Why Japan should just pay people to have children

There is an alternative, though. Why not just pay people to have children? There’s mixed evidence that it provides a sustainable boost to birthrates, but it makes logical sense. If you lower the price of something, you will get more of it. Over the past two decades, Japan has spent trillions of dollars on mostly wasteful pork-barrel spending projects. It seems to me that the country would be better off today if that money had been spent on bonuses for second and third children instead.

Not that it’s all about writing checks. The price of housing, for example, is a huge drag on family formation. Japan is famously expensive and crowded. What would have happened if the country’s brainiest people had been focusing on reclaiming land from the sea rather than making robots?

Now, pro-family policy is a tricky thing to get right, and no one has got a perfect recipe. There are many dials to push. But the whole world is oddly blind to this topic.

Demography is not destiny, exactly, but it is close to it.