ON THE LEFT and the right, in Europe and the United States, a consensus is growing: People aren’t having enough kids—not enough to support the welfare state, not enough to preserve the culture, not enough to keep advanced economies young, thriving, and entrepreneurial. The last time the U.S. was at replacement level fertility (the number of kids the average woman must have to stave off population decline, without immigration) was 2007. Replacement level fertility is roughly 2.1 kids per woman. Since then, America’s total fertility rate dropped to 1.66. This, in turn, led to a lot of unanswered questions about the fate of federal entitlement programs, innovation, education, politics, and culture in an aging country.
To many, the solution is obvious: Americans should have more children. Yet pro-natalist policies have a weak track record in every country where they’ve been tried. They’re incredibly expensive, they produce few or no gains in fertility, and they can lead to a disturbingly authoritarian form of governance where individual choices about family formation are deprioritized and women are pressured to have babies for the national good. Efforts to control birthrates at the population level inevitably end with efforts to control women at the individual level. Mean-while, birthrates have declined in tandem with several social upsides as well: better education, greater wealth, longer life spans, and more freedom for women.
The U.S. and other developed countries falling below replacement level fertility needn’t simply accept a choice between drastic population decline and despair or a forced-birth regime. But responding to demographic shifts will require both creativity and humility about the limits of public policy to influence birthrates. Fertility, and all the individual choice it entails, may be too big for even the most powerful governments to control.
WHAT WON’T WORK
FALLING BIRTHRATES AREN’T a new phenomenon. America’s overall fertility rate has been falling for more than two centuries. There have been periods of rebound as well, both in the middle of the 20th century and from about 1990 through 2007. But since then, America’s fertility rate dropped rapidly below replacement levels. The first full year after COVID-19 came to the U.S. bucked the trend—but only slightly.
Nor is the United States alone. In countries with a diverse array of cultures, political systems, values, geographic locations, and degrees of homogeneity, fertility rates are way down. Today, fewer than half the world’s countries—largely in Africa and the Middle East—have fertility rates more than a few points above replacement fertility, with many falling far short.
Declining national birthrates pose real challenges. First and foremost, a country with low birthrates will soon face an aging population. While a country with more old people than young may arguably be wiser, it’s also less productive, less innovative, and less physically fit. That could mean labor shortages, especially in manual labor and fields related to caring for all those old folks. It will definitely
