The Institute for Family Studies' Lyman Stone has a new post up arguing that pronatal policy can work. This is a big issue of contention: even among people who acknowledge that falling birth rates are a serious issue that should be addressed, most of them will state, often as if that is a demonstrated fact, that policy simply cannot change the birth rate.

Stone, a demographer and head of IFS's pronatal initiative, has consistently argued otherwise. His biggest evidence comes from the nation of France, which has historically, for better or worse, been a demographic pioneer: first country to "demographically transition" and, as a result, first country to tinker with pronatal policies, at least on a large scale in the modern era.

"Without pronatal policies, the French population today would be between 56 and 61 million people: or 5 to 10 million fewer French people," Lyman writes. Furthermore, "the reason France’s population is still growing today rather than staying stagnant or shrinking is because of the pronatal policies of the past."

Lyman has produced research, not just on France but on many other countries, that consistently shows modest, but real, impacts on birth rates of pronatal policy. Here's Lyman's takeaway: if you pay people to do something, you'll get more of it; but because children are such a fantastically expensive investment, if you pay people the amounts they're typically paid, you'll get a small extra amount.

But—and this is where the example of France comes in—that small extra amount compounds over time: those extra babies in generation n themselves have extra babies in generation n+1, and so on. Because France has had pronatal policies the longest, it shows this long-term effect best.

As we head into debates on child tax credits and other pro-family policies, this is an important thing to keep in mind.

SEE ALSO: Our podcast with Stone, where we get into these issues and many more.

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