There are reasons to care about like the overall global birth rate, and I think there are good reasons that specific countries care about their birth rates for economic reasons.

I just think that it's not like a simple problem with one technocratic fix anyway.

And so we're probably better off going into it asking, what do we think are the main ingredients in this stew? And what do we think about each one of those? And can we make society better on this front, on that front, on this front, on that front?

Birth rates do have a correlation

with economic health, but also that they are not synonymous.

And to understand also that there are some sacrifices that we might want to make in order

for the existing people and the future people who are constantly being born

in actually quite large numbers even when birth rates are low to have good lives.

I'm Katie Gaddy Tossan. This is The Money with Katie's show.

I am once again asking the conversation about birth rates and crisis after a wave of hand-wringing coverage infiltrated all the major bastions of economic news.

The central question the coverage seemed to ask was,

can you pay people to have kids?

It seemed to me that much of the conversation took it as a given

that a stagnant population was a problem per se.

That is not a sign of a problem, for example,

a lack of support for families, but a problem in and of itself.

In that episode, I argued that the best immediate investment a modern government could make

in family formation would be advancing access to and efficacy of fertility science.

But the question has been revived anew since the New York Times reported that the Trump

administration is considering $5,000 baby bonus payments for new mothers, literally paying

women to have children, and reserving 30% of Fulbright scholarships for married people with children.

Since then, he's floated the idea of doing away with Fulbright altogether, so who knows?

...