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Having children younger. This builds villages and generates the community flywheel. The problem now is that it's close to impossible for the vast majority of younger people to buy a home with a single income. So the choice becomes dual income and farm out the raising of your children (requires even more money and negates the benefits of enjoying your children which is part of the reason to have them in the first place), or delay having children until you are financially secure. Couple this with the constant inundation of social media and the myriad experiences available with the click of a button and people are simply taking the short term gratification route.

Society needs to change and we need to incentivize it.





It's even less about buying a home now and more about just affording a second or third bedroom in a rental. If you look at job centers, even when they do build multi-family they aren't building family sized units.

Which is partially an issue due to fire codes that were established when we built vastly more flammable cities.

It's weird how much happens for random, completely unrelated reasons.


Older generations need to be more comfortable with their kids getting married and having children before moving out.

In terms of incentives, Hungary has attempted this with tax policy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_policy_in_Hungary

Seems to be working!


"Working" is a pretty generous description of a policy that, at a cost of 3-4% of GDP, has raised the fertility rate from its low of 1.23 in 2011 to about 1.55 today. That 1.5ish TFR is pretty stable, too: there's been almost no improvement since 2016.

No country has figured this out, and if getting to (just!) replacement rate requires healthcare-like expenditures as a % of GDP, it is genuinely unclear to me how we do that on a global scale.


Not it is not stable, it was 1.38 last year (source, from the central statistics authority: https://www.ksh.hu/stadat_files/nep/hu/nep0006.html). This year will be even worse, see top left chart: https://www.ksh.hu/heti-monitor/nepmozgalom.html (live births per month)

(edit: added translation of unit)


It's pretty clear theyre going to drop below their 2011 baseline soon. In other words, 5% of GDP into pronatal policies and transfers will have at best delayed the inevitable drop by a couple years.

Neighbour countries are at 1.0x TFR, so that policy is quite effective.



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