I have seen reasons like workspace discrimination, lack of parental leave, economic uncertainty and poverty in general used as reasons why young adults are not choosing to have children and it doesn’t quite make sense to me. Objectively along all those axis, societies have improved with time from the early 1900s and the birth rate keeps falling. Can someone help me understand why European countries keep trying to increase the comfort of their population expecting to increase birth rates? I understand social programs with payouts can be popular and perhaps paying to solve the problem is appealing to the population but I don’t see why we would expect those policies to actually increase fertility. I would understand if this was simply a case of government programs that people like even if they don’t achieve the desired outcome.
I think a much simpler microeconomic analysis explains the decline in fertility: opportunity cost. People in child-bearing age have too much other stuff with a larger expected payout than having children. For example, a lot of people might prefer to work hard to improve their socioeconomic situation or travel the word over raising children. Under this model, more government provided comfort won’t increase fertility because the vast amount of costs in child bearing comes from the opportunity cost. Even in a world without parental discrimination I would find it hard to argue that parents should automatically be promoted in their work but that may actually be the more significant cost. A parent may forgo promotion or other gains for parenting.
I am not sure what a better solution this problem is. We probably need to reframe childbearing in a different way through so that having children is not subject to this type of utilitarian analysis.
We are a planet trying to find the resources for eight billion human beings and we already know the backbone of our global agriculture solution is an unsustainable fossil-fuel-based phosphate cycle.
People choosing to not have replacement-number of children is one of the more humane ways to balance the cold equations for subsequent generations.
Hard to predict. The resulting chaos could cause outsized environmental damage. On the other hand, the environmental damage caused by wars tends to be short-term (in contrast to the damage caused by, say, fossil-fuel-based energy production and agriculture, which is perpetually-increasing damage to feed the needs of a society with a stable population and status quo).
But you're making an excellent point. I'm certainly not advocating for societal collapse. I, for one, think the risk of such is a bit overblown (societies tend to adapt, not implode, even in the face of demographic turbulence).
Besides, automation's supposed to make up for much of the labor shortfalls anyway.