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A few thoughts:

1. I also find that the innovation argument is kind of sidestepping the question. High population isn't required for innovation — the population of ancient Athens was maybe 100,00 free men and essentially spearheaded Western culture in a couple centuries. The undercurrent of the innovation discourse is that high achievers are declining in population, which is not often stated explicitly.

2. "Changing the cultural incentives is equivalent to chastising people who are childless" — I don't think this is necessarily true. For instance, medieval Christianity essentially valorized chastity and monastic life, but still had upward population growth because there were high enough birth rates among the non-celibate. The same applies for various Eastern religions with monastic traditions. This is definitely a tougher problem now since urbanity and education appear to inversely correlate with fertility, and top-down cultural change for pro-natal culture has proven to be very difficult. But I think this is the biggest conundrum that people are trying to solve: creating bottom-up pro-natal cultures that can still be appealing in the modern world.

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This might just be a me thing, but the fertility crisis pieces I have read/heard in the past have had racist undertones. The reason they don't answer your third question is that there is no PC way to say 'more white kids pls'.

Although to be fair, it's not a topic I've done any balanced research on so I just get the views from some questionable corners of the internet I'm on.

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These are of course valid points, that no one knows how to engineer a cultural solution to this problem, and that a meaningful economic solution is going to appear like draconian punishment of the childless. But a couple comments:

1. I don’t anyone is concerned about “slight decreases in population growth rates.” I think people are concerned about collapsing birth rates. There is not much difference between TFRs of 2.6 and 2.8, but a TFR of 1.3 is going to do really frightening things to our living standards, and within our lifetimes.

2. The question of “who has the obligation to reproduce?” unfortunately has a fairly straightforward, if extremely unpalatable answer. Because as a basic matter of fairness, the answer is probably: anyone who is able to, and who plans to rely on the labor of other human beings in the second half of their life.

And I’m not just talking about public pension/healthcare systems; I’m talking about the division of labor in general. If you’re not planning on growing your own food and making your own medicine, what you’re implicitly saying is you’d like other people to do the hard work and sacrifice of parenting so that their kids can do stuff for you, because you don’t want to. That sucks, that’s an ugly way to think of it, but I don’t know a way around that fact.

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What if you really suck though, and are a burden on the system and your potential kids probably would be as well?

Anyway, I remember a graph asking european women (of a somewhat older generation, like Gen X, but still) how many kids they wanted vs how many they got. Many wanted 3 or more but very few got them, most wanted two but many got only 1. At the end it was like 5% or less who truly wanted to be childless and didn't regret it. It seems like if a substantial part of the population has 3-4 or even more kids, we can afford some percentage who doesn't have kids. Many cultures throughout the world had celibate people revered, eg monks or nuns.

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