“Notably, Chang’s report claims that biological females develop earlier than males do, so requiring girls to enter school at younger ages will create classes in which the two sexes are of more equal maturity as they age. This, the author posits, makes it more likely that those classmates will be attracted to each other, and marry and have children further down the line.”
(…)
“The report does not include evidence of any correlation between female students’ early enrollment and the success rate of their romantic relationships with men. The author also does not detail specific mechanisms by which his proposed policy would increase romantic attraction or birthrates.”
Or simply accept that population will go down
Population shrinking is probably a good thing, but population shrinking too quickly might be all sorts of bad.
It’s hard to see where we really are with so many variables, so many future decisions, but I believe we’ve passed the point of “good shrinking” and are well into “all sorts of instability and disruption”. If replacement rate is 2.1 kids/woman, and South Korea is already like 1.1, that’s a huge difference. As current generations pass, each succeeding one will be half its size. That’s a problem.
That can be solved by welcoming immigrants because it won’t be solved by trying to force people to have kids. When social programs are introduced to help people raise a family you see a little bump in the numbers and then it goes back down again. It’s as if people realize that having a family isn’t just a financial decision, crazy right?
Medium term, yeah. After a few centuries you’re reaching dangerously small levels, though, assuming normal mortality. Maybe you’re onboard with extinction, but for a couple reasons I’m not, even as shit as we are.
Ok, so the only way to reverse it is to reduce access to birth control and go back on women rights.
There’s a whole lot of stuff that people in this discussion are blaming for birthrate going down but if you look at historical data it was going down even before these things were issues, just because people are more educated, have access to birth control and women have rights over their body. You’re not moving back above 2.1 without getting rid of these things.
Have you ever read A Brave New World? If we can get artificial wombs going - in a few centuries, which is a reasonable timeframe, I think - we could do it that way.