With the United Nations, CNN, the New York Times, and even NPR acknowledging that falling birth rates will cause public policy challenges if current trends continue, economists who have long ignored the problem are beginning to pay attention.

Responding to a post noting how fast South Korea’s population is set to fall if current birth rates don’t rebound, economist blogger Noah Smith posted, “Tell us what the effective fertility policy would be. Speak it. Speak the words, say it aloud.” The post has since been read almost 3 million times.

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Responding to his own question, Smith wrote, “The only thing I can think of that would have even a slight chance of working — other than returning society to preindustrial standards of living — is to cut off old-age health and pension benefits to childless people.” As anyone who is even marginally familiar with politics in the United States knows, this is a political nonstarter.

Fortunately, there is a better way to reverse declining fertility, one that should be more politically palatable, although it will take far more than one policy change to make it work: marriage.

So much of the discourse on fertility centers is on making it easier for married couples to have children. Increasing the value of the child tax credit, subsidizing child care, and creating paid maternal/parental leave benefits. All of these policies would make parenthood more affordable for married couples. But here’s the thing: Married couples are actually having children at the same rate they were in 2007, when the U.S. fertility rate was above replacement. For that matter, unmarried women are also having about the same number of children as they did in 2007.

The problem is that married women have always had more children than unmarried women, and the percentage of women who are not married is far higher than it used to be. The birth rate among married women under the age of 44 is almost three times as high as the rate among unmarried women in the same age group. This shouldn’t be surprising. Having children is difficult, and it helps to have a husband assisting you. Meanwhile, the percentage of unmarried women between the ages of 20 and 44 has risen from 45% in 2007 to 55% today.

If we want to get fertility in the U.S. back to replacement level, all we have to do is get marriage rates and the average age at first marriage back to where they were in the 1990s. This is not that huge a cultural shift. 

And it is not like most people are averse to getting married. While Democrats are far more likely to believe that “marriage is an outdated institution” than Republicans, overall, the vast majority of never-married adults, 81%, say they would like to get married someday.  

We just need to make it easier for young people who already want to get married to get and stay married.

For most of our nation’s history, it was the policy of the federal and state governments to promote and protect marriage. “The foundations of national morality must be laid in private families,” John Adams wrote in his diary. “In vain are schools, academies, and universities instituted if loose principles and licentious habits are impressed upon children in their earliest years.”

Writing over 100 years later in 1885, upholding a congressional statute that made cohabitation between a man and more than one woman a misdemeanor, Supreme Court Justice Stanley Matthews wrote for the majority, “No legislation can be supposed more wholesome and necessary in the founding of a free, self-governing commonwealth … than that which seeks to establish it on the basis of the idea of the family, as consisting in and springing from the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony.”

As late as 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, which upheld the right of marital couples to use contraception, Justice William Douglas wrote for the majority, “Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in our prior decisions.”

The Supreme Court then abandoned the sanctity of marriage just seven years later in Eisenstadt v. Baird, when the court held that the right to privacy adhered to the individual, not the marital couple. Over the next decade, the Supreme Court would go on to dismantle a series of state laws that had channeled sexual desire through marriage by privileging the children of married couples over those born outside of marriage. This includes the court’s 1973 New Jersey Welfare Rights Organization v. Cahill decision, which held that the equal protection clause made any differential treatment between children born into or out of wedlock unconstitutional, thus creating marriage penalties in the burgeoning welfare state.

Today, between Medicaid, food stamps, Section 8 housing, the earned income tax credit, the child tax credit, Obamacare, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and other programs, the federal government and the states spend a combined $1 trillion a year on means-tested welfare programs that actively punish marriage. Is it any wonder that marriage has declined the most among the very demographics that use these programs?

There is no silver bullet for reversing the decline of marriage (and thus reversing the decline of fertility). It will take a comprehensive government and cultural effort to restore the married couple as the foundational unit of civil society. But ending the welfare state’s marriage penalties is a must and a great place to start.

Declining male wages are another major cause of marriage’s decline. According to the Congressional Research Service, since 1970, the real wages of men in the 50th percentile of earners have actually fallen 3%, and the wages of men in the bottom 10% of earners have fallen almost 8%. All this while median female wages have risen by 30%. Nobody wants to undo women’s wage gains, but those men who have lost earning power are also the men least likely to find a woman willing to be their wife. Anything we can do to improve male wages will help create more marriages.

The easiest way to raise low-skill male wages is to secure the border. As University of Minnesota history professor Steven Ruggles notes in his history of the American family, the “golden age of wage labor” for young men just happened to coincide with the lowest percentage of foreign-born workers in the American economy. That all changed with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which made it much easier for low-skilled immigrants to enter the country. The foreign-born population is higher today in the U.S. than ever.

Now, some natives do benefit from cheap immigrant labor. Doctors and lawyers can pay their gardeners, maids, and nannies less the more foreign-born labor is available. But those with similar skill sets to the foreign-born lose out in the form of fewer job opportunities and lower pay. The more we decrease the percentage of foreign-born, the higher the pressure on wages will be.

Environmental regulations are also strangling key economic sectors traditionally dominated by men. The construction (90%), energy (85%), transportation (75%), and manufacturing (70%) sectors are all overwhelmingly male and often do not require college degrees. By repealing the National Environmental Policy Act entirely, or at least removing the citizen suit provision, which allows activist groups to stop projects in their tracks, we can make America a country that builds things again and gets married and has children. The extra housing built by regulating the construction sector would also make it easier for young couples to afford homes.

Unfortunately, economics is not the only thing holding boys back from becoming men worthy of a woman’s love. Far too many men have been seduced into destructive online worlds, with gambling and pornography being the most destructive. As different states have legalized mobile gambling apps in a staggered fashion, economists have been able to measure the effect of legalization. And it isn’t good. Those states that legalized mobile gambling apps first show higher levels of credit card debt and bankruptcy. And it is young, low-skilled men who are hit the hardest, the very demographic we need to be helping the most.

There is also a growing body of research that shows the 24/7 availability of an infinite amount of pornography can sap many young men’s desire to better themselves and become the type of person a woman would want to marry. 

TRUMP’S AMERICAN BORN WORKER BOOM

A decade ago, college and professional television broadcasts were not saturated with gambling advertisements. OnlyFans isn’t even a decade old. Pornhub has, unfortunately, been around a little longer, but a number of red states have already succeeded in regulating Pornhub to an extent that the company has pulled out entirely. Gambling and pornography bring nothing positive to our society. We should recriminalize gambling and start prosecuting pornographers for obscenity. Our young men will become better people without them.

We were once a country that knew the married couple as the foundational unit of civil society, and we structured our laws accordingly. We have since lost that truth, and marriage has suffered as a result. If we want to continue to exist, if we want our way of life to continue into the future, we are going to have to recommit to making marriage a priority.