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.
You don't need to penalize the non-parents to entice people to have kids.
But it needs incredible systemic change to do that. The first one would be climate change policies and programs that will at the minimum stop the current trajectory we are in, and at best reverse it.
Second, we need to reign in the extremely greedy corps and make them pay their fair share. In a not so distant past, when the economy wasn't doing well, companies would cut their profits before raising prices. Today, this is practically unheard of. The margins must be kept at all cost, the rest be damned.
Third, create decent safety nets. Right now, our social policies are eroding pretty much everywhere. Some countries more than the others.
Then, we can start thinking about policies that favor the patents.
We have enough resources and technologies to solve all of our problems, but since society is lead by greedy conmans in the pocket of corporations, until that changes, people won't be comfortable having kids.