If "it's too expensive" were the reason why people are having fewer children, then paying women to have babies would work. But the article's title claims that it doesn't work.
A fundamental reason why fertility is below replacement is that when people have choices about what to do, they take them. A significant minority don't have kids, another minority (or majority) delays having kids so long that they can only have one or two. Part of the cause of this is the change of marriage from being a cornerstone of adult life, something to build your life on and around, to the capstone, something that marks success. So it is delayed by a decade or two. Yes, culture does play a role in shaping choices.
Women have been persuaded to adopt male values and standards of success as goals for themselves to achieve: high status career, high status goods like a large house in a good neighborhood, and so on. At the same time they have been persuaded to devalue traditionally female things like relationships and community wellbeing. Indeed: society, culture, will have to radically change to bring fertility above replacement.
It's not a lot of money they get, it's probably just to survive. Without kids and a career women have a much better life. Women with kids really have to work hard, women knows this by now.
I don't think it took a lot of persuasion to make women want things like money, and the things that can be bought with money. Those aren't really "male values". They're just things that women were forbidden from.
Things like relationships and community wellbeing should be human values, not female values. Men relied on women to perform them, as part of keeping them out of other occupations.
The human race won't go extinct as long as the replacement rate is above zero. Society and culture will indeed have to adapt to the altered age demographics, but that doesn't strike me as a bad thing. Certainly better than placing the onus on all women to maintain an arbitrary population size.
> Men relied on women to perform them, as part of keeping them out of other occupations.
This sounds rather blank-slatist, the idea that there are no psychological differences between men and women.
No one believes that any more. There are solid evolutionary reasons for the differences, and plenty of evidence from places like Sweden, where despite heavy pressure and highly smoothed paths into high-paying technical fields, women overwhelmingly choose people-oriented work.
A fundamental reason why fertility is below replacement is that when people have choices about what to do, they take them. A significant minority don't have kids, another minority (or majority) delays having kids so long that they can only have one or two. Part of the cause of this is the change of marriage from being a cornerstone of adult life, something to build your life on and around, to the capstone, something that marks success. So it is delayed by a decade or two. Yes, culture does play a role in shaping choices.
Women have been persuaded to adopt male values and standards of success as goals for themselves to achieve: high status career, high status goods like a large house in a good neighborhood, and so on. At the same time they have been persuaded to devalue traditionally female things like relationships and community wellbeing. Indeed: society, culture, will have to radically change to bring fertility above replacement.