Incentivizing procreation

Across the world, in vastly different cultures situated on separate continents, we are seeing a precipitous decline of birth rates in Developed Countries. While this issue boils down to many different factors, this problem can mainly be chalked up to economic incentives. While we like to imagine ourselves as richer than the peasants of yesteryear, most of the urban youth today cannot afford to start families and raise children on their own due to deteriorating economic conditions. While villagers and agrarian peasants in the past were incentivized to have children in order to create more workers with which to work within family businesses or on the farm, people within their fertile years today have no such economic incentives to reproduce and on paper, reproduction has become a strictly negative outcome in terms of finances. Just as we all texted far less and abbreviated words back in the day when cellular service providers charged us per character, economic forces have worked to ensure that we have less children as the prices of having and raising children continues to rise while the prospects seemingly available to children born in Developed Countries continues to decline. Today, almost half of all births in America are out of wedlock (40%) and this number continues to rise as procreation becomes increasingly accidental, rather than intentional. In this article, we are going to dive into how to resolve the issue of declining birth rates, and for those who are not familiar with our content, our answer will not depend on population replacement.  We have explored the problems with population replacement in another article, and while there is overlap with the topic we are covering today, focusing more on the issue of declining birth rates is completely necessary for providing a comprehensive material analysis of the world today. 

When we look at who gives birth, the numbers don’t lie: the secular portions of the American population have very low birth rates, while the very religious portions of the American population have very high birth rates on par with Developing Countries. Even when we look at the different birth rates across the list of OECD countries, only Israel manages to have a sustainable birth rate and this ties directly into how religious most of its inhabitants are. While procreation is very costly in the modern world, it does seem that social factors can still pressure young couples to look past the financial dangers and procreate. While some masochists among us may say that the answer then can be found in just increasing the levels of religiosity in countries, a great deal of the children born into these very religious families are subsidized by welfare programs (i.e. Hasidic Jews in Israel) and have diminished qualities of life later on. If we are to try and raise the birth rates in Developed Countries, the means by which we do it need to be sustained for generations to come for any of these changes to matter in the long-run. A dying country, whether its death be today or tomorrow, is dying regardless of the timeline unless sustainable solutions are found. 

In order for us to truly create sustainable conditions that encourage procreation in couples again, we have to look to the past and study how to recreate the incentives and circumstances that allowed people to procreate at rates far above replacement levels. While children in the past were viewed as a means by which couples could retire and be assured care in their old age, the socialized safety nets of today in Developed Countries have allowed for couples and individuals alike to waive any responsibility in having and raising children. As the worker-retiree ratio continues to plummet and resources that would be allocated to the youth are instead redirected to the parasitic class of retirees, the question becomes: how do we create economic incentives for people to have children? First off, we would need to create a living and thriving wage calculator that ensures people have the means by which to start families and raise children, as well as guarantee company-funded pensions for workers on top of their social security deductions. Secondly, we would need to mandate that all pensions and social security benefits would be rendered null and void, with the proceeds redirected towards youth programs, in the event that workers did not procreate before their retirement ages. If a worker were to enter their mandatory retirement age without having procreated twice or adopted at least two children born within their own country, euthanasia would be offered. While this measure may be harsh, it would mirror conditions found in earlier times where children were depended on as part of a couple’s retirement plan and it would ensure that those who did not reproduce did not steal unearned resources from the children of those couples that did fulfill their obligations to society. Additional measures like the subsidizing of developments, both commercial and residential, in low population-density areas would ensure that childrearing would become increasingly affordable over time and would ensure that couples could afford the square footage in their homes necessary for comfortably raising their children.

In the modern age, we’ve had to witness many nations start precipitous and endless declines into economic insolvency as the elderly populations have continued to strip resources away from the rest of society. If harsh measures like the plan suggested here are not installed in time, we will see Developed Countries continue to crumble away and population replacement become increasingly appealing for decision-makers to pursue. In order for societies to sustain themselves, they cannot allow for a growing class of parasites to sap away resources from productive economic actors, and this needs to be ensured by any means necessary. Retirees owe a debt to society, rather than the other way around, and if they haven’t done their part to sustain the society in which they live, then society should have no obligation to sustain them. The age of freeloading must come to an end in order for industrial society to survive and that starts with addressing the needless parasitism of the childless elderly.