The shame is downstream from the fact that we made child-rearing an expensive luxury that could only be afforded by the few. Either a couple needs enough at-home hours to take care of their own children (this means each parent should only be working at most 7 out of every 14 days because that's how math works) or centralized childcare needs to be affordable and good. People want to have children, people want their children to have children, fix the major fuckups and it'll happen.

Yes, stocks will go down. They will go down harder if we have demographic collapse.

But surely we can't fix the hours because then Asia will eat our lunch by forcing everyone to work 99 hours a week? They have the same problem but much worse and a government that isn't shy about major interventions. If we wanted to lead on this, we could get them to cooperate. If.

Dear business leaders: demographic collapse will swing the pendulum away from capital and towards labor, and policy changes have a 30 year lag built in. It is in your enlightened self interest to get in front of this before it gets in front of you.

The author's argument completely fell apart when they highlighted Israel's Haredim as a high fertility group that is socially respected. I don't believe this is actually the case. I'm not Israeli, but my strong sense is that the Haredim are widely condemned as freeloaders, receiving lots of public benefits but not contributing via taxes or military service. I can't find any good opinion polls but a cursory search will find a number of Op/Ed articles from Israeli newspapers commenting on the topic.

I suspect Israeli fertility has a lot more to do with nationalism (though not among the Haredi groups, who are often explicitly anti-nationalist). However, reviewing the data it doesn't seem like there's a clear pattern - Turkey (another country I'd consider currently as nationalist) has above average TFR but so does Iceland and France (two countries I wouldn't consider nationalist).

A few things glossed over:

- the shame in question might actually be about whether one can provide a sufficient and healthy environment for the kids to grow up and thrive in an ever-changing world, the pace of which is increasing exponentially. It might be good to be circumspect about having children due to the fact that we are economically bifurcated into very-rich and increasingly-poor (in most places - it's understandable that if you're from Sweden like the authors you might not feel that quite so much b/c you live in one of the few examples of modern governance done kinda-right).

- 'outcasts' and 'misfits' are, in most places in the world (again, a nordic caveat is important here) a GOOD thing. The state of culture rit-large these days is pretty abysmal, and if you happen to be an outlier you actually represent a potential path for survivability given that the apparent thrust of most of the critical mass of society is self-destruction. Personally, I blame the news cycle and social media for this.

- Hyper-orthodox anything is not a great example of how to be. It's a very all-or-nothing strategy in a world that increasingly requires elasticity.

Shaming the choice to have children by those who are not "married, employed, [or] mature" is certainly a problem and we should address it, but another even-more-impactful problem we need to address is the problem of people not being married, employed, or mature. It also seems intuitively wrong to suggest that the shaming of the choice to have children, in general, eclipses the shaming of the choice not to have children.

I am of the opinion that there are a very large number of reasons why people have no or few children; parent shaming is one among many. If we want people to have more children we should address all/most of them.