Fifteen years ago, demographic doomsayers were dismissed as right-wing cranks. Today, only cranks still deny that the birth dearth is a problem.

The developed world seems to be falling into a demographic tailspin. In the United States, birth rates have been on a downward trend since 2007; nearly every year, it seems, we reach another record low. In much of Western Europe and East Asia, the problem is considerably worse. Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore have fertility rates barely above one child per woman. This is staggering. What does it mean for a society when each generation represents but a fraction of the one before it?

Many nations are experimenting with pro-natal public policies, and these offer some grounds for hope. Evidence increasingly suggests that they can help raise birth rates, though modestly, and perhaps temporarily. France and Sweden have been celebrated as success stories on this front, but after briefly rising in the early 2010s, their birth rates also began to sag. We should pay close attention as data on this topic expand. For now, though, it must be acknowledged that the trends are ominous.

For gloomy traditionalists, that is a cue to wax eloquent about modernity’s deep spiritual maladies: declining religiosity, soul-destroying libertinism, and a civilization-wide collapse of confidence. Progressives, meanwhile, reach cheerfully for their wish list and start demanding free maternity care, paid parental leave, and universal pre-K. Only the small-government conservatives feel awkward at this juncture: They like babies, and human civilization, but they don’t like lifestyle-invasive state programs, or steep hikes in entitlement spending. Our national debt recently topped $30 trillion. Who are we kidding? We need fiscal austerity, not a new round of benefits. Still, our society cannot continue without new citizens. Something will have to be done.

This problem is perplexing to small-government conservatives, because they are accustomed to treating market growth as an unambiguously good thing, and indeed as the solution to a wide range of social problems. When boats are rising, life is supposed to be good. Over the past half century, developed nations have indeed prospered, but their populations have dwindled. This odd and counterintuitive development has opened the door to embittered diatribes against free trade, many of them coming from the right. Populist figures now warn us to protect our families and communities from the hot, withering winds of “globalization.” We are advised to move on from the free-market pieties of the Reagan years and return to more-traditional sources of meaning: faith, family, the dignity of work. Fusionism has failed.

The populist critique has little to offer if the goal is to generate prudent solutions to our debt and demographic problems. Still, it resonates with many people, in part because it channels the deep anxiety so many Americans feel about family fragmentation and demographic decline. If conservatives hope to win this argument, they must explain our present situation in a more satisfactory way: Think of falling birth rates as a large-scale case of market failure; explain the reasons behind this trend; then suggest some possible solutions.

I submit that the developed world, in the wake of World War II, has in fact been profoundly anti-natalist in some crucial ways. Markets were never the central problem, but they have magnified the impact of other mistakes that were made, in both public policy and culture. The good news is that it may still be possible to reverse these vicious cycles, and the hardest step has in fact been a cherished objective of small-government conservatives for many years. Somehow we must find a way to accomplish entitlement reform. In concert with a few other sensible pro-natal measures, this might be the key to a long-game natalism that could save our nation from demographic collapse.

At first it may seem strange to describe mid-century America as “anti-natalist.” The Greatest Generation certainly didn’t hate babies. But they did make a serious, though understandable, mistake: They took childbearing for granted. Throughout the 20th century, it was largely assumed that men and women would continue to pair up and make new humans, just as it was assumed they would continue eating breakfast. Left and Right argued vociferously about the optimal circumstances for childbearing, but hardly anyone worried that it would go out of fashion. The state grew considerably larger, and we freely subsidized, incentivized, and stimulated a thousand different things. Through it all, we forgot to tip the stork.

The entitlement state was constructed in pieces, primarily over the course of the 20th century, with the goal of alleviating need. Now consuming roughly half of the total federal budget, entitlement programs assist the sick, disabled, elderly, and unemployed, as well as many people who are impoverished for other reasons. Historically, vulnerable people were the responsibility of extended families and communities. Today, children seem like a lingering relic of that older world. They are the only naturally needy people who are presumptively placed in the care of other citizens.

As state programs expand, people come to understand the social contract in a new way. When people are legitimately needy, we demand a program to help them. But it is increasingly difficult for citizens to understand why they should have personal responsibilities for anyone that they did not voluntarily choose or accept. This is a hazard of the entitlement state generally, but Social Security and Medicare are the most damaging. They enable childless people to become free riders, relying on retirement support from younger generations they never helped to raise. Yet that injustice is only the tip of the anti-natal iceberg. Entitlements for the elderly erode people’s natural sense of intergenerational responsibility. With the government playing caretaker, we no longer feel the same pious obligation to honor and care for our parents. Neither do we expect our children (should we have any) to honor us.

The injury cuts both up and down. Older Americans have been zealous in their defense of state benefits, even as it has become increasingly clear that Medicare in particular is unsustainable and a source of unmanageable debt. At the same time, younger adults feel alarmingly free to walk away from the people who raised them. Growing numbers are cutting ties with parents, simply because they find the relationship onerous. Most young people today would likely be astonished by the suggestion that they might be obliged to bear and raise children, for their parents’ and grandparents’ sake. Most societies, historically, would have seen this as a commonsensical truth.

The demographic impact of entitlements is difficult to measure, since it is both long-term and diffuse. But should it surprise us if babies start to dwindle in a world where young and old increasingly feel they have no obligations to one another? Intergenerational ties have traditionally given people many reasons, both noble and self-interested, to accept the risks and sacrifices of parenthood. Babies are a terrible short-term investment, and no pro-natal program will change that. Entitlement reform would not immediately inspire a wave of new births, but over the long term it could be far more efficacious than anything Viktor Orbán has devised for Hungary. More babies would also mean more future workers, which in turn might make a modest social safety net sustainable.

Mid-century social planners weren’t the only people who took childbearing for granted. Free-market conservatives largely made the same mistake. For decades they assumed that strong economic growth would reinforce strong families. It made sense; families generally are more stable when they are financially secure. However, prosperity can actually discourage people from marrying and raising families in the first place, if markets cater to the lifestyle preferences of childless adults.

This pattern is familiar among young professionals especially. Early in their working lives, they become accustomed to a standard of living that they will not be able to maintain if they have children. Their social lives revolve around adult-oriented activities and entertainments. Children are not welcome in their favorite bars and restaurants. Elsewhere in the country and world, people are raising large families on much lower incomes, but that lifestyle may seem thoroughly unappealing to someone already established in a comfortable life. After World War II, it took decades for Americans to shed traditional assumptions about marriage, sexual morality, and the social roles of men and women. Over time, established singles became more common, and family life started to drift farther toward the margins of mainstream culture.

Markets cater to families too, of course, and as a mother, I am genuinely grateful for Aldi fruit snacks and dollar-store sidewalk chalk. Even so, I can see how children open wide avenues to market failure. The reason is simple. They have no money. Markets cater beautifully to affluent adults, but they will meet children’s needs only if someone else is willing to pick up the bills. If we want markets to facilitate family formation, we need to ensure that parents have money.

Parents are disproportionately likely to be prime-age workers and thus upper-bracket taxpayers. Here again, it seems reasonable to assume that the resulting large-scale wealth redistribution has already had a significant anti-natal effect. The good news is that both parties at present seem well disposed to let families keep more of their money. Some of the proposed policies may be unrealistically generous, and the trade-offs must be carefully considered. Still, the investment could pay off richly over the long term. As families become wealthier, markets will serve them more effectively, and cities and commercial centers might well become more family-oriented. Parenthood may start to seem more appealing if young singles are regularly seeing families in the same public places they frequent, looking prosperous and having fun.

Money isn’t everything, of course. A healthy birth rate should ideally be supported by a culture that teaches young people to view marriage and parenthood in an aspirational light. Unfortunately, the past half century has left us with a great deal of baggage in this regard. Malthusians spent decades portraying large families as selfish resource hogs. Feminists sneered at women who made personal sacrifices to care for their kids. But today, decades after Roe, some people on the left are slowly starting to recognize how the “right to choose” has often transformed mothers, in the eyes of wider society, from honorable social contributors into exceptionally needy hobbyists. Despite that, the Left quite obviously is not prepared to reconsider that particular mistake.

These are daunting challenges, but we should find encouragement in some clear and visible signs that Americans do still want to perpetuate their culture and traditions. Women still tell pollsters that they would like to have multiple children. Citizens still come together to celebrate their history and instill patriotic piety in the young. The American gift for innovation and entrepreneurship is a great asset to us today, as it has been in the past.

Still, we must understand that we are playing a long game. Even as we honor our forebears, we must also learn from their mistakes and remember certain truths that they inadvertently obscured. Raising children is honorable work — for many or most of us, the most important work we will ever do. It is essential to maintain ties, within communities but also between generations. Sometimes we may have serious personal responsibilities that we did not explicitly choose. Our demise is not inevitable, but neither can life be taken for granted. Moving forward, we must remember to tip the stork, so that new generations will continue to come.