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I think this belongs squarely in the 'raising awareness' category of government activity. Governments raise awareness about obesity, mental health, cancer and so on - it does basically nothing.
On the other hand, there are actual kinetic, physical actions.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41487443
From the abstract of this article, it cost the government about Aus $ 126,000 per new birth in its fertility spending program (giving $3000 to women who have children). Accounting for inflation, that sums to about US $ 118,417.10 2022.
So if Taiwan wants to double its fertility (which I'll take to be that of 2019 pre-COVID, 177,767) births, it would cost somewhere around $21,050,634,839 per annum, or about 2.5% of GDP. That's more than they spend on defense, so they're at least consistent about ignoring all threats to national existence. Anyway this naively assumes the effect scales, which it probably won't seeing as many Taiwanese women are too old to have children or too rich to care about a few thousand here or there. There'd be some dysgenics too.
Only a massive spending program is going to have any significant effect. Alternately, there are more unconventional options like organizing social credit for parents (such that they're priveliged in education and workforce), suppressing contraception, placing caps on women entering higher education and so on. My suspicion is that the ultra-nerdy East Asian youth would instantly start having children if it meant they'd better be able to get into prestigious universities. The amount of effort that goes into education there is ridiculous. But nobody has bothered trying this. Perhaps it's a case of 'you know who else tried raising their country's fertility by encouraging mothers to have children?'
Real desperation is when states start taking serious action.
My guess was gonna be "Communist Romania."
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You assume that marginal cost of extra birth will stay flat. There is every reason to expect otherwise. As you buy yourself more births, each additional one will be more and more expensive.
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I’m skeptical that even a massive spending program will have any effect. Eventually natural selection will run its course and the USA, France, Japan, Australia, etc will have high TFRs once more. Of course the populations might look very different, but eh, hajnalis shouldn’t have invented the pill.
... why do you think so? Even if we aren't all converted into biodiesel for use in drone tanks and jets by competing AI armies by 2060, there won't be much 'natural' selection going on within 50 years.
If we don't die out, odds are very high the dream of biological immortality is going to be realised, at that point a high fertility becomes a real problem unless your plan is to dismantle Venus into raw materials for a lot of space habitats.
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Since it might not have been obvious immediately from the OP, the Danish ad doesn't belong to this category. It's an ad by a (private) travel company, and their goal is not (at least directly) to increase fertility but to sell vacations. Moreover, it's the travel company originally established by this dude, so using sex and publicity to sell vacations basically runs in their blood, so to say.
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You might be the first person on the planet to suggest that Asians are too concerned with not copying Hitler.
I was mostly thinking about the West in that bit, that obviously doesn't come through in what I wrote. Anyway, it's striking how important demography and race was to Hitler's thinking. The whole objective of the war was to acquire land to fit more Germans on, ensure that there were as many Germans as possible. Population is power as far as he was concerned. But today, there's this schizophrenic thinking about demography where some countries like Canada and Australia want to massively increase their populations by immigration even as they artificially restrict and complicate housing, as they propagate memes about overpopulation. It's made out to be virtuous not to have children due to climate change. The notion that population is power seems to be very fringe, there's only that 'One Billion Americans' book.
China goes around calling the West racist for police brutality against blacks. They bring in tens of thousands of Africans to Chinese universities. They actually conducted a mass sterilization/infanticide program of their own people in the One Child Policy. Their rhetoric and their official policy are diametrically anti-Hitler. It's funny since China is probably the closest thing ideologically today to fascism but without any of the racial or eugenic angles. They've got the corporatism, the party-state and the national rejuvenation/revanchism elements.
As did the Nazis, with the same motives.
I remember that Spike Lee movie where some waiting Germans tried a "Berlin Betty" kind of thing on an advancing black troop.
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