Immigration may be a solution for richer countries but only if the people there accept it (currently there seems to be a trend against immigration in many devel

Immigration may be a solution for richer countries but only if the people there accept it (currently there seems to be a trend against immigration in many developed countries). Other ideas may be reducing the need for people (e.g. more automation, but then what do you do about various welfare-for-the-old programs like state pensions, Medicare, social security?) or policies to improve fertility (random ideas I’ve seen: required paternity leave so that women won’t suffer an unequal career disadvantage from maternity which can discourage having children; relaxing booster seat requirements because they require a larger car for more than two kids which can be unaffordable and offer rules don’t seem to be based on when they are beneficial; reducing other regulations that make larger families more difficult, e.g. rules about leaving children unsupervised; reducing the cost of housing as this can be a large burden preventing people from having families; reducing the cost of college as parents may consider it when choosing to have children; somehow having people being better paid so they can have a parent stay at home with children; reducing the cost of childcare so that parents can afford more kids; forcing employers to give reasonable consideration to requests for flexible working conditions (part time, etc) for parents). Currently in rich countries when people are polled on how many children they would like, they often would like more than they end up having, so if immigration is not to be an option, reducing demographic problems may be doable by removing some of the barriers to people having children. A policy I didn’t mention is paying people for having children as many governments already do it one way or another. One issue is that the payment is often meagre and not worth it for wealthier parents (where the payments won’t come close to the opportunity cost from the career hit of taking leave from work). The kind of policies that seem particularly effective to me are ones that make marginally larger families easier — that is, it seems easier to get more children by causing some families of 2 children to become families of 3 rather than families of 0 to families of 1 — and housing/school affordability matters there as well as silly things like the booster seat thing.