These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
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If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.
In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.
People are generally depressed and struggling with little help, barely making ends meet, and then they get bitched at for not creating more people to thrust into this thankless meatgrinder. If people felt better about the world that they were bringing people into then maybe they would be more inclined.
We live in a world with an aging population that is happy to reap the benefits of short term thinking, leave it up to the next generation, then get pissed when people aren’t giving them a next generation to pay the tab.