The feminist case for spending billions to boost the birthrate
If current trends continue, by 2050 more than three-quarters of countries will be below replacement-level fertility. By 2100, populations in some major economies will fall by 20% to 50%. And because birthrates compound like debt, the further fertility rates drop in one generation, the more they would need to increase in the next one to make up the numbers.
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If birthrates do not change, the eventual result would be human extinction. That is a long way off, but population shrinkage is likely to have severe consequences far sooner. As the ratio of working-age adults to dependent children and retirees falls, there are fewer workers to support the social safety net. The result is that taxes rise, the quality of public services deteriorates, and the economy eventually shrinks.
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Politicians, policymakers and the public increasingly realize that this is a serious problem. And yet despite a variety of financial incentives, ad campaigns and other policies, birthrates have continued to fall.
That has become an especially salient issue on the right. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary has made raising his country's fertility rate a top priority. Vice President JD Vance -- who once claimed that the United States was 'dominated by childless sociopaths' -- has helped force the issue at the White House, where officials have been discussing offering $5,000 'baby bonuses' to women who have children or a National Medal of Motherhood for women who have six or more.
On the right, the issue is often tied up in concerns about cultural shifts, the deleterious influence of feminism, the availability of abortion or a decline in religiosity, and even the racist 'great replacement' conspiracy theory.
But one doesn't have to be a nationalist or an anti-feminist to believe that the government could and should support people having more children. The long-term consequences of subreplacement fertility could be disastrous.
The work of Nancy Folbre, a feminist economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, suggests that the problem may be that existing programs are simply too small to make a difference to the real issue: that as countries get richer, it becomes much more expensive to be a parent. That's not just because out-of-pocket costs rise, though they do. Rather, the bigger issue is the cost of the
time
parenting requires, which, while unpaid, is not free, and in fact becomes vastly more expensive as economies develop.
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'There's a point at which, if you just keep ratcheting up the price of doing something that's socially valuable, if you just keep ratcheting up the private costs, eventually people give up,' Folbre said. Today's plummeting fertility rates suggest that potential parents are doing just that.
Economists have long had a response to that precise problem: When private costs lead to underproduction of something with social value -- solar panels or electric cars, for example -- the government helps pay for their production with subsidies, tax credits or other incentives.
Could we really do that for parenting? The scale of the problem means that it wouldn't be cheap. But, Folbre and other experts argue, it would be worth it.
The High Costs of 'Free' Labor
In 1994, Folbre published an article with a provocative claim. 'Individuals who devote relatively little time or energy to child-rearing,' she wrote, 'are free-riding on parental labor.'
Free riders, in economics, are people who benefit from goods or services without paying for them. Because all citizens of the United States have claims on children's future earnings via the money they will pay to support Social Security, payments on public debt and other programs, she argued, people who enjoyed those benefits without doing the work of childbearing and child-rearing were free-riding.
In fact, she pointed out, parents actually take a double hit because unpaid child care work, which represents a huge component of the cost of parenting, is also left out of the benefit calculations for government programs like Social Security. So the parents who give up some or all of their paid work to care for children not only lose income in the short term; they
also
get a comparatively smaller share of the public benefits in the future. Nor can unpaid work be saved in a tax-advantaged account like a 401(k), putting parents further behind in accruing private retirement savings, too.
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There is a long history of feminists calling for women to be compensated for unpaid work in the home, including an international 'Wages for Housework' campaign that started in the 1970s.
'Men are able to accept our services and take pleasure in them because they presume that housework is easy for us, that we enjoy it because we do it for their love,' Silvia Federici, a feminist activist and scholar who was one of the founders of that campaign, wrote in a famous 1974 essay on the subject.
'Only when men see our work as work -- our love as work -- and most important our determination to refuse both, will they change their attitude toward us,' she wrote.
Folbre's work adds an additional element. By reframing parents' unpaid work as at least partly a public good, she also reframes the failure to support parents as a kind of societal turnstile-jumping, an unfair exploitation of those who are actually putting in the time and effort.
As a parent myself, thinking through this argument felt a little bit like seeing the matrix. I had always seen programs like paid maternity leave and subsidized child care as benefits
from
governments and employers
to
parents. Folbre's work turns that around. These programs are ways to return a small portion of the free-rider benefits that society enjoys at parents' expense.
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Her argument is not merely that the current system is unjust but also that it makes little economic sense. The failure to compensate people for the unpaid labor of child-rearing creates a disincentive to have children, and therefore leads to falling birthrates that harm society as a whole in the long run.
Government programs like Social Security have, according to this argument, taken many of the financial benefits of children and shared them with the wider public. At the same time, the private costs of childbearing have skyrocketed, because the rising wages available to parents in paid work make the opportunity costs of doing unpaid work rise, too.
When parents cut back on their hours at work to take care of their children, for example, they lose income. And even if they work full time and pay for child care, the child care and related housework they do before and after their paid jobs still carries opportunity costs: foregone overtime, leisure, sleep and investment in other relationships.
One standard prescription for free-rider problems is government intervention, either to shift more of the costs of production onto society or to privatize more of the gains from it. For parents, that might mean boosting Social Security payments for each child they have or giving them tax credits or direct subsidies.
Many governments already offer at least some subsidies to parents to defray the costs of child-rearing. The United States, for example, gives most parents a tax credit of up to $2,000 per child per year. In Hungary, Orbán recently announced that mothers of at least three children will be exempt from income tax starting in October, and mothers of two will receive a similar exemption next year.
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But such programs might need to be expanded much, much more to meaningfully defray parenting's staggering price tag.
'I can tell you this: It would have to be a pretty significant percentage of the total costs,' Folbre said in a recent interview. 'And the total costs include the cost of the time. It's not just the money, right? The whole framework is based on centuries of completely ignoring and devaluing the process of raising kids.
'We need a more holistic approach to population and family policy than just thinking that, 'Oh, a $5,000 bonus here, a little bit more child care there,' would solve the problem,' she said. 'You have to ask what percentage that bonus would be of the total cost of raising a child. It's a tiny percentage! It's tiny!'
What About Sweden?
Of course, some countries, like the Nordic nations, offer parental leave policies and state-subsidized child care that reduce out-of-pocket costs to levels that most American parents can hardly dream of. So why are these paradises of cheap child care, socialized health care and inexpensive universities still in the same declining-population boat as most of the rest of the world?
Although benefits are generous, the prices of food, housing and paid child care are so high in those countries that parents are still left with higher out-of-pocket costs than elsewhere, a 2023 study found. State subsidies offset only a fraction of the high out-of-pocket costs for things like food, housing and paid child care. And high wages increase the value of parents' unpaid time.
Based on out-of-pocket costs alone, if the average parent in Sweden suddenly became a nonparent, they would be able to consume 55% more in goods and services over their lifetime. In Finland, they would be able to consume 50% more. The average European parent in the researchers' sample, by contrast, would be able to consume just 31% more.
When the value of parents' time is added in, the numbers grow even more extreme. The hypothetical nonparent in Sweden would be able to consume 164% more over their lifetime, and the Finnish one 146% more. The average European, by contrast, would consume just 108% more.
Even those figures may be an undercount, said Pieter Vanhuysse, a political scientist at the University of Southern Denmark and the lead author on that study. For ease of comparison, the study calculated the 'replacement cost' of parents' time -- the amount it would cost to hire someone to do child care, for example. But parents whose salaries are higher than child care workers' would actually have even higher opportunity costs.
There is some evidence that cash transfers to parents do make a difference to fertility rates. Lyman Stone, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative pronatalist think tank, studies the impact of government subsidies on fertility rates. His research suggests that fertility rates rise about a quarter of a percentage point for every percent of GDP that governments spend on cash transfers to parents.
'For the U.S. to buy its way to replacement rates -- so to go from our current 1.6 to 2.1 -- to do it in the long run would probably cost $700 billion to a trillion dollars a year,' Stone said. For context, Medicare cost approximately $848 billion in 2023. And countries where fertility rates have already fallen even lower would have to spend more. Stone estimates that Hungary, for example, would need to spend about 9% of its GDP per year to reach replacement rates.
That is an eye-watering amount of money, even if the target was to stabilize populations over time rather than reach replacement rates immediately. But if children are social goods, then in financial terms, it would be an investment.
'It's inevitably a matter of public values and public commitments. You have to decide what you care about and what you're willing to pay for that,' Folbre said. 'It's got to be a democratic decision. We have to figure out what our priorities are and what we think the value of a human life is.'
Closing the Global Fertility Gap
But is money really the issue?
After all, if fertility is falling because people genuinely do not wish to have children, government measures to increase births among the unwilling would likely be ineffective at best, and a step toward a 'Handmaid's Tale'-esque nightmare at worst.
It does appear that falling interest in parenthood is at least part of the story. Some surveys of 'fertility intentions,' which ask people how many children they would like to have, show a decline among younger generations. In an interview with the Financial Times earlier this year, Anna Rotkirch, a sociologist and research director at the Family Federation of Finland's Population Research Institute, ascribes this in part to parenthood becoming a 'capstone event,' something people do after they have achieved other life goals, rather than a 'cornerstone event' that they do as part of embarking on adult life.
And some of the decline may be the result of improvements in women's freedom and ability to control their own fertility. In the past, coercive laws that legalized marital rape, banned contraception and abortion and limited women's ability to own property and support themselves often left them with little or no ability to make their own decisions about motherhood.
'That's how patriarchal societies function. They create really significant incentives for high fertility, in part, by really disempowering women,' Folbre said. (Those coercive methods are not gone, and some governments, including those of the United States and Poland, have curtailed reproductive freedoms in recent years.)
But in most countries, people still say that they would like to have more children than they actually are having. A recent United Nations report, which surveyed 14,000 people in 14 countries, found that across every country, the most commonly desired number of children was 2.
Financial concerns were the single biggest reason people had fewer children than they wanted. In South Korea, which has the lowest fertility rate on Earth, 58% of respondents said that had been a barrier to having children. In the United States, 38% did. In Sweden, 19% did. And many respondents also cited other cost-related factors, including housing limitations, unemployment or job insecurity and lack of access to child care.
Folbre, for her part, believes that the focus on reaching replacement-level fertility is the wrong short-term goal. 'I don't think we should pose the problem as, 'How do we get to replacement?'' she said. 'I think it's better to frame the problem as, 'How do we achieve a sustainable economic system?'
'It's just that in the long run, we have to get up to replacement,' she said. 'Because if we don't, we disappear.'
This article originally appeared in
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