Have! More! Babies!

Italian bambinos and the Child Tax Credit that Republicans hate.

(Andrea Morales for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

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.