The Natalist’s Dilemma: Good and Bad Ways to Increase the Birth Rate

When I was in college, a popular trope among Gen Xers was that the Earth had too many people. Too many consumers, especially in the West, would overwhelm the planet as greedy capitalists extract resources beyond the Earth’s carrying capacity. (Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource II went unassigned, though the clever kids passed it around like a Metallica album in the Eastern Bloc.)

Neo-Malthusian thinking had been an intellectual holdover from the 1970s. By the 1990s, students were still under the spell of Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome. Back then, it was still in the zeitgeist that Americans should have fewer children, whether to save the planet, pursue education, or succeed at work.

In the intervening years, teen pregnancy was roundly discouraged. Experts and authorities encouraged education and careerism for young people. Subsequent generations didn’t just swear off teen pregnancy. Memes encouraged girl bosses to get their PhDs, which went along with telling young men that their provider/protector instincts amounted to toxic masculinity. Educated people put off child-rearing till their late thirties. Add the perverse effects of matchmaking sites and dating apps in the 2000s—we got multiple factors of demographic decline.

Vice President J.D. Vance has proposed increasing the child tax credit to $5,000. Others in the Trump II administration have proposed a one-time “baby bonus” of $5,000 to help encourage childbearing during a period of declining birth rates that threatens demographic collapse.

It’s true that incentives matter and that a $5,000 child tax credit would be a strong incentive. The trouble is that $5,000 is a strong incentive.

Critics of such policies predictably argue it’s simply not enough. They think a wider, deeper social safety net around children—paid parental leave, childcare assistance, and a holistic suite of other support measures—would do the trick.

But would it?

Sweden mandates 480 days per child, with 390 days at approximately 80 percent of salary and 90 days at a flat rate. According to Le Monde, each parent must take at least 90 days, and up to 45 days can be transferred to another caregiver, such as a grandparent. ​Sweden also has an extensive public daycare system, with over 75 percent of children aged 1–5 attending subsidized municipal preschools. ​

In Norway, parents can choose between 49 weeks at full pay or 59 weeks at 80 percent pay. A portion of the leave is reserved for each parent to encourage shared caregiving.​ Regarding childcare, Norway enjoys universal access to subsidized daycare for children aged 1–5, with capped fees to ensure affordability.​

Finally, in Denmark, mothers are entitled to 18 weeks of maternity leave and fathers to 2 weeks of paternity leave. Additionally, parents can share 32 weeks of parental leave, with financial support provided. Furthermore, high-quality, subsidized daycare focusing on early childhood education is widely available.​

Remember that the replacement rate for a population is 2.1 children per mother.

Despite generous social support for families in Scandinavia, here are the results:

• Sweden. As of 2021, the TFR for native-born Swedish women was approximately 1.62 children per woman.
• Norway. In 2022, Norway experienced a record low TFR of 1.41 children per woman.
• Denmark. In 2023, the TFR for Danish women was reported to be just under 1.5 children per woman.

Generous, holistic social welfare benefits aren’t working in Scandinavia. There’s no reason to think they’d work in the US, either.

America’s redistributionists reflexively want more taxpayer-funded goodies, but there is no evidence that lavish social support for families encourages enough people to have more babies, at least not the right people.

This is also the problem with the Vance plan.

The social engineering objective should probably be to invert this chart. Yet we want neither to embrace policies that consider the future poor as liabilities to be managed, nor policies that view the poor as peapod pickers for the patrician class.

A Law of Tax and Subsidy says if you tax an activity, you’ll get less of it, but if you subsidize an activity, you’ll get more of it. And this is generally true. But strange exceptions and perverse consequences follow when you get into the weeds.

The weeds in this case are what we might call productivity stratification. In other words, whether we like it or not, baby bonuses create strong incentives for the least productive members of society to have children.

This probably seems unkind, but reality can be cruel.

In other words, if my income prospects are low, I am more likely to avail myself of such programs by having more children. But if I’m at the lower quintile of the productivity distribution, I am likely also at the lowest quintiles of natural ability, intelligence, perseverance, and good parenting—characteristics we desire for healthy development and good life prospects for children.

As a lower-quartile woman, I would be less likely to live in a stable home with a male partner or father figure to contribute. As a lower-quartile man, the incentives might still be too weak for me to provide my children with stability.

More children born into such circumstances can’t be a net good for society, especially if the productive class is meant to subsidize the unproductive class. I’m sure there are exceptions. There will be geniuses among the lower quintiles. But by and large, people tend to reproduce within their quintiles.

And that’s what I mean by the right people. The paradox is that we want those most likely to have healthy, productive kids to reproduce.

Call it elitism. Call it soft eugenics. Call it whatever you want.

If you subsidize certain classes of people to have more children, you will almost certainly get more of those classes. Yet, if officials sit on their hands, demographic decline is inevitable, as the most productive people continue to reap the rewards of renumerative behavior, which means less procreative behavior.

This is the natalist’s dilemma.

If incentives worked better, we might swallow the bitter pill of subsidizing both more productive and less productive people, but in amounts proportional to their income. That might work, but it would be highly regressive, expensive, and taken as offensive. Otherwise, you would want only to subsidize those that would not likely be—or breed—wards of the state.

Neither approach is politically feasible. But the answer can’t be to dump baby bonuses and tax credits on the population without perverse effects.

If some social engineering program or other is absent, private solutions remain. But that’s vague.

So what specifically could we do?

1. Cultural Campaigns. Support private media and influencer efforts to normalize larger families and early parenthood among educated, productive groups, countering excessive careerism and anti-natalist narratives.
2. Family-Friendly Corporate Cultures. Encourage companies to offer flexible work arrangements, on-site childcare, or fertility benefits to make parenting more compatible with careers.
3. Community Support Networks. Foster local initiatives like parenting co-ops, where families share childcare responsibilities, or otherwise include communitarian activities that make growing a family more appealing.
4. Philanthropic Incentives. Encourage wealthy donors or foundations to fund scholarships or grants for young couples who commit to starting families early, targeting those with strong potential for stable, productive households.
5. Reduce regulations on extended families. Create family-friendly tax and building codes so that it’s less expensive and less of a hassle for retired grandparents or extended family to live on the same property as their grandchildren.
6. Return to free-range kids culture. Helicopter parenting doesn’t just stunt kids’ development, it sucks for the parents, too. We must gain some perspective about risks and then insist kids roam, play, and skin their knees again.
7. Emphasize selfish reasons, not moral suasion. Communications about parenting should be less about any progeny panic and more about why having kids can be fun and rewarding. (See Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.)

None of these solutions is a silver bullet.

But as our demographic decline accelerates, it will take nothing short of a societal sea change to make settling down and having children more appealing. Some will argue that the burden of such a change falls most heavily on women. And it does, thanks to Mother Nature. So we will have to navigate those waters, too—between the Scylla of barren feminism and the Charybdis of patriarchy—elevating mothers and motherhood without turning America into Gilead or the World State.