But fascinating or not, the real reason people are having fewer children is because they want fewer children. Governments try to offset this with subsidies – and we’ll see (much) more of that in the future – but the fact is, the financial, emotional, and energy costs of having children are so high that no plausible government subsidy is going to offset them. Subsidies may have a small effect at the margins, and maybe another small effect in terms of setting social preferences, but it’s unlikely that they’ll offset the pleasures of sleeping in, or of taking expensive vacations, or advancing one’s (or two’s) careers enough to change most people’s minds. If it costs a million bucks to raise a kid, it’s going to cost at least that much in subsidies to really change people’s minds. …

I don’t know, but I suspect that after over half a century of policies built, explicitly or implicitly, on Paul Ehrlich’s bogus Population Bomb claims, we’ll see governments trying, with increasing degrees of desperation, to encourage people to marry and have kids. (It’s possible that the U.S. Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on contraception and abortion was influenced by “population explosion” worries, and it’s possible that the Dobbsopinion, reversing Roe, represents a retreat from these concerns. And in Texas alone, the post-Roe era reportedly led to 10,000 more live births in the first year than would have happened under Roe.)

The thing is, it’s a lot easier to encourage people to do things that are easy and fun – like have sex without having kids – than to do things that are difficult and sometimes unpleasant, as raising kids certainly can be. So my suspicion is that the global population bust is going to go on for quite a while.