Misunderstanding the Fertility Crisis
The DINKs video isn’t shaping culture—it’s a cultural response to the rising opportunity cost of having children in free and prosperous societies.
Several years ago, I bumped into a conservative acquaintance in the green room at Fox News. He had just been on air, and I was about to go on to talk about my area of expertise, the latest immigration controversy. (Yes, this is a very DC story.) I asked him what he was working on and he said, “The fertility crisis.” I was broadly aware of concepts like the demographic transition, falling total fertility rates, and how even immigrants from high-fertility societies rapidly decrease their fertility after arrival. Well-worn books by Bryan Caplan, Jonathan List, and Julian Simon about how children and a higher population are great and why falling birth rates are bad have been with me for years, but this was the first I’d heard of a crisis.
Knowing that I worked on immigration policy, my acquaintance said that immigrants assimilate too rapidly to America’s low-fertility culture and we have to find a way to slow assimilation to boost the birthrate. I disagreed vehemently because I support cultural assimilation (which is going well, by the way), but also because he had misdiagnosed the mechanism. “They’re not assimilating to America’s low-fertility culture,” I said. “They’re assimilating to high opportunity cost in the United States, which is the reason why they’re here in the first place.” He asked what I’d do to increase fertility if that were the only outcome I cared about. After clarifying that I don’t support this policy, I said that I’d massively increase marginal tax rates on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity cost of having children. Then the producer came out and hustled me on set.
