer its population reproduces. That is because more educated people are more cautious with sexual intercourse, they also tend to be more knowledgeable on and inclined towards the use of contraception, and they are also more aware of the long term investment and commitment associated with having children.

If you want to generally have people make fewer children, you have to educate and raise from poverty to a wealthy standard of living the rest of the world population. However this will probably cause those countries to have a baby-boom at a certain point, like the west had, and so the global population will increase for a few decades even more before the following generations start reconsidering making children because the cost of living is too high due to the too many retired people.

You would end up anyway in a bad scenario, like many European countries are in right now, where there are not enough young people to pay taxes to the government to cover retired people, so the younger generations will have to work and pay huge taxes until they are 75.