BIRTHRATES: Baby bonuses won’t solve the birthrate problem: Only culture, not cash, can spark a new boom in having kids.
Baby bonuses prove “costly and ineffective” almost everywhere they are tried, wrote Leonard Lopoo, a professor of public administration and international affairs at Syracuse University, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. Considering how expensive it can be to raise a child — roughly $300,000 over 18 years, according to a new LendingTree analysis — what difference is a relatively modest “baby bonus” going to make? The prospect of a government check might induce a couple already committed to parenthood to get pregnant a little sooner. But is it going to convince adults who don’t want a baby to change their minds? Hardly.
Government benefits and incentives may have some impact at the margins, but ultimately the only real strategy for reversing demographic decline is to change cultural norms surrounding marriage and child-rearing. That is the lesson from Israel, the one advanced country where the fertility rate remains far above replacement level, at more than 2.9 children per woman. All the factors that usually lead to falling birthrates are present in Israel: a rising cost of living, pronounced female participation in the workforce, high rates of education, easily accessible birth control, expensive housing. Yet fertility remains incredibly robust — not only among Israel’s most traditional and religious communities, but also among the far more numerous Israelis who live modern or secular lifestyles.
“The real secret to Israel’s fertility rates appears to be cultural,” wrote Danielle Kubes in Canada’s National Post in 2023. “The family is at the absolute center of Israeli life. Getting married and having kids is the highest cultural value.” It is a value that goes beyond religious observance and political ideology. It cannot be explained by government financial aid (welfare benefits in Israel are comparable to those in Western Europe). Rather, it boils down to this: Israelis of every stripe share a conviction that having children is the best and highest means of imbuing life with meaning.
Related: Harrison Butker, Harbinger: Life during and after the coming Demographic Winter.