Countries With Low Fertility Rates Need Better Maternal Leave, Not Bribe People to Go on Dates or Get Married

South Korea is the warning.

South Korea offers up to US$29,000 cash for marriage to tackle birth-rate crisis. As South Korea continues to grapple with plummeting birth rates and fears of regional depopulation, local governments are now expanding their efforts beyond childbirth subsidies to include cash incentives for marriage.

In Busan's Saha district, local authorities have promised up to 20 million won (US$14,700) in payments to couples who date and marry.

With South Korea facing a demographic crisis due to having the lowest birth rate in the world, one district has decided to tackle the challenge by offering cash for couples just to date and even more money if they get married.

In Seoul alone, the fertility rate dropped to just 0.58 in 2024. Nationally it sits at a historic low of 0.72 children per woman.

And yet: Pronatalist incentives are not new in South Korea; the South Korean government has spent 270 billion dollars since 2006 in effort to promote childbirth. The effect has been negligible.

Seoul had considered a similar event but put the plan on hold after facing criticism that it would be a waste of taxpayers' money that failed to tackle the reasons behind people opting not to marry and have babies - most notably the sky-high costs of housing and education.

Cash for dating fails because it solves the wrong selection pressure.

What Measuring Selection Actually Means Here

All of these studies use the Lande Arnold framework: regress lifetime reproductive success on a trait, standardize both, and the slope is the selection gradient beta. Combine that with additive genetic variance and the breeder's equation R = h2S gives predicted response per generation.

The critical denominator shift: Crow's opportunity for selection I = V(W)/W bar squared, decomposes into mortality and fertility components.

In pre-transition populations 40 to 50 percent of children died before reproducing, so differential survival did most work.

In post-transition rich countries, survival to age 15 is above 99 percent. The mortality term collapsed to nearly zero.

Total opportunity fell, but composition changed completely: essentially all remaining variance in fitness is variance in fertility.

Selection can now only act on traits that predict how many children you choose to have. Physiology is almost out of the loop. Psychology, partnership timing, and social circumstance are the whole game.

Why Bribing Dates Fails

Cash for romance assumes people are not meeting.

The data says people are not affording to continue.

Busan Saha District Cash for Romance:

• 14,700 dollars for marriage
• 29,000 dollars cash bundle
• dating incentives: meals, movies
• Cash given to encourage dating and marriage

But It Does Not Fix the Real Problem:

• Fertility 0.58 in Seoul, lowest birth rate in world
• Housing costs still too high
• Education costs remain burdensome
• Cash alone does not equal more babies

Incentives help short term, but without affordable housing and education, birth rates keep falling.

Age At First Birth Is the Master Variable

This is where the Iceland and UK Biobank data clarifies everything.

Framingham: Lower cholesterol, lower systolic blood pressure, shorter height, higher weight, earlier age at first birth, and later menopause were under selection.

The two reproductive timing traits had the largest gradients.

Both are just longer reproductive window.

That is the actual signal.

deCODE Iceland: 129,808 Icelanders, POLY EDU score associated with delayed reproduction P less than 10 to minus 100 and fewer children, effect stronger in women. One standard unit of POLY EDU predicted 0.061 fewer children, while each additional year of actual education predicted 0.011 more children.

Those point in opposite directions. It is not going to school that reduces fertility. It is a disposition toward delay, deliberation, and long horizon planning.

Selection attributable decline about 0.010 standard units per decade. Extrapolated to full genetic component about 0.028 SD per decade, roughly 0.30 IQ equivalent points per decade.

Flynn effect was 3 points per decade.

Environmental gains outran genetic gradient by an order of magnitude.

UK Biobank (Hugh Jones and Abdellaoui 2022): 33 polygenic scores against fertility in 409,629 subjects, scores predicting higher earnings, education and health also predicted lower fertility.

Effects concentrated among lower SES groups, younger parents, people with more lifetime sexual partners, and people not living with a partner.

Then the critical result: the direction of selection reverses among older parents, or once you control for age at first live birth.

That is the whole finding in one sentence.

Condition on when people start, and the negative gradient on human capital scores disappears and flips.

The selection is not against intelligence, health, or earning capacity. It is against delay.

They frame it through economic theory: higher potential earnings produce an income effect (children more affordable, raising fertility) and a substitution effect (childrearing time costs more in foregone earnings, lowering fertility).

At higher incomes the two roughly balance; among lower income people and single parents facing larger time burden, substitution effect dominates.

This is why effect is stronger in women in both Iceland and UK.

Female fecundity has a hard biological deadline that male fecundity does not, so delay converts into lost fertility much more efficiently.

Generation time multiplier: Two lineages with identical completed fertility but first births at 22 versus 32 produce dramatically different long run contributions, because over 200 years one runs through nine generations and the other six.

Mean age at first birth in Western Europe moved from roughly 24 to roughly 30 since 1970. That alone compounds the AFB gradient.

The Fix: Better Maternal Leave + Childcare, Not Dating Cash

The Nordic reversal proves this is a phase, not a law.

The education fertility correlation was flat or positive before demographic transition, went negative during it, and in several Nordic countries has been flattening or reversing again.

Highly educated women's completed fertility converging with, and in some Finnish and Swedish cohorts exceeding, that of less educated women, as childcare infrastructure and male domestic participation reduce the time cost that drives substitution effect.

Hugh Jones own conditional result predicts exactly this: change relative cost of time, and sign flips.

So correct statement is not humans are under dysgenic selection.

It is: in a specific institutional configuration that has existed for roughly sixty years, in a subset of countries, a gradient of this magnitude and sign is measurable, and gradient is a function of institutions, not biology.

Solution: Build real support, parental leave, affordable childcare, work life balance

• Paid maternal parental leave 1.5 years, 100 percent salary, both parents
• Affordable childcare, subsidized childcare centers, safe reliable
• Work family balance: flexible work hours, parental leave protection
• Monthly allowance for first year, subsidized childcare centers, tax support plus housing aid for families
• 2024: Fertility rises to 0.80, first increase in years when support improves

This helps parents actually choose to have children. Sustainable, caring, effective.

Countries trying to bribe people to date are trying to move age at first partnership.

Countries that succeed in raising fertility reduce cost of age at first birth for existing couples.

Make second child cheap, not first date expensive.

Key takeaway: Focus on support systems, not just cash bribes. Fix root causes, childcare, work, cost, to encourage families.

Low fertility is a global issue. Solutions should support families, not dating bribes.