While many on the Left, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), still believe there are too many people in the world already, some are beginning to acknowledge that a declining population poses significant challenges to the United States. 

There are even some who argue the government should help women have the number of children they want, which, for most women, is fewer than the number they are having today.

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Writing in the New York Times, author Anna Louie Sussman notes that, according to recent polling, the average American woman wants between 2.1 and 2.7 children, which is far higher than the 1.6 children the average woman is currently having. 

“America,” Sussman concludes, “has made parenting unusually, needlessly hard. Child care and rent are unaffordable; medical care, even when subsidized, is a nightmare of red tape; family leave is too short and too rare; everyone feels overextended and underachieving.”

To remedy this, Sussman calls for a “woman-friendly and birth-friendly” regime like they have in Denmark, including “free in vitro fertilization for single women,” subsidized child care, and “extensive” parental leave.

To her credit, Sussman admits that Denmark’s “woman-friendly” family policies haven’t raised birth rates. In fact, at 1.5 births per woman, Denmark’s fertility rate is below the U.S.’s, but she notes “this country has never even tried,” and they might work if we did. Not exactly a convincing argument.

Also in the New York Times, Amanda Taub makes “The Feminist Case for Spending Billions to Boost the Birthrate,” building on the work of feminist economist Nancy Folbre from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Folbre, Taub explains, believes that childless adults have been free-riding off the unpaid labor of parents for decades.

“Because all citizens of the United States have claims on children’s future earnings via the money they will pay to support Social Security, payments on public debt and other programs,” Taub writes, “people who enjoyed those benefits without doing the work of childbearing and child-rearing are free riding.”

Parents, Taub explains, take a “double hit” because they also often forgo paid work in order to provide care for their children. Not only does less time on the job mean fewer paychecks, but it also means lost professional experience, networking, seniority, and promotion opportunities. And since mothers provide the lion’s share of care for children, it is women who end up sacrificing the most financially when a couple has an additional child.

Folbre’s solution to the rising cost of parenthood is simply to pay parents for the public good they are providing by raising the next generation. We already do this on a small scale through things like the child tax credit, which cuts $2,000 off a family’s tax bill for every child under 17. But as any parent will tell you, $2,000 does not pay for much child care or tuition these days, nor does it come close to replacing a parent’s full-time income or even half of one.

Folbre wants to see parents get a much larger payment. The current child tax credit costs the federal government about $120 billion a year. Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies estimates that it would take about $700 billion a year in payments to raise America’s birth rate from the current 1.6 to a replacement level of 2.1 children.

“It’s inevitably a matter of public values and public commitments. You have to decide what you care about and what you’re willing to pay for that,” Folbre told Taub. “It’s just that in the long run, we have to get up to replacement. Because if we don’t, we disappear.”

There is much truth to Folbre’s diagnosis. The direct costs of having children, including housing, child care, and education, are rising. And the indirect costs of lost paychecks and professional opportunities are rising, too, especially now that women often make just as much as their husbands do and sometimes more. 

But as much as Folbre’s story is true, it misses the more detailed picture of who is having fewer children, which paints a clearer picture of why fertility is falling and suggests a more targeted approach to fixing the problem.

While women without a college degree still have more children than those who do, the decline in births among women without a college degree has been much steeper than among those who have one. If the opportunity cost theory were correct, the opposite would be true: Women with the most to lose by exiting the labor force would see the steepest decline in fertility. Instead, we see the opposite. If anything, the most educated women with advanced degrees are having more children than they did before. 

So if fertility’s decline is not being driven by the rising opportunity costs of having children, then why is it falling?

Sussman actually walked right up to the real problem but then abandoned it. 

“A growing share of [American women] are single,” Sussman reports. “By one estimate, more than half of non-college-educated women born in the mid-90s will be single when they’re 45.”

This is the entire fertility problem right here: the growing percentage of women who are single. Married women have double the number of children that single women do, and women who get married younger have more children than those who get married later in life. If we want to solve the fertility crisis, all we have to do is help young women get and stay married.

Unfortunately, as Sussman goes on to report, “fewer women are marrying, at least in part because they’re having trouble finding appealing men.”

But if the problem is that women aren’t getting married, and women aren’t getting married because they can’t find appealing men, then how does free child care, or parental leave, or payments to parents help women find appealing men?

It doesn’t.

The reality is that women mate hypergamously, meaning they only find men “appealing” if they make as much money or more than they do. Women with college degrees prefer men with college degrees or higher education. They will even marry men without college degrees, but only if they make more money than they do. But women simply do not find men who make less than they do appealing. 

And over the past 50 years, the percentage of women who outearn men has risen substantially. According to the Congressional Research Service, the real wage of the average woman has risen almost 30% while the real wage of the average man has decreased by 3%. Now, for college-educated men, the story is different. The average real wage of men with a college degree has risen substantially. But only 37% of men have a college degree, and that number is falling. At the same time, the percentage of women with a college degree already surpasses men (39%) and continues to rise. 

In other words, thanks to hypergamy, men’s falling wages, and women’s rising wages, the number of “appealing men” is shrinking every day.

If we want to solve the fertility crisis, we are going to have to solve the marriage crisis first, and the only way we can do that is by making a concerted effort to raise male wages. No feminist is going to be on board for that. But they should be.

Men’s and women’s wages are not locked in a zero-sum game. Male wages can rise right along with female ones. The government just needs to pursue policies that help industries with predominantly male workers. The construction (90%), energy (85%), transportation (75%), and manufacturing (70%) sectors are all heavily dominated by men and often do not require college degrees. 

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The best thing we can do to boost male wages (thus boosting marriage, thus boosting fertility) is to make America a country that builds things again. Get rid of all the environmental regulatory red tape that makes it next to impossible to build more houses, pipelines, roads, and factories. And enforce immigration law so that employers can’t undercut male wages by hiring illegal immigrants. 

Population decline is not inevitable. Most Americans still want to get married and start a family. We just need a government that makes it a priority to help young men and women get and stay married.