Austerity for Fertility

Why libertarians, natalists, and economists should respond to low birthrates with: "Defund higher education, except for STEM."

Until recently, economists — or at least development economists — assumed that birthrates were too high. While they rarely argued for this anti-natal premise, economists’ cost-benefit analyses routinely put “fewer births” on the benefit side of the ledger. Since education, especially female education, seems to strongly reduce fertility, economists standardly named lower fertility as a major social benefit of education, especially female education. This 1995 article on “Social Gains from Female Education,” typifies the genre. The opening sentence:

Female education increases the value of women's time in economic activities by raising labor productivity and wages, with a consequential rise in household incomes and a reduction in poverty. Female education also produces social gains by improving health (the woman's own health and the health of her children), increasing child schooling, and reducing fertility.

Over the last decade, happily, economists have at long last largely abandoned their casual anti-natalism. Some top economists are now curiously talking about how to raise birthrates. Their tone, however, remains pessimistic: “This is such a hard problem, it’s so hard to find any pro-natal policy that durably works. And even if we did find such a policy, the cost would be astronomical.”

This pessimism is bizarrely blind. Unless economists were totally wrong for half a century to conclude that raising education, especially female education, causally reduces fertility, we are already in possession of a demonstrably highly effective natalist policy tool that costs taxpayers less than nothing.

That policy tool is, of course, educational austerity. Since more government spending increases educational attainment, which in turn reduces fertility, we can immediately infer that less government spending decreases educational attainment, which in turn increases fertility. Furthermore, since raising female education is an especially potent way to reduce fertility, reducing female education must be an especially potent way to raise fertility.

Better yet, educational austerity kills two birds with one stone. Bird #1 is, of course, low fertility. Bird #2, as you may have guessed, is massive deficits. Or to be more precise, educational austerity hits two birds with one stone. While austerity will make fertility rise and deficits fall, it’s not clear that even full separation of school and state will make fertility high and deficits low. But austerity remains a big step in two right directions.

I’m well-aware that my proposal will horrify many readers, including most academic economists. But my position is logically airtight, at least if you know the prior research. For many decades, economists declared, “Education’s negative effect on fertility is an extra reason to support more government spending on education.” Once you admit that fertility is too low, there is no escaping the complementary conclusion: “Education’s negative effect on fertility is an extra reason to support less government spending on education.”

The latter statement is clearly true even if you accept other standard textbook arguments in favor of education spending. That’s how marginal thinking works. Though as I explain in The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, the other standard textbook arguments are much weaker than my fellow economists suppose.

The same holds, of course, for my claim that cutting spending on female education is especially beneficial. When economists thought birthrates were too high, they were happy to prioritize female education. Once they grant that birthrates are too low, they should be equally happy to deprioritize female education.

Wouldn’t that be illegal discrimination? Almost no one thought so when the shoe was on the other foot.

But in any case, there is a gender-neutral way to deprioritize female education that’s worth doing even ignoring its fertility effects: Defund all higher education, except for STEM.

The idea is common sense: If you want to study humanities, social sciences, psychology, communications, or business, you can do so on the your own dime. If you want taxpayer money, you’d better specialize in science, technology, engineering, and math. I’m well-aware that even STEM is riddled with wasteful signaling, but at least STEM majors reliably learn objective truths and STEM professors reliably have high standards. You can’t honestly make the same generalizations about non-STEM fields.

So what’s the fertility connection? Simple: Males are more interested in STEM than females. If government only spends tax dollars on STEM, granted, some women will successfully switch to STEM. But most women will be unwilling or unable to do the STEM switch. As a result, in a world without subsidized soft college majors, the average woman will probably finish school years earlier — and start having kids years earlier, too. Which could easily raise the Total Fertility Rate by .5 — moving the U.S. from 1.6 all the way to the replacement rate.

Isn’t this just authoritarian social conservatism in libertarian guise? I think not. There are many degrees of libertarian radicalism, but even the least radical libertarian should unequivocally oppose government spending with bad overall consequences. And subsidizing non-STEM college majors has two big bad overall consequences: It wastes valuable resources and depresses birthrates.

Crucially, subsidies don’t just depress birthrates relative to socially conservative ideals. Subsidies depress birthrates relative to where they’d be in a free market. Truly, libertarian supporters of blanket education subsidies don’t have a leg to stand on.

I am well-aware that neither libertarians nor natalists are likely to make friends by declaring their support for educational austerity in general. But “educational austerity except for STEM” potentially has broad appeal — and both libertarians and natalists should be proud to embrace this reform. And at least at the margin, so should every economist with intellectual integrity.