Birth rates are plummeting in the United States and globally, forecasting a political and financial crisis. The most recent estimate predicts the average American woman will have 1.6 children in her lifetime, far below the rate of 2.1 required to maintain a steady population and even further below the 2.5 rate observed in the United States as recently as 1970.

Many cultural and technological factors have contributed to this dramatic decline, and public policies play a role in shaping people’s decisions about whether to have children and how many. Finding the right policy levers for influencing fertility rates, however, has proven very difficult.

Countries such as Hungary and South Korea, operating on the assumption that fertility is primarily constrained by the costs of raising children, have offered very generous government subsidies for families having children to offset those costs. Unfortunately, their fertility rates haven’t risen, so these large expenditures clearly haven’t helped.

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This piece originally appeared in The Federalist. You can read the full piece here.