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.
We have enough people, especially now that we are entering some form of second stage of automatization with AI developments. We’ll be fine if we end up being a few billion less.
What we should be aiming for is a more steady state economy, and not one that relies on endless growth (outside of like, new technology and gathering knowledge). Even today there are so many jobs that could be eliminated by more sane resource distribution, like eliminating fast fashion, building things to last, etc.