Pay me to get knocked up?

The New York Times’ Freakonomics has just renewed my faith in readers. So smart they are in response to the uncritical article by Melissa Lafsky on a study showing that financial incentives can increase birthrates. The study looked at Israel’s child subsidies and found that they increased the birth rate across cultural groups. The article dismisses other issues that influence fertility (such as the high costs of having children, which fall disproportionately on women, or of policies that could ease those costs, such as childcare funding, antidiscrimination laws, family leave, etc). This leaves one with the impression that child payments are the only effective way to raise fertility.

But smart readers pointed out that just because payments to families for having children raised fertility in one (unique) country doesn’t mean that’s the only thing that could affect fertility. “It’s like saying its been proven that your head aches when you hit a wall, but that DOES NOT MEAN that everytime you get a headache that you have hit a wall,” one reader put it.

I think a lot of women feel like they’ve hit walls against having more kids. That could be why they, ahem, are getting headaches. As if to suggest Western European countries with social policies that ease the burden on working mothers are trying the wrong tack, Lafsky writes, “Th[e study’s] conclusion could be big news for countries like France, Germany, and Sweden, which, in the face of lagging birthrates (a problem the U.S. doesn’t seem to be having), have adopted “explicitly pro-natalist policies” to reduce the costs of bearing children.”

Here things get odd. If you click on the link about lagging birthrates, you find no mention of France, Germany, or Sweden, and instead learn that the sharpest birthrate declines have been in the former Communist countries. Eastern European women in the article speak longingly of the days when Communist governments provided subsidized day care centers, not to mention other social supports, such as free apartments.

The women notably weren’t saying they wanted to stop working (for pay) to stay home with children but couldn’t afford it. They were saying it was hard to have more than one child without social support. So payments for having children don’t address their problems. Child payments wouldn’t provide the structures of support that the women longed for, and they wouldn’t reduce the costs to women of trying to combine work and parenthood.

By leaving all the costs of working in place, while subsidizing childbearing, child payments push women out of the workforce. But evidence suggests women don’t want to go. The countries whose birthrates have fallen sharpest are the industrialized countries with the least social support for working mothers: Eastern Europe, including Russia, and Japan, Greece, Spain, and Italy. Faced with barriers to working while having children, women aren’t dropping out of the workforce. They’re having fewer kids. Meanwhile, France, Germany, and Sweden have more social supports and higher birthrates.

As the article mentions, falling birthrates are an economic threat, “straining pension plans and depleting the workforce across the continent.” Europe “faces a shortfall of 20 million workers by 2030.” So, um, why not help keep mothers in the workforce? This could be a two-fer, likely producing a higher birthrate as well.

Keep all this in mind if Republicans again promote child credits instead of social support to working mothers (a la the Contract with America, in which child credits were the most expensive plank). It’s a bum deal—economically and morally.