1. Boomsa
Here is a very real thing that people used once upon a time in America: The Baby Cage.
The Baby Cage was a small, five-sided enclosure of about 4 square feet. It had mesh wires and was mounted so that it extended outwards from a window. Kind of like an air conditioning window unit.
But you put a baby inside it.
No, really.
Today we don’t let kids ride a bike in the cul-de-sac without a helmet, but parents would dangle these things out of high-rise tenement windows.
It was a different time.1
I wrote about baby cages a decade ago when demographics was my beat. I won’t recapitulate the entire spiel for you here—you can get the book if you like—but for the purposes of today’s discussion the take-aways are:
Fertility rates have been falling in America for two generations.
We have been below the replacement rate for one generation.
Entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare are untenable when fertility rates are substantially below replacement.2
If Americans don’t start having more babies, we’re going to have to make some hard decisions in the medium future.
Other countries are further ahead on the low-fertility timeline. In most of Europe and large swaths of Asia, governments have been trying to goose fertility rates for years. Some of the stuff they’ve tried is crazy.3
But in general, very few of these policy-level interventions have moved the needle.
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