Nicholas Decker (@nicholasdecker): "When people say that subsidizing fertility doesn’t work, my honest answer is that we haven’t even tried. It’s like giving a sick person a Tylenol, and if that doesn’t cure them saying that clearly medicine doesn’t work."

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When people say that subsidizing fertility doesn’t work, my honest answer is that we haven’t even tried. It’s like giving a sick person a Tylenol, and if that doesn’t cure them saying that clearly medicine doesn’t work.

In this post, we show that under the median estimated elasticity the socially optimal fertility rate is 2.4 in the US, well above today’s 1.7, given that the US should place a value of 14.28x GDP/capita per additional birth ($1.17mn per birth). Furthermore, to achieve this, the US should be willing to spend the equivalent of 3.8% of its GDP ($290K per birth) on fertility subsidies

Duncan McClements and Jason Hausenloy

Mar 22

9:07 PM

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