As birthrates decline across the world, countries including the U.S., South Korea, and most famously Hungary have devised various incentives to encourage citizens to have more children. So far, they have little to show for the effort. The economist Catherine Pakaluk believes such policies, which focus on tax breaks, cash payments, and perks like free daycare, are doomed to fail. Instead, she argues, countries should look to religion, and the demographic success of Israel. M.J. Koch writes:
Women can’t simply be bribed into having more children. What’s needed, instead, is a more pro-children culture. “Free market solutions are the only ones that stand a chance,” Ms. Pakaluk, herself a mother of fourteen, tells the Sun.
America could instead learn from a country that has been immune to cratering birth rates around the world—Israel. “They have a larger percentage of people who have religiously devout families who believe children are blessings, and that it’s worth taking on these extra sacrifices,” Ms. Pakaluk says. If a substantial minority of the population is forming large families, there can be spillover effects that make the whole culture more family-friendly and inspire more people who are on the fence about having children to go ahead and do it.
In America, organized religion is in a decades-long decline and faith-based education has grown more expensive. “Intergenerational transmission of values is much stronger when parents are working together with churches, which pass on their values to their children,” says Ms. Pakaluk. “Schools are an enormous way in which that channel of passing on faith gets broken.”
To help reverse the inverting pyramid of America’s population, Ms. Pakaluk advocates for giving parents more “educational freedom” in deciding whether to send their children to school, and giving churches a greater role in shaping people’s values.
Read more on New York Sun: https://www.nysun.com/article/bidens-strategy-of-bribing-women-to-fix-plummeting-birth-rates-is-a-road-to-ruin-author-says