Birth rates are a measure of the health of a country's population. A below replacement birth rate is a sign of unsustainable trajectory.

The faillure of government incentives to stimulate birth rates in any meaningful ways points to the wrong solution to the problem.

If we examine when the problem started we find it coincides with what we know which is that women who prioritise a career and go through higher education have the lowest birth rates and many miss their fertility window altogether.

Many factors effected the birth rate. One such factor  was the drive  in the 70s to  incentivise women into the work place and into higher education.  We know from statistics that women who focus on career and women who go through higher education have the lowest fertility rates with many having no children at all.

 Currently in many countries there are more women in higher education than men.

Women in the workplace created the dual income family. One of the outcomes of dual income families was the rise of housing prices which created a feedback loop to drive more and more women into the workforce to enable couples to afford property.

Another unintended consequence is that the smartest women are having the least amount of babies, thereby directly affecting future generations.

Instead of addressing the root cause of the problem which are bad value lock in, governments seemed more concerned with loss of revenue than with the general sustainability of its citizenry and began an a program of mass migration without any popular mandate.

The financial incentives offered by government have barely moved the needle, and governments have doubled down on the bad values that caused the problem, seemingly for the sole sake of revenue and ideology.

The time and financial cost of a child in a western society is a huge investment that is not offset by the tiny incentives the government is offering. 

Another factor is no fault divorce which vrtiually no one is interesting in looking at. There is a clear corelation between birthrates and marriages.

What we get from government are superficial misdirected logic. For example the cost of housing is a drag on fertility so we must provide more low cost housing. However women who pursue a career or go through higher education are not going to be interested in public housing. The root cause has been completely ignored, the price of housing is high largely because of dual income couples which in turns self perpetuates the problem by driving more women into the workforce for longer. Offering more public housing is never going to make any sort of impact until the cause is addressed which are bad value lock ins.

The price of housing is determined by demand and the more prosperous and educated women are, the more they contribute to higher housing prices.

The only viable solution is to roll back the many bad values that have been locked in which are principally gender equality and the idea that woman must have the same roles in life as men, no fault divorce, abortion on demand and the current fad of driving teens into same sex relationships.

Ideology acts as blinkers on people's viewpoints and what is interesting is that almost no one questions the root causes of low fertility instead pointing to numerous other minor factors.

The irony is that those most obsessed about sustainability are in fact the same people who are the least concerned about the most important sustainability of all, the sustainability of civilisation itself. In a  philosophy of effective altruism we should not sacrifice the future for short term self-centered rewards.

Until the root causes are addressed  we are in a civilisational doom loop.