Jim Penman argues that cash incentives for babies fail everywhere because the real problem is cultural, not financial. South Korea, Australia, China, Japan, and Singapore have all tried parental leave, childcare subsidies, and cash bonuses with no results. He says we need neuroscience research instead, pointing to GLP-1 drugs as a possible lead.
Hi, I'm Jim Penman. I'm a businessman who's funded a research institute into, amongst other things, the birth rate crisis. Why are birth rates dropping? I've written previous books including Epigenetics and Character and Biohistory, about to release Birth Rate Crisis. South Korea is trying a whole lot of different things: higher parental leave pay, more time for fathers, newborn housing support, leave time for both parents, shorter working hours, help for employers. Okay, they're trying all these things. People say it's money, it's this and this and this. What's really interesting is that none of them are working. They're not working at all. And it won't work for South Korea, it won't work for anywhere else. My own country, Australia, has been trying a number of things: 26 weeks paid parental leave, 3-day childcare guarantee, family tax benefit, superannuation on leave pay, childcare subsidy, newborn payments. Tried this stuff, doesn't work. any of it, no appreciable effect on the birth rate in Australia. China's trying national childcare subsidy, maternity and parental leave, housing support, more affordable childcare, tax relief, broader maternity benefits. Adding to that, you've got government pressure. The government's now saying you've got to have children. They're getting rid of propaganda against having children. They're actually controlling the media to push it. It's not working. And what's really interesting about China is The Chinese had a change of policy from the strict one-child policy to allowing 2 children, birth rate went down. Then they said they went from allowing people to have 2 children to encouraging them to have more than 3 children and the birth rate went down. What it shows is what the government does is irrelevant. It's trivial. They can't fix the problem. Japan's trying expanded childcare allowance, near full-time income replacement, housing support. Half million yen in childcare payment, short-term work benefits, more childcare and education help. It's not working. None of it's working. The birth rate isn't even budging the slightest bit. Money isn't the issue. Singapore is trying baby bonus cash, 30 weeks paid leave, newborn healthcare funding, child development account, large families scheme, housing, childcare, and tax support. And yet the birth rate continues to go down, and it will keep on going down because this is not solving your basic problem. We should spend money on scientific research, basic neuroscience research. There is a reason people are not having children. It's to do with the change of character, which is a reaction to our ultra-competitive society, to prosperity, to all these things. It's solvable. It needs neuroscience. We need science. And there are actual potential treatments around, which is the GLP agonists, the weight loss treatments. There's actually some of the effects in those we think have some of the right effects. If they were tweaked and followed up, we could solve this crisis. We're not talking about a big program. We're not talking about the trillions of dollars being spent. We're talking about a few hundred million dollars just to do the basic research to find out what the problem is, and we can fix it.
Rising mental illness and falling birth rates have the same cause, it is this.....
