Fertility rates are dropping all over the world. The slowing rate of having babies has reached a crisis level in most of Europe, Russia, and especially China. Here in the US the situation is much better, with earlier decades of Mexican immigration providing us an additional younger labor pool to take over as Boomers retire.
Generally, as societies move from agrarian to urban dwellers they need have fewer kids and family sizes drop. Here in the US, the rapid escalation of housing & school costs makes raising a family a much tougher choice.
Our government and Mr Musk haven't figured out a solution for that.
Musk Says ‘Make More Italians’
A Harvard-educated economist and mother makes the case for having big families.
By William McGurn
Dec. 25, 2023
Elon Musk, listen up. I have a woman who not only knows what you want—she says she knows how to get it.
At a recent conference in Rome, Mr. Musk brought up one of his hobby horses: the challenge to global prosperity posed by declining fertility rates. That’s the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime. At 1.24 Italy’s is among the lowest in Europe and well below the 2.1 rate a country needs to maintain its population.
His answer? “Make more Italians.”
Enter Catherine Pakaluk. She agrees with Mr. Musk about birthrates. But she notes that countries have learned that while it’s possible to drive birthrates down, it’s much more difficult to drive them back up once the decline has started.
You might expect as much from a professor who earned her doctorate at Harvard and now teaches at the Catholic University of America. But this isn’t your grandfather’s econ professor. Mrs. Pakaluk met her husband, Michael, at Harvard, where he was a widowed father with young children.
They fell in love and married in 1999—making her an instant mother of six at age 23. The experience can’t have been too bad. The Pakaluks went on to have eight more children.
It’s part of her message that if you want people to have more babies, talk to the women who are defying the trend to smaller families. She’s done exactly that, and she’s found that the women who, like her, have large families do so because they place a higher value on being mothers, typically because they are more religious.
That may seem obvious, but it makes a feminist point. Women who have invested heavily in their own careers aren’t about to make the trade-offs involved in having large families just for a few extra weeks’ maternity leave or a bigger child-care subsidy. It’s literally not worth it.
“Free-market solutions to low fertility are the only ones that have a chance,” Mrs. Pakaluk says. “Tax-and-spend approaches fail because the costs that militate against having children—the opportunity costs—are too big to be influenced by cash transfers.”
Mrs. Pakaluk points to Israel, whose 2.9 total fertility rate is the highest in the industrialized world. Yes, Israel offers some pro-natalist subsides. But these don’t seem to be the decisive factor.
“Secular Israelis have birthrates similar to secular Americans,” says Mrs. Pakaluk. “Israel stands out because it has a greater share of religious people.”
The left loves gunking up the tax code for its pet preferences, such as discouraging fossil fuels. Some on the right now want to get in on the act by rejiggering the tax code to reflect right-wing priorities.
The real issue, Mrs. Pakaluk says, is how moms regard opportunity costs. The women she interviewed are aware of the trade-offs involved in having more children. Like Mrs. Pakaluk, many have full-time careers. The difference is that they seek to accommodate their careers to motherhood—not the other way around.
And she’s not calling for every woman to raise 14 children, as she has. “There’d be a big improvement if women who are open to more children just had a second or third.”
Even so, the condescension toward women who choose more children remains. When President Emmanuel Macron five years ago mansplained that educated women don’t have large families, Mrs. Pakaluk led a Twitter campaign for moms to post photos of their families for the French president. Even Pope Francis once crudely said Catholic women don’t need to breed “like rabbits.”
“What I’m interested in,” Mrs. Pakaluk says, “is challenging a rigid narrative about female success patterned on a male timeline. I’m interested in raising awareness about the very real possibility of prioritizing children in a modern economy.”
What a change this is. For decades, the orthodoxy on this subject was found in Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” (1968), which portended global cataclysm unless population growth wasn’t suppressed. Women were told they were threatening the planet by having children. Now the fear is reversed.
“Total fertility rates below replacement lead inexorably to a shrinking population, economic stagnation and lower quality of life,” Mrs. Pakaluk replies. “We won’t have the people to staff valuable services. Social Security and Medicare will be shuttered. Many countries are already on this path. It can only be avoided if a nation can compete, indefinitely so, for a larger share of a shrinking number of world immigrants.”
Many are not going to like Mrs. Pakaluk’s solution, which is a civil society thick with religious institutions that are the most likely to share the value these women place on motherhood. But she makes a powerful case that nothing else has worked or is likely to work. So the next time Mr. Musk talks about population decline, he might want to bring along this economist and mother.
Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.
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