Earlier this month, after the Heritage Foundation released a 168-page report detailing a comprehensive plan to reverse our nation’s declining birth rate, National Public Radio aired a story on the matter, framed around two lesbians, of course. It found that “progressive leaders have largely opted out of the growing public discussion over birthrates and shrinking families, ceding the policy space to right-wing voices.”
After quoting some left-wing voices that were concerned about “silence from many progressives” on the matter, NPR went on to report that it “could find no broad policy document addressing this population shift from think tanks or activist groups on the left, comparable to the one put forward by The Heritage Foundation.”
And it is true that no left-wing think tanks have issued policy papers on how to address falling fertility, but the Biden administration, which was populated with left-wing academics and economists, did.
In May 2024, after the National Center for Health Statistics released its annual report finding that the percentage of women who gave birth in the United States had dropped to an all-time low, former President Joe Biden’s White House Council of Economic Advisors released a 13-page Issue Brief, titled, “A First-Principles Look at Historically Low U.S. Fertility and its Macroeconomic Implications.”
To its credit, the Biden White House fully acknowledged the harms caused by declining birth rates, including “significant headwinds to economic growth, the fiscal sustainability of public benefit programs, and the trend of continuous improvements in living standards.” And while the brief did mention “immigration” once in passing as something other nations (Canada to be exact) have tried, it was not the centerpiece of the brief’s suggested policy response.
Instead, the Biden White House recommended “building out the care economy” as its answer to declining birthrates. But what does that mean, and how would it reverse falling fertility? In practice, the “care economy” is mostly government-funded child care, using taxpayer dollars to pay one adult to care for someone else’s children, through programs such as free day care and universal pre-K.
The point was not that subsidized child care would lead Americans to have more children. The administration’s argument was different: If the government covered child care costs for working mothers, and only working mothers, more mothers would move into full-time employment instead of part-time work or staying home. And if more mothers worked full-time, overall economic output would rise.
But there are at least four problems with this approach. First, it depends entirely on economic tautology. When mothers care for their children, that is considered consumption and not economic output. But if mothers pay someone else to care for their children, that exact same activity suddenly becomes economic output. The only reason paying strangers to care for children increases economic output is that, by definition, it is not output when mothers provide the care.
Second, for a growing number of women, the market value price of child care for their children is higher than the market value wage they could earn doing something else. In other words, it would be more economically efficient for many mothers to stay home and provide their own care rather than pay a stranger to do so.
Third, and more importantly, most mothers don’t want to work full-time. According to the Pew Research Center, 53% of married women with children under the age of 18 would prefer to work part-time, and another 23% would prefer not to have a job outside the home at all. That is 76% of married mothers who don’t want to be forced into the workforce full-time by left-wing policies.
Fourth, and most importantly, the “care economy” does nothing to actually reverse declining birth rates, and if anything, it makes the problem worse. The literature available clearly shows that mothers who work full-time have fewer children than those who work part-time or not at all.
NPR reported that an independent think tank, Capita, hosted a conference on fertility for left-wing activists last summer, but that the entire session was off the record because acknowledging the problem creates tension on the Left.
“Some participants voiced concern that the issue of shrinking families is being used to push conservative or traditional values,” NPR reported.
“Traditional” values? The horror.