Economic conditions of the modern world are making it increasingly difficult for people to produce children. Men struggle to find wives. Those that do then find it difficult to sustain a family on a single wage, resulting in both parents having to work, resulting in less children. This is not a cultural/economic issue restricted to the Western world, as some claim, but a global issue of urbanised post-industrial societies. Both economic incentive programs and reactionary cultural movements attempting to bring back the traditional family have failed to significantly raise birthrates (see Korea, Russia, Hungary, China, etc.). Western states have attempted to use their comparatively higher wages to attract foreign workforce thus putting a bandaid over this issue but this solution has in turn caused many more problems, mainly due to cultural friction between the imported foreigners and natives. We can thus say that no solution to the depopulation crisis, that is both satisfactory and effective, currently exists.
But there is a solution that may soon become available.
A state could in theory move the responsibility of producing future generations directly onto itself, thus taking the burden away from the individual and putting it onto the collective.
How could this be done? In 2025 Japan unveiled the first artificial womb capable of sustaining mammalian life without a mother’s body. Full ectogenesis is already outside the realm of science-fiction and it will move to humans. It may very well become economically feasible for a state to mass produce human beings from donor genetic material. Combine this with state-funded child rearing and you have the recipe for a nation that can fully control its own population growth and adapt it to social, economic or geopolitical considerations so that it may at any time be exactly what it requires. A state that has no need for immigration. Furthermore production would be subsidiary to natural population growth, so if in a year the birthrate went up or down the government can then adapt artificial production to compensate.
The hurdles with implementing such a system are great, both because of ethical concerns certain sections of the population may raise and because such a system would take at least two to three decades after implementation to start bearing fruit and would be initially costly but if a state is able to achieve this feat the advantages it would have over its competitors would
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