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Notes -
Catholicism can lower birth rates.
Getting married is a big barrier to having children. Men aren't marriageable until they have finished their education, have a job and a place to live. In a country where 29 year old men can't afford their own place and are working as interns few men are going to be married at a fertile age. Unless young women start marrying substantially older men having a high fertility rate becomes unfeasible if marriage is a requirement.
There are really only three solutions:
Lower the social requirements to having kids. Aka single motherhood.
Make becoming a husband more achievable. Aka make it possible for young men to get a stable job and buy a four bedroom home.
Adapt to a middle income country lifestyle. This is common among high fertility immigrants. They can live with six kids in a small apartment, never eat in a restaurant, live off rice and beans and pull teeth out by themselves instead of going to a dentist. Their lifestyle is still materially superior to the vast majority of humans who ever lived. With free school lunches, the children can stuff themselves and get enough calories to cover most of their needs. Humans can survive on a tiny fraction of what middle class people assume to be the limit of survival.
The combination of high requirements and a Catholic view of family means that a sizeable portion of men will never be fathers and those who do will only meet the requirements after age 35.
It seems like a simple intervention would be to massively increase property taxes for people with no children.
This would bring property prices down a lot.
In my opinion, the housing bubble is mostly caused by inflation expectations. If your house can only go up in value, then the best time to buy is always right now. The government should send a clear and unambiguous message that you will lose money by buying a home. It will accomplish this by applying a ratchet effect to property taxes. Any time that annual appreciation exceeds X%, the property tax rate will be raised.
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