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New York Times

The Feminist Case for Spending Billions to Boost the Birthrate

There is a certain type of problem whose sheer time scale makes solutions difficult: The longer the time between today's decisions and tomorrow's catastrophes, the harder it is to demand sacrifices now in order to ensure those catastrophes never happen. Climate change is the obvious example. But it's increasingly clear that there is another: population decline. As the problem of falling birthrates attracts more concern — and previous efforts to reverse it have proved insufficient — a growing body of research indicates that a genuine solution will require a paradigm shift in society's understanding about what is worth paying for and who ought to pay it. Across most of the world, fertility rates are falling. As economies develop, fertility rates tend to decline — and when economies develop especially quickly, fertility rates often plummet to particularly low levels. In many countries they are already below 2.1 births per woman, the 'replacement level' needed to keep populations steady from one generation to the next. 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 percent. 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. 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-aged 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. 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. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.