Storks Take Orders From The State, by Cremieux Recueil
Many people are very critical of the government’s ability to pay people to have children. The skeptical position is so common that, when fertility benefits are mentioned, one invariably earns a retort along the lines of ‘They’ve been tried and they don’t do anything.’
But that is not true. I believe there are at least two key errors supporting the belief.
Well, he's right about part of that. I would have taken the skeptical position until I read this essay. The key is not whether there is still a decline in fertility after government measures are taken. Even if there is continued decline, we have to get some estimate of what would have happened without the government measures. If the decline is 5% over some time period, but would have been 15% without them, then we can call them successful.
Lyman Stone stresses that this is a marriage problem, as the number of children to the married and the unmarried have both remained relatively stable since the end of the Baby Boom, but the percentage of people married had plummeted. Yet these two theories do not have to be opposed to each other. They can both be true and addressed separately or together.
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