How can a country balance its demographics ethically and morally? [closed]

Question

As a kind of follow-up from this question, I have another question.

How can a country balance its demographics ethically and morally?

Of course, mass genocide and rapes are some of the ways, but they would not be embraced by the population in any sense of the word. This would be abhorred even by the international community.

Another way would be to "wait" until things balance "naturally" - this works best to "phase out" older people in favor of the younger people - under some conditions: 1) the economy can survive the wait and 2) the young people are actively "doing" something to help things - which might not happen because of the bad economy.

And the results of trying to raise the retirement age are already very visible.

I am not sure if the same strategies would work to balance the young-vs-old, as well as male-vs-female.

Answer 1

In a liberal democracy, it's pretty much politically impossible to outright tell people how many children they should have. But there are nevertheless ways to encourage or discourage births in indirect ways.

There are several policies that aim to increase birth rates:

• Financial incentives. Some countries give tax relieves and/or subsidies to parents. The idea is that by relieving the financial burden on parents, some people who are unsure whether they can finance raising a child will reconsider.
• Policies that make it possible to still pursue a professional career while raising children. This includes policies like state-sponsored childcare, mandatory maximum work hours, mandatory work-from-home where possible, mandatory parenting leave and maternity leave.
• Taking children into account during urban planning. This includes things like walkable city layouts and reserving public spaces for family recreation (parks, playgrounds, pools...). This helps to create an atmosphere where people feel that they are in a good environment to raise children.

There are also policies that reduce birth rates:

• Provide sex education in the school system. Research shows that comprehensive sex education in school reduces the rate of teen pregnancies.
• Make birth control easily accessible.

These policies are often considered a reason for the drastic reduction of birth-rates in Europe and North-America during the 1970s. The contraceptive pill came on the market. And sexuality became less of a taboo subject in school and in society in general, so people knew that they had the option to take it.

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And besides birth rates, there is of course another way to change the demography of a country: migration. There are ways to encourag and discourage the immigration of people in certain age groups. For example, student visa programs to get young adults from abroad, work visas to get people of working age into the country and visas for the families of foreigners who are already in the country to repatriate whole families into the country.

Answer 2

Migration.

If a country has insufficient workforce, but is otherwise a pleasant place to live, people from unpleasant places have an incentive to move there.

Or, alternatively, elderly people who can't find a caregiver might emigrate to a place where care is cheap.

Answer 3

A decrease in birth rates is achievable through means that most people will find agreeable. For example, through increased education, in particular making sure that it is available to women, and to all economic levels. Education usually means higher income, more awareness, and more ability to make choices. The net result is, among many other things, people can be more assured of having their children live to adulthood. They can prepare for their own old age and not depend on children to care for them. They are aware of ways to take control of such issues and can afford them. So education generally results in lowered birth rates.

Increasing birth rates is a tougher proposition. Nearly every country in the world is experiencing falling birth rates. Granted, few countries are actively trying to reverse these trends. And the few that are (China for example) have only recently started doing so. It is early to expect results.

But, if it were easy, one might expect that some countries would have found it by accident. It would be possible to pick out countries and say "that country is pleasant and they're having lots of babies."

It isn't clear that there are pleasant methods of achieving increased birth rates. For example, few people would accept returning to the conditions of a century ago when birth rates were higher. Plus, it isn't even clear it would work. The education cat is out of the bag.

Answer 4

a political class has no moral right to impose on its population decisions such as how many children should they have

indirectly however, since there are consequences from the externalities of excessive population, it makes sense that people should pay for them as close to the problem as possible, as they do with basic education and hospital care through taxation

indeed people already make decisions on how many children they should have based on the fact that children are no longer cheap labour and are in fact a massive liability in economic terms at least for the first couple of decades of their life, as children are not allowed to work and parent have a duty to care and to provide for State-mandated education among other things in most if not all of the industrialised world

these liabilities already constitute a large tax on children, perhaps too large in many cases as people have decided to have less than 2 per couple, leading to an aging population

the framing of this question implies that the political class has the right to decide how much population is too little or too much, rather than the very effects of population numbers on the people - removing agency from the people and assigning it to the State through the political class

at most, the political class could perhaps pose the question to the electorate, perhaps as part of an electoral programme, to take measures that would lead to different incentives to have more or less children; but I don't think this is even an issue when, as soon as the externalities of children are exposed to parents in terms of long-term liabilities from having children, the problem is that people may have too few rather than too many children