, Columnist
U.S. Birthrate Might Rise With Help From Government
The high costs of housing and college could be keeping Americans from having more children. Can better public policies make a difference?
They may need a boost.
Photographer: Callaghan O'Hare/Bloomberg
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Americans aren’t having as many babies as we used to. Fewer infants were born in 2017 than in any of the previous 30 years, even though our total population is much larger than it was in the mid-1980s.
Whether we should be concerned about this decline, whether it is likely to continue, what’s behind it, and what, if anything, should be done about it: All are disputed questions. A recent report by Lyman Stone, an economist and a colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute, sheds light on each of them.