I’ve got a piece at Law & Liberty tomorrow that I plan to send out in honor of September 11. For today, therefore, I’m going to re-up this piece from The Freeman, which I mentioned in passing at the end of the last one. I wrote it a year ago, and I still think it holds up pretty well.
The one thing I will say about this piece is that it has a bit of a slow start, at least for people who regularly debate family policy questions. The Freeman is a libertarian publication, so I came to the table expecting that pronatalism of any kind would be a bit of a hard sell with their readership. There’s perhaps more stage-setting than many social conservatives would need. Basically, I establish that the birth dearth is in fact a serious problem but that dumping cash on families doesn’t seem to be helping, at least not very much. If you know all that stuff already, just skip the first ten paragraphs and start here:
In my estimation, there are two broad pathways that modern societies can take at this juncture in responding to the birth dearth. We might call one “communitarian pronatalism,” and the other “libertarian pronatalism.” Thus far, the communitarian approach has been more extensively explored at the governmental level, and has generally enjoyed broader support from people who self-identify as “pronatalists.” But it hasn’t worked particularly well, and I think there are reasons to worry that it never will. The libertarian approach is comparatively untried, and may initially rouse greater suspicion. But it is far more compatible with freedom and human dignity, and may be both more sustainable and more promising over the long run. I think it’s worth a shot.
I go on to explain why a more successful pronatalism may need to embrace a new paradigm for thinking about families, understanding them not as naturally needy, but rather as naturally productive. Sometimes it’s good to invest in productive things, but you do it primarily in the spirit of enhancing flourishing, not in the spirit of relieving suffering. This does not mean that we should never relieve family suffering. Sometimes families need welfare (in various forms), but family welfare is family welfare; pronatalism should be about growth and dynamism, not charity to the needy. We don’t achieve that by dumping money on people, but rather by creating a “family-friendly climate,” more parallel to a “business-friendly climate.”
How would we do that? A large-scale return to the family economy isn’t likely, though it is possible that the fluidity and flexibility of our evolving labor markets could be a boon to families, in ways that labor policy could potentially encourage. Twentieth-century labor policy was largely built around the expectation of work–family compartmentalization. It was assumed that most workers would effectively be wage laborers, and that caretakers and children would be dependents. Many pronatalists today would like to double and triple down on that model, using tariffs and labor legislation to prop up breadwinners while encouraging domesticity through baby bonuses and cultural messaging. A libertarian pronatalism, by contrast, would recognize the many ways in which a more fluid labor situation (think remote work, gig work, and starting home businesses) can be beneficial to families, enabling parents, and perhaps adolescent or young-adult children, to develop their productive potential in ways more compatible with family life. We needn’t remake ourselves as an agrarian society in order to rediscover the many ways in which a household can be more productive than an individual in a cubicle.
I have multiple suggestions here, but one of my favorite is a “quotient” tax system, similar to France’s:
This same sort of logic could apply to a “family quotient” tax system, which is already the basis of France’s somewhat unusual tax code. The details of France’s system have been adjusted several times over the past several decades, but the core idea is that a family’s taxable income can be calculated based on the size of the household. Instead of expecting adult citizens to file “singly” or “jointly,” with additional household members claimed as dependents, a family of five would simply file “for five” with their income divided accordingly. Clearly, this kind of system could give substantial tax relief, especially to higher-earning families. That will be controversial in itself (more on this in a moment), but we should note a significant advantage to this approach: it shifts incentive structures in a pronatal direction without engaging in potentially offensive forms of social engineering. Many people, especially women, are understandably irritated by state programs that seem to be offered with a paternalistic cast, nudging them in the direction of the kitchen. A family quotient tax system needn’t rest on any policymaker’s assumption about how often women should be barefoot and pregnant. It simply recognizes that children are citizens, not pets or personal projects. Why shouldn’t we treat them that way for tax purposes?
I end with thoughts on how this might change culture and create virtuous cycles:
Communitarian pronatalism has made more headway in the world today, since it fits naturally into the logic of the entitlement state, but precisely for that reason it risks ghettoizing family life. As a rule, state subsidy for particular classes of people tends to foster dependency while undercutting adaptation, innovation, and cultural respect. Any handout the government attaches to babies will naturally appeal more to the poor than to the rich. That might easily usher in a world in which family life is viewed as a kind of lowest-common-denominator option for people (especially women) with poor employment prospects. Poor people are incentivized to have more babies, while the talented and ambitious devote their energies to running the economy. If that’s where communitarian incentive structures are leading us, it’s only reasonable to expect that domesticity and caretaking will be less respected in the future, not more, and no amount of “positive messaging” is likely to counteract those trends.
A libertarian pronatalism, by contrast, will incentivize childbearing especially among the affluent. People who believe in the power of markets should easily see the upsides: if parents have more cash, they are likely to use that money to invest in better schools, family-friendly institutions, goods and services that families need, and so forth. Since the affluent impact cultural trends far more than do the poor, a libertarian pronatalism is more likely to facilitate the rise of a family-friendly culture, with attendant benefits for all demographics and for society at large. And if that looks to some eyes like social engineering, we should reflect that it would really only represent a return to a more natural perspective on family and childbearing.
Very grateful to The Freeman for giving me the chance to think through that line of thought. Really, in the end there is this. We already know that communitarian pronatalism is ineffective. It’s extremely expensive, and it doesn’t raise birth rates, at least not by much. How about we try something else?