This sort of article infuriates me.

This kind of high fertility community — and the culture of neighborliness it engenders — used to be the norm everywhere. But today, my neighborhood just north of Washington, D.C., stands out as highly countercultural — an island of fertility in an ever-widening sea of infertility sweeping the world. This natalism isn’t a product of happenstance. It’s largely the result of countercultural norms that governments concerned about low birthrates have the power to foster.

In a word: No.

The article goes on to talk about how this is "cultural norms" based.

It is not.

Policymakers have neglected to address snowballing cultural norms that have led to fewer marriages and children. Many younger people write off having kids as an undertaking that threatens the climate or spells the end of their personal freedom, financial ease and happiness itself. If everyone you know thinks it's disadvantageous to get married or have kids, more money is unlikely to change your calculus.

It is not, in the main your money that drives such calculations.  As noted the issue is not so much you its what you believe your children will have; if you believe your children will have a less-full life than you then only someone who doesn't care about children will have them -- and those who don't care about the future their children will have are precisely the people who shouldn't reproduce in the first place.

The drive to reproduce is one of the most-base that exists.  Whether you consider this "good" or not is immaterial; without it no species survives from the lowliest to the highest in mental capacity.  But once sentience is achieved, and this is a defining difference between humans and most other creatures, and then advances enough that you both foresee and can change future outcomes then expected outcome for your children becomes a counterweight to that base drive and the more and better you can think the more-profound that impact can become.

This, above all else, is why the hollowing out of the middle class and allowing exploitation of others is destructive.  Tell young people to go to school and learn high-skill life paths such as coding, accounting and similar and then displace them for foreigners because the foreigners are cheaper and that young adult looks over his or her life and sees a less-positive future for their potential offspring.

The same is true for the "more-ordinary" folks.  Americans used to be some of the best and most-productive people in construction.  The 1920s, 30, and 60s home was not built by illegal immigrants.  It was built by Americans -- but they cost more because they are not going to be satisfied living 10 to a one-bedroom place.

Problem: If you import cheaper labor because those people have lower expectations they increase demand for goods and services and that drives up the price, which screws the American citizen twice; first by depressing wages and then again by increasing prices.  The basic law of economic supply and demand is not a suggestion.

The concern is not about "the climate"; that's twisted nonsense.  It is about tens of millions of young adults who live in a higher-cost society being displaced by those brought in from a lower-cost and lower-standard of living society, importing not just the humans but their standard of living as well which is done specifically because corporate America finds those people to be cheaper for a unit of labor.  Whether said person is an illegal immigrant roofing houses or a programmer from India who came from a society where they literally do not have flush toilets in 3/4 of their homes the issue and outcome is the same.

If you allow "chain migration" with any of these people you make it 100x worse because they bring more of the folks who do not have our cultural expectations and values in a multiplicative fashion.  Then on top of it you hand all of them various forms of subsidy such as "free" health care, housing assistance, EBT cards and they scam on their taxes as well which the rest of us are expected to pay as the law demands, never mind stuffing our schools full of non-English speaking persons and demand they get the "same" education AT NO COST which destroys the capacity of the English-speaking kid to advance as he or she otherwise would.

Plenty of people have said "well my family came over from {X} and we all huddled in a little house and went out to work every day."  True.  Go back far enough and that's basically everyone in America's story, other than Native Americans who were here first.  So what?  You didn't have any welfare, you didn't have any housing assistance or "food stamps", you didn't have free medical care and your kids either learned English or you had to teach them until they could acquire enough English skills to compete because there was no other language spoken in school or anywhere else beyond your home and perhaps small neighborhood area!  If you wanted a driver license or other government thing like, for example, water and gas service the people in the office spoke English and you either did or you took someone with you who did -- because otherwise you couldn't understand them.

That was and is American culture: You come here that's fine but you assimilate to our culture, not the other way around and that means you're not owed anything -- not housing, food, medical care or anything else.  You are exactly equal and we all speak English so if you want to go to school and understand the teacher or be able to actually get a job where the instructions can't be conveyed by pointing at something you better learn it and no, its not our job to teach it to you.

You might, as an American with a nice fat 401k think its fantastic that all these tech firms are selling at 10x sales when historically that's ridiculously unreasonable in that a company with a 10% earnings growth rate (quite-healthy over periods of years) typically sells at roughly 10-15x earnings but today sells for 50x.

Why does it sell for 50x?  Because through the supply chain of both goods and labor such exploitation takes place.  That it occurs in other lands is bad enough (and it can be argued that is raw exploitation or even effectively slavery) but when it comes here into America, or the labor is offshored from America to those other nations then it destroys the forward earnings capacity of Americans and if you're one of those IT folks who was forced to train his or her H-1b replacement such as occurred at Disney why would you then think your children will get a fair shake two decades from now should you choose to have a few?

Then add to it a society that has chosen to reward and even celebrate breaking up families -- and ours does.  If you went through that as a kid are you going to believe it won't happen to your children when at best you're only in charge of half the adults involved?

Is it rational to bring new life into the world when your neck got stepped on in this fashion?

First you get no special treatment at all but all these other people do -- and if you make a kid they won't get any special treatment either.  But every brown, multi-lettered or whatever person who shows up here -- they will including screwing your kid from being able to actually get a decent education because the teacher has to teach in six different languages -- and both you and your kids will be forced to pay for it!

So tell me why you think someone who has a brain in their head will make kids unless society gives them a reason to believe the same thing won't happen to their kids that they are watching happen to everyone else and which happened to them.

Yes, the top 5 or 10% of those in any given field survive and the top 5% and better can wind up with wildly superior outcomes.  They're good enough to claw their way above the fray or even rise to the point that they become those who exploit the lesser-skilled themselves.  But essentially everyone overrates themselves; that's not because all humans are egotistic fools, it is just that people tend to be optimistic when it comes to their own capacity in any given set of respects.  But the facts are that only 1 in 10 persons in a given field is actually in the top 10%; all the rest are in the large group of "average" somewhere (or below) and thus they're subject to that sort of replacement.

If you want to solve the fecundity issue generally you have to stop all of this ****.

Americans must always be first throughout both supply chains of goods and services sold in this nation, our educational, social support, medical systems and all the labor performed right here in America.

You can force people out of their middle-class lifestyle through credit emission (inflation) and H-1b forced replacement or offshoring in the workforce, robbing the average American of their earnings capacity and keeping it for those in the top tier of the corporate ladder, all the while claiming that "higher stock prices" will make up for it.

But those who can think are free to believe, and they're right, that if they make children you will step on their kids necks exactly as you stomped on theirs and the technological genie that allows any adult to choose not to reproduce with a very high degree of success cannot be put back in the bottle.

100 years ago and before the only option for rejecting such societal challenge was abstinence, which we all know is a loser; you can preach it, but you won't achieve it.  Today that is no longer true and thus now we are forced to confront that it is in fact our deliberate acts as a society to devalue the bulk of our people through deliberate wage suppression coupled with ridiculous compounded ramping of the cost of living right here, that is responsible -- and the issue is world-wide among developed nations, not just in the United States.