I keep seeing birth rates discourse end in "and I guess the long term solution is exowombs" and, ignoring questions of how long such a technology will take to make, that is not the issue with birth rates. The carrying is not the issue, it's the raising and paying for children that's the stop gap. If it became possible to 3D print babies, that would not change the population growth rate more than a little.
If we could somehow solve the care and investment issue—say, by the discovery of magical brownies who loooove taking care of kids and gladly work for a saucer of milk—then the actual production of kids would not be hard. Pregnancy is a pain but not a bad tradeoff, if the kid isn't also a huge time and money suck. And if society still can't make enough kids, surrogacy is a known thing that could be publicly funded.
🌂 Surely the next thing people say after just saying exowombs, that they're not bringing up right now but is on at least half their minds as the next step is "And this allows states to directly address the problem by siring children themselves and then raising them (even if they do the raising part cheaply and badly)"?
if states wanted to raise children themselves, why dont they do this already with the kids they remove from homes with unfit parents?
🌂 Obviously the retort to that is to say that in the face of A Large Project the way states relate to the topic will change, and the introduction of the technology would...
🌂 C'mon!
You don't need exowombs for that, though! If "more babies" as a target metric was a policy goal, there are plenty of human "endowombs" available already; this theoretically could exist *tomorrow* in the form of a surrogate pregnancy reverse cap-and-trade market.
Many women who are not currently pregnant yet could carry a viable pregnancy to term would surely be willing to become pregnant for the right price, which likely far underbids the marginal cost to develop an unknown futuristic technology that may not even be feasible to begin with or be delivered in the next century, such as exowombs. And this economic solution proceeds entirely from voluntary contracts, without violating anyone's human rights, potentially also injecting large amounts of wealth from OECD nations into the global south. Really the only reason no one has tried this yet is because they don't consider it a higher priority to produce more babies than to find people to care for them. Also possibly because I came up with it less than a year ago while ogling a picture of Robert Nozick.
Many women who are not currently pregnant yet could carry a viable pregnancy to term would surely be willing to become pregnant for the right price,
🌂 yeah but people find doing that weird
🌂 and so the argument goes, they would find it less weird once we invent the baby table that prints out babies
okay but do you think that anyone will fund the research into developing the baby table that prints babies when they can be undercut at any point in the entire R&D cycle by "a kinda weird economic policy"
In fairness this entire thing is based on people being more willing to spend money on wacky birthrate policy than adding adult workers for free, aka "immigration"
ok but that's just kicking the can down the road right? iirc global tfr is below 2.1 so this is just moving people around
