America's Birthrate
By: Dylan Cawley
America has not been above replacement birth-rates (2.1 children per family) since 1971. The response from the political class — left and in some cases right — has been so inadequate that it almost constitutes its own kind of answer. Nobody is doing anything about it. And the reason nobody is doing anything about it is the most clarifying fact in contemporary American politics, if you’re willing to look at it directly. Think about what it would actually take to reverse a fifty-year fertility decline. It would require subordinating the immediate material preferences of all living voters: housing policy, tax structure, etc., to the interests of people who don’t exist yet and thus can’t vote. It would require a political coalition willing to absorb enormous short-term costs for a long-term demographic payoff that no sitting politician will live to see.
The left’s answer to this issue is to replace the missing births with immigration. This is somewhat of a coherent short-term economic patch, but the real reason they’ve taken this position is the bonus of a considerable political advantage in generating a new constituency. It also happens to be civilizational suicide, as the substitution of one people for another is not viable long-term. But that is a separate issue. The point here is that even on its own terms, mass immigration does not solve the birth rate problem. You cannot import your way out of a domestic failure to reproduce.
On the right, there has been an emergent pronatalist movement — a handful of think tanks publishing papers about natalist policy and a small clique of podcasters and X-posters — but they’ve not grappled honestly with the scale of what reversal would require. A baby bonus does not fix a society in which a median-income couple cannot afford a three-bedroom house within commuting distance of a city with jobs.
The societies that have successfully maintained or recovered fertility have generally done so through some combination of strong religious institutions, tight cultural norms around family formation, or direct state intervention in reproductive and family life. The structural changes that would actually move the fertility rate are expensive, politically dangerous, and require taking things from constituencies that show up on election day. Consider what reversal would actually require: fundamentally restructuring zoning laws in every major American city to make family-sized homes affordable near jobs, and directly attacking the asset values of the homeowning majority, making it economically viable for one parent to step back during child-rearing years — meaning either dramatically raising the single wage and with it a significant share of GDP declines. Each of these changes attacks an entrenched interest with votes, money, and institutional representation.
Hungary has tried the softest version of a genuine natalist program with direct cash transfers, mortgage subsidies, tax exemptions for large families, spending roughly five percent of its GDP doing it. The fertility rate went from 1.23 in 2011 to roughly 1.6 by 2021. Still well below replacement. Fiscal incentives such as these can move the needle modestly at enormous cost, but they cannot overcome the structural conditions that make children expensive.
The honest version of the conservative position has to acknowledge something it keeps avoiding: The American economic program for forty years has been structurally anti-natal in consequence. The choice on the surface, if there is one, appears to be between an economic model that has made Americans extraordinarily wealthy and a demographic future. However, economics and birth rates are not mutually exclusive, nor should they be. The answer is that there is an obvious systematic struggle to hold both in mind. Economic growth has constituencies while the unborn do not. That asymmetry, more than any specific policy failure, is what the last forty years have demonstrated. What would actually change the trajectory is if the party is willing to make family formation the organizing principle of domestic policy rather than an afterthought of it. The window for reversal narrows with each year it goes unaddressed.