Falling fertility will have numerous consequences for societies all around the world. Slower population growth will lead to rising inequality, growing prominence of inherited wealth, increasing monopoly power by existing firms, and a decline in entrepreneurship and innovation. Demand for new housing will stagnate. Intergenerational transfer programs like Social Security (or private life insurance, or even the stock market) will face financial troubles. Interest rates and inflation will stay preternaturally low, limiting options for recession-fighting and making every recovery slower than the one before it. Debates about immigration will become ever-more-rancorous.
These consequences all sound dire to policymakers, as they should, and they have motivated a global turn towards pronatalism. The number of countries which are officially committed to pronatalism has risen steadily over time, according to data from the United Nations. And indeed, academic evidence lends credence to the idea that government support for childbearing, especially in the form of direct cash grants, boosts fertility rates somewhat. But the price tag is very large: increasing the total number of babies born in a society can cost anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million in public spending per extra baby born.
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