To Family Engineers of All Parties: A Call to Reject State-Sponsored Culture

The fertility debate among conservatives reveals a tension between those who view below-replacement birth rates as a moral or cultural problem and pronatalists who treat them as an incentive or resource issue. These thoughtful conservatives reach vastly different conclusions about the cause, yet robust alternatives have been sidelined.  

Any thorough explanation of below-replacement fertility rates in the developed world, and declining birth rates everywhere else, will acknowledge that the cultural, moral, and religious issues matter, as do the opportunity costs of marriage and child-rearing. Are there forces that alter both culture and incentives at the same time? This essay argues that there are, and that they exert indirect but universal influence on declines in marriage and fertility. 

A False Choice: Culture vs. Economics 

Recent essays by Patrick Brown and Allan C. Carlson deliver ostensibly conservative analyses that nonetheless fail to appreciate the underlying causes of the problems they lament. They offer solutions that propagate those very pathologies. 

Brown offers what he calls an “All-American Approach” to the US’s below-replacement-rate fertility. Conceding that culture shapes fertility, he puts the downbeat on opportunity costs and economic incentives as the main drivers of the decline. His sharpest criticism is toward conservatives who pine for a culture lost to the left’s long march through the institutions and their alleged ‘fatalism’ about using economic interventionism to reverse that slide.  

In response, he proposes familiar pro-natalist policies: the $3,000 baby bonus from Australia, expanded child tax credits, and expanded housing supply, but without reference to how to so implement them. Through these, he expects marginal fertility gains. Yet Brown then pivots and rejects, whole cloth, the notion that “affordability” drives family formation or fertility at all. Is this paradox for rhetorical effect, or a blatant contradiction? 

He notes that children have grown costlier in forgone affluence and career advancement, echoing economist Joseph Schumpeter, who held that  “the capitalist process, by virtue of the psychic attitudes it creates, progressively dims the values of family life,” making adults ever more aware of  “the heavy personal sacrifices that family ties and especially parenthood entail under modern conditions.” This opportunity cost explanation isn’t novel, but its persistence warrants examination. 

While Brown eyes the future, Allan C. Carlson seeks the solutions of yesteryear. In an open dismissal of the Wall Street Journal’s editors and family economist, Catherine Pakaluk, Carlson insists the federal government can and should intervene to reinstate the single-breadwinner household. He revisits federal efforts from the Children’ s Bureau of 1912 through federally funded home economics for girls and manual training for boys, alongside “family wages,” veterans’ mortgages, and income splitting, crediting these policies as the driving force behind the baby boom.  

Another reading is that these were forms of family engineering: fiscal through the tax code, regulatory through FHA and VA underwriting, and cultural through homemaker education. Tellingly, Carlson credits midcentury home affordability to there being, for a time, “fewer dollars chasing the same housing stock.” Does he unwittingly upend his own case, since he also advocates both subsidies and an expanding monetary base, which affect the loss of purchasing power in real estate markets?  

Brown and Carlson disagree about which levers of state power to pull, not whether they should be touched. Both treat households as machines, capable of being supercharged by interventionism. Brown prefers altering marginal incentives, Carlson prefers structural incentives. Their fatal conceit stems from wrongly dividing the economy from culture, a mistake they share with the progressives who pull the same levers toward different ends.  

In December of 2024, debating Pakaluk, Brown heard her correctly observe that pronatalist conservatives are producing “fancy rebrands [of] progressive ideas.” Both camps deploy social engineering through their preferred channels: culture or economics, and the false dichotomy overlooks how political economy shapes both. 

The Common Cause: The Interventionist State 

The family’s decline isn’t merely about scant subsidies or ineffectual tax breaks, nor strictly about cultural norms taught in schools. Nations with vast pro-natal schemes or even those with theocratic religiosity (see Iran’s below replacement total fertility rate) face the same demographic realities. The decline is the predictable outcome of a post-World War II political economy founded on economic interventionism, which has reshaped social life in underappreciated ways. Interventionist “broker states,” arbitrating between competing economic interests, have unwittingly subsidized what makes family formation harder while raising the financial, psychological, and spiritual costs of household formation and child-rearing the world over.  

These outcomes are not the result of clumsy marginal policy decisions. The default position taken by the leaders of nation-states is that family life and fertility are policy outputs to be managed, like inflation, employment, or gross domestic product. This approach doesn’t negate culture, incentives, and institutions. Instead, it assigns responsibility for the family to the planners, crowding out family and civic life. 

The intervention bias is what Roger Scruton called “state-sponsored culture”. Under its weight, the family becomes a “subversive institution,” perpetually “at war with the state and the state-sponsored culture,” and its absence yields what Scruton called the “state-produced animal.” Namely, children who are servile adults. This essay stands against the “state-produced” and “state-sponsored” family. Such children are not only feebler in mind and civic virtue but fewer and farther between, because family-sponsored culture has been crowded out by the state’s fiscal, monetary, and regulatory tools. For Scruton, family ties serve as an “underground conspiracy” against them. 

Each tool poisons a different well. Fiscally, the welfare state subsidized the old and non-working through the working young making their income generation, marriages, and raising children harder. Inflationary monetary policy ignites the Cantillon effect, favoring older homeowners over young singles, younger families, and poorer renters as home prices escalate. Regulatory policy diminishes the creation of affordable starter homes as local, state, and federal regulations make them less profitable to build. Some government officials, including the current chief executive, have vowed to maintain high home prices. Through these channels, the state has crowded out the institutions that families themselves supplied. 

Carlson hails interventionism as the source of the post WW2 baby boom. But its presence across western nations occurred under an array of tax regimes, housing, and welfare programs, undermining his claim. No single set of policies explains this general phenomenon. What they did share in common were improvements in maternal and infant mortality, incomes that were higher than expected, and household technologies that saved immense amounts of time, laissez-faire approaches to home construction, all combined with returning warriors eager to marry who had shared values centered on religion, industriousness, and marriage as the foundation of community and civic life. These factors weren’t the result of government dictates. They were the result of unleashed market innovations, However, these conditions wouldn’t last. This boom in fertility was eroded by the winds and waves of intervention after intervention, slowly but surely eroding civil institutions, especially the family. 

Those fading family institutions include self-insurance for old age and emergencies, education, and vocational guidance and apprenticeship. Even value-based matchmaking has given way to subsidized higher education as one of the main funnels through which the young are deemed desirable marriage partners. Some call this the fruit of prosperity, of resources directed toward social insurance, rising educational attainment, and per capita productivity, especially for women. But this is a rebuke to Brown’s “affluence” argument: these institutions vanished not merely because of increased wealth, but from the coercive restructuring of economic life, which is to say, of family life. 

If interventionism and its state-sponsored culture produced these outcomes, we should expect diminished family formation wherever interventionism is applied. Indeed, we do. 

The welfare-warfare democracies of the post-WW2 era and the communist command economies all shared one pattern: a collapse in family and fertility. Romania’s 1966 pro-natal Decree #770 banned abortion and contraception. After its short-lived fertility boost, Ceausescu’s communistic policies led to high prices, rationing, and large-scale child abandonment. These interventions, combined with the policy, produced orphanages overflowing with Scruton’s “state-produced animal”. Despite their best efforts to boost fertility and to push the citizenry toward state-provided childcare, fertility rates continued to decline.  

Meanwhile, China’s anti-natal one-child policy was designed to deliver fewer children, based on flawed Malthusian assumptions. Namely, that food production would not keep up with population growth. The fruit of this approach has had disastrous social consequences. This extreme form of family engineering led its heirs to clamor for and achieve its reversal.  

Some point to religiosity as the sure-fire solution to cultural ills and to revive fertility. But Iran’s theocratic regime made fertility a top priority with direct subsidies only to see fertility fall from 6.3 children per woman in 1979 to 2.3 twenty years later under the weight of its inflationary economic environment. Contrasting cultures, opposed religious creeds, and pro- and anti-natal policies alike produced the same result. The common factor in these widely varied cultural and political contexts was not capitalism à la Schumpeter, secularism, or a lack of good intentions. It was the presence of an interventionist state that was crowding out family-sponsored culture. 

This is why even “conservative” pronatalism hasn’t and won’t work. Whether Brown’s incentives or Carlson’s restored educational and tax favoritism, both only deepen the crowding out of what Schumpeter called the “family motive.” A “baby bonus” is a fixed transfer that inflation erodes. A family-wage regime cannot outearn restrictionist housing regulation. Neither can out-subsidize the state-sponsored culture, which erodes family culture. They can only further hasten its demise. 

One might object that the state, especially after the 1960s, was simply captured by the wrong agents, hostile to the family. But the answer is not to install conservative pronatalist engineers instead. A grander and weightier lift must overturn the state-sponsored culture itself: a shared consensus that family-generated culture is not merely preferable but superior, producing both the number and the type of children capable of carrying a nation toward a freer, more prosperous future. The family is a pre-political institution, but it can be snuffed out by the political economy of interventionism. 

The genuinely conservative course is to shrink the fiscal, monetary, and regulatory footprint of the family engineers, left and right alike. For the 80 years after WWII, they have pulled levers in failed attempts to produce their preferred outcomes, and stand befuddled that the machine they built yields fewer people and sharper political polarization. The answer is not more sophisticated governmental faculties or more able or empowered operators. It is past time to switch their machine off and trust what springs from the fertile ground of family culture. 

Jeffery Degner is a research fellow in economics and economic freedom, joining American Institute for Economic Research in 2026. He holds a PhD in economic science from l’Universite d’Angers.