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Because kids were useful labour that'd help you be more secure during the times when agriculture sucked up most of the human capital.
Does this imply that eliminating child labor laws (and ignoring the ethical issues therein) would drastically increase fertility? Or is there not enough productive labor that children could accomplish in the first world, even on farms? But even then, reducing/eliminating minimum wage for them would allow the market to find some sort of niche. Like, if a poor family could just have a bunch of children and send them off to McDonalds for $6 an hour, 40 hours per week (after school and on weekends would allow this), that's $12,480 per year per kid. I'm sure lots of minimum wage jobs would hire children if they could pay them less than they had to pay adults, and could avoid public controversy. Have 10 children? That's 124,800 per year. Granted, you would have to feed and house and clothe all of those children which would eat most of that money, but that's kind of the point. Have as many kids as you want and the costs and you're just as economically stable as you would have been without them, if not slightly more.
I'm not at all actually advocating for this. I don't know that we want a society where poor children are forced to work 40 hour weeks at fast food restaurants, and poor people literally create children for the purpose of earning a profit. But it seems like it would solve the fertility issue in exchange.
Having children work in fast food restaurants for less than minimum wage is a lot more similar to Victorian London than to a high-fertility agricultural community. The difference is that in the latter case the work done by the children can be performed at or near home, visibly contributes to the family, and allows them to act as surrogate parents for their younger siblings at the same time. This reduces the burden on their parents and also prepares them for future parenthood, as it won't induce the same terror it might in a 25-year old college graduate who has never held a baby in their life. The former provides some financial incentive but none of the social or household management benefits.
I think some combination of work from home, homeschooling, and building more walkable communities is the most reasonable path towards increasing fertility in developed nations if natural selection is too slow for one's liking.
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Not necessarily, because there's been a long-term process of industrialization and urbanization that means we need fewer and fewer people to work agriculture and many of those families' descendants just don't live on farms where they need the labour or necessarily have the land (apartments aren't good for large families)
Now that's an interesting question. It's possible that would help. Some would argue that the US already encourages poor kids to have babies via welfare.
I would need to know more about how much current policies that pay people for kids (and are apparently middling at best at providing long-term results) offer.
I think there's reason to be somewhat skeptical; having kids is not costless and, as you say, a lot of the money would get eaten up which might put it under the "worth it" threshold.
I've also heard an argument that Social Security and nursing homes are to blame. It used to be that having kids was how people saved up for retirement. You spend 18 years paying for a child, and even if they earned you some money that just reduced the economic burden without removing it, but then they love you and are loyal to you and when you're old they take care of you and pay for you. Which, especially if you have an agrarian society where most of your wealth and income is physical goods not just cash, makes it hard to invest in a retirement account the same way we do now.
I don't think there's way to even possibly actually move the clock back on that though. Even if you ruthlessly cut social security and all financial assistance for elderly people, they could still take the money that would be spend on children (and the resulting decrease in taxes) and invest it in a retirement account.
But if you combine it with the reduced labor laws, together they might add up to being worth it.
I mean, the issue is there were a lot of families who didn't or couldn't do that, and it led to insane levels of endemic deep elderly poverty.
Social Security was a win-win. For lefties like me, it basically ended endemic deep poverty among elderly people. For more conservative people, it created a whole new class of consumers, who bought RV's, homes in Florida, et al. Plus, ya' know, actual retired people seem to like the freedom, instead of being free labor for their kids.
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