The mixed record of such programs in other countries suggests that the design of particular policies matters a lot.
Noah Rothman excoriates the developing Trump administration proposal to open a government childcare subsidy program to one-earner married couples. This proposal, he says, can have only one purpose: to boost the birth rate. And, he adds, it won’t work.
Government efforts to boost the birth rate, he notes, didn’t work in Hungary. Several places that have tried to encourage work by giving people money with no strings attached haven’t succeeded at that either. But, he sighs, no amount of evidence will persuade the pro-natalists: “For some, bigger government is both a means to an end and an end in and of itself.
“And maybe none of these experiments were designed properly. Maybe it would work if the right people administered it. Maybe true natalism has never been tried.”
He might be right both about the unwisdom of the proposal — I have my own concerns about it — and about its unlikelihood of affecting birth rates. But I think his arguments against it sweep too far.
First: Some of the Trump-Vance proposal’s advocates are making a fairness argument for it. Why, they ask, should parents be excluded from the program’s benefits just because they provide care for children at home? Some are making a related argument for government neutrality between daycare and care at home. You can agree or disagree with these arguments, but if they are sound, no increase in birth rates needs to materialize for the proposal to be justified.
Most proposed government policies, including policies categorized as “pro-natal,” have multiple purposes. Some people have argued for expanding the tax credit for children in order to raise the birth rate, for example, but there are many other possible rationales for such a policy (including making life easier for parents, reducing child poverty, recognizing that children lower households’ ability to pay taxes, and many more).
Second: While Noah’s apparent view that government policies designed to increase the birth rate can never succeed in that aim is widely shared, the evidence is mixed. Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies has rounded up research that shows that what he calls “cash for kids” policies raised birth rates above what they would otherwise have been in France as well as in Japan, Mongolia, Poland, and Slovakia.
That mixed record suggests to me that the design of particular policies matters a lot. Just as we don’t dismiss policies intended to boost economic growth as a class on the basis that some of them have failed to attain their objective, we shouldn’t expect all pro-natalist policies to perform the same. The culture in which the policy unfolds matters, I suspect, even more: We will almost certainly see different results in places where low birth rates are primarily a function of low desire for children compared with places with a large gap between desired and achieved family size. (Our own society falls in the latter category.) And monetary help will also probably achieve more when combined with other policies — such as deregulation that enables affordable housing — than when implemented on their own.
I would not count the basic-income evidence Noah cites against pro-natal policies. When you give money to people with no condition that they work, a lot of them aren’t going to work; when you give people money on the condition that they have children, they will tend to be people with children. These are just different types of policies.
Finally (for now!), I don’t think any appreciable number of pro-natalists just want bigger government as an end in itself. The proponents of the idea currently under discussion, the change to a childcare program, deny that it would expand government at all.