On the bus recently I noticed a mom wrangling her crying, unruly two-year-old. In and among the mainly adult commuters, some might be bothered by this. Instead, my mind wandered into the policy realm of how to increase crashing fertility rates across the globe; how to normalize again what is normal, that being a crying kid on a bus. Would large sums of money do it?

A recent proposal by Cardus Senior Fellow Lyman Stone together with Peter Foreshaw Brookes writing for the Institute of Family Studies argues “We Should Have a Mega-Baby-Bonus.” They ask, “would you have another baby for (USD) $75,000?” This is about CAD $105,000. It’s obviously alarmingly generous even by current Canadian benefit standards, which are greater than what federal family policy offers in the USA.

Their idea, worked out in conjunction with Finnish scholars, is that government would invest USD $17,000 in the market for every baby born and when that baby becomes an adult and has a child of his or her own, the parent could start claiming the money allocated to him or her, up to $75,000 USD for a third child. The authors explain: “Instead of paying a baby bonus for current kids from current tax revenues, on a constant tax-and-transfer treadmill… we can use current tax revenues to make productive investments to pay for a much more lucrative future baby bonus.”

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The proposal is creative and different and it’s worth having a read of the details. Stone and Brookes think this proposal could boost fertility by eight to 25 percent in the USA. 

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Still, for me it raises questions. Can government intervention – of any kind – actually do anything to raise the fertility rate? Or are there other, deeper cultural and spiritual reasons for declining fertility? Is not Canada an example of a country where quite generous benefits have still placed our country in lowest of the low fertility? If a benefit must have a shockingly high dollar value to increase fertility, what does that say? 

Lyman Stone and others like him, Patrick T. Brown of the Ethics and Public Policy Centre for example, certainly believe government can and should do something to encourage higher fertility. This proposal relies on private markets to grow the wealth that Americans could then access years later, when they become parents themselves. It remains nonetheless a government intervention. Is this terrain we want to advance? What are the unintended consequences we have yet to realize, and is over-reliance on government one of them?  

Governments are limited in what they can do to encourage higher fertility. Personal finances are only one factor in the complex interplay of reasons people have fewer children. Catherine Ruth Pakaluk is an economist and author of Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, a book about how some women buck the waning fertility trend by having large families of five or more kids.  She has likened government policies to encourage people to have a family to trying to encourage people to run a marathon by giving a free pair of the best kind of running shoe. It might work at the margins, but it still won’t get most people to run that distance.

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I can see both sides. Certainly, some amount of bad government interventions, marriage penalties for example, or a generally high tax environment for all families, are responsible for the low fertility reality we now face. Perhaps it’s time to have some good ones. And a proposal that might raise fertility even if only at the margins would still result in more children being born to some people. As we enter lowest of the low fertility, more babies are better than fewer babies. At the same time, will high cash payouts able to shift the inability to find a partner? The weight and value we place on work? The idea that children impede our personal growth? 

About that mom on the bus: By the end of my ride, her crying daughter was enveloped in a big comfortable mom hug and perfectly quiet. It was the kind of moment that makes older people smile, and middle-aged moms feel wistful for the sands of time slipping away because our own kids are already too big. We have to see kids to want to have kids. I’m open to a large sum of money opening the door to extra children being born, but this is only ever going to be one part of the equation. Discussing this kind of policy, even if we discard it, is worth it as we stare down a new childless reality across the globe.