Most of developed countries have bad fertility rate, some developing and/or poor countries have good fertility rate. People in rich countries don't have children not because they can't afford to, but because they don't want to.

Every country with falling birth rates has that problem, regardless of the political/economic system. Barring extremist solutions like euthanasia, you need to support non-productive citizens and the resources for it need to come from productive citizens in some way, be it with government intervention or not.

Most of the west has already drastically reduced the number of babies. All that happened is we were told we need immigration instead.

Social fabric collapses. At least in the western world.

Many systems like pensions simple don’t work in the context of not enough stable families having babies.

You can patch it with immigration but that gets you other social cohesion issues.

All kinda scary

Myself and many of my friends who have decided to have zero children or only one child rather late in life, cite the burden of having to take care of children, when one is already tired after work, one would like to pursue leisure activities that do not involve children present, etc. Even in countries where the state provides abundant infrastructure to minimize the financial expense of childrearing, birthrates are still low because of the time and effort expense that remains. So, how do you address that issue? Telling people to just suck it up and accept childbearing as their duty isn’t going to work.

Immigrants are often coming from countries where religious and cultural pressures in favor of childbearing are maintaining the birthrate higher than in the West, but even in those regions birthrates are gradually falling as their countries become more developed.

A lot of developed countries have done a lot of things about it. A long time ago. It's mostly just the US that doesn't really seem to care about families, as far as I can tell. It's one of only 3 countries in the world that doesn't even guarantee paid maternity leave.

And if it does that, so what? Is perfectionism really that important?

And honestly, my proposal isn't so much about increasing the birthrate, but preventing a certain kind of freeloading ("The pensions...they can all burn"). Totally make the conscious choice to go child-free, just understand if you do you may not be able to retire.

> and it’d be especially cruel to anyone with fertility issues.

And if that's really an issue, which I'm not convinced of, because policies are invariably "cruel" like that in innumerable ways, you could always carve out an exception for people who've attempted fertility treatments.

> As social policies go it’d be much easier to simply allow more immigration.

Except that probably would be even more cruel, since it falsely hand-waves that there's enough high fertility elsewhere to sustain a low fertility rich country. It turns out there isn't, so what you proposal requires is either: 1) export the labor shortage to poorer countries that are less equipped to handle it, or 2) maintain crushing poverty in many countries to turn them into baby factories for the immigration solution.

While I do, I don't think most of Western public policy does. It seems like we've fundamentally outsourced children to third world countries. Raising a child in any state is going to be much costlier than raising him/her in the Philippines for example.

When the children become economically valuable adults - or prove to have enough economic potential (say by being admitted into a university), they are imported into the West. In a very cynical way, this is sort of what immigration has become. Instead of tackling the issue of why people are not reproducing, public policy seems happier to drain the most economically useful citizens from other countries.

So, essentially, no reasonable person would have children. Instead we should have an underclass of people who were, in your words, "irrational" enough to have children to move to another country to work for very low wages and serve and literally change the diapers of the aging, enlightened elite who were rational enough to not have children.

Raising birth rates to a sustainable level is a long term investment and stable solution. Mass immigration just kicks the can down the road. And currently, only two neighboring countries have birth rates above replacement rates: Indonesia and the Philippines. Their birth rates will likely drop below the replacement rate by 2050, in which case mass immigration from those countries to other countries deprives them of a stable future and royally screws countries who were dependent on immigrants who will no longer exist.

Worse for whom? For women personally, probably. For nations? For the species? I don't know.

It's not really that simple. Taking, by force, from Person A to raise Person B's children is complicated especially if you're worried about justness.

I mean, citation needed. I know that e.g. Japan is having issues with an aging population but they could probably fix that with more immigration if they wanted to. The US certainly could.

Yeah, and the idea is: "Let's replace them with other people, from other cultures".

The rational response for an individual or a couple is to not have kids. That's why we're seeing so many articles about "omg the birthrate!". People aren't having kids, it's too hard.

From a nation perspective, however, you will die out as a people if you have negative population growth. Immigration can boost the numbers for a while, but not forever. Especially not if you're also trying to keep the immigrants out as many conservative policies are.

So what is there to do? Governments need to make having children easier, if they want more children. If they do not in fact want more children, then all is good.

However the current economic policy is based on infinite growth. How are you going to infinitely grow an economy if you aren't producing more consumers?

The fertility and associated problems of local population can be completely ignored by the government of country like US - country with low population density, predictable steady population growth, and always a large group of people around the world willing to immigrate into the country. If not you, it's going to be someone else.

Most European countries already support this but their birth rates are as bad or worse than Japan when excluding migrants. The only groups reproducing above replacement level are traditional Christians and Muslims, groups with an ideology that is proven by 2000+ year Lindy effect.

People have been doing that for several millennia.

Developed countries already are below reproduction rates. My country of birth is nearly at the very bottom.

You're sort of preaching to the choir here.

I would argue it still is now unless you patch things with immigration (but that's just having another country do the work for you) or AGI becomes a thing.