First, the good news. In a recent report on birth rates in the United States, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 3.62 million babies born in 2024, up about 1% from the number born in 2023.
Now for the bad: even with that tick upwards, the nation’s total fertility rate remains way below “replacement,” the level at which a given generation can replace itself, 2.1 babies per woman. In 2024, the U.S. fertility rate was 1.62. In most years since 1971, and in every year since 2007, the rate has been below 2.1. What can be done to boost it?
The short answer is a pro-worker natalist policy that emphasizes so-called predistribution — altering the spread of the social income through better jobs, higher wages, and worker bargaining power, rather than redistributive handouts from above.
The Trump administration has signaled openness to post-tax redistribution. Last month, President Trump echoed Vice President JD Vance’s case for giving mothers a $5,000 “baby bonus,” calling it “a good idea.” Maybe, baby. A recent Niskanen Center report touted baby-bonus policies in New Zealand and Australia and claimed that just “$2,000 for every baby” born in the United States could be “an affordable, effective” policy “to support families.”
Fair enough, but let’s not kid ourselves about how many more kids a baby bonus might beget. In most nations that have experimented with baby bonuses, the impact on birth rates has been trivial, transitory, or ambiguous. A 2024 study found that financial incentives boost fertility rates slightly in the short run but do little to “increase the total number of children in the long run.”
Still, what if we aspired not merely to claw back to 2.1, but soar past it to the Baby Boom days of 1946 to 1964, when America’s fertility rate averaged close to 4. What might we do?
Well, we might start by recognizing that while politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from economics with respect to fertility rates. Specifically, the quantity of high-quality blue-collar jobs for men matters greatly to marriage rates and birth rates: the better and more plentiful the jobs, the higher the rates of family formation and childbearing. There are good reasons, both anecdotal and analytical, for thinking so.
Let me start with the anecdotal. In 1958, I began life in a semi-dilapidated, brick-row house in South Philadelphia, just across the street from the cathedral-like Catholic church where the fictional Rocky “The Italian Stallion” Balboa got married in the sequel to the 1976 blockbuster Rocky — and where my nonfictional older sister got married in 1977.
The urban, Catholic, blue-collar Boomer world of my Philly youth was no paradise, but it was close. Most dads had steady, decent-paying union or other jobs. Nobody needed a credit card to take their vacation week on the Jersey Shore. Nobody bowled or drank alone. Nobody thought they needed to go to college to make it. Above all, nobody thought that intact families with three or four or more kids was anything but the natural, good, and godly order of things.
Indeed, Saint Barnabas, the Catholic elementary school I graduated from in 1972, had about 180 kids in each grade. And that was small compared to our K-8 rival, Most Blessed Sacrament, which at its Sixties peak averaged more than 400 students per grade.
Tutored by hard-won experience, the adult working-class women in my life never doubted that good jobs were essential to making men moral, marriage-ready, and marriage-worthy. As my maternal grandmother would say, “senza buon lavori, senza buon uomini,” meaning, “without good jobs, no good men.”
“Good jobs were essential to making men moral, marriage-ready, and marriage-worthy.”
One of my aunts was married to a — as my father would always inject, “half-assed” — house painter. The guy would commence carousing and boozing whenever he was short on work, which was often. When girl relatives turned 15 or 16, she gave them “the talk”: men behave like animali (animals) on Saturdays and skip church on Sundays unless prezioso lavori (valuable jobs) await them and their paesani (male friends) on Mondays.
And lest you think it was just an Italian-American thing, one of my father’s brothers, a unionized construction boss, was married to a German-Irish woman. They had five children, plus me as their godson. She gave her four daughters essentially the same talk. And when her son talked of being a professional drummer, rather than working construction, she counseled him to “drum on the bricks” instead if he wanted to win a decent wife and lead a good family life. He did.
That job-centered male marriageability narrative is backed by statistics from numerous solid empirical studies. For instance, a 2024 study estimated that unionization, all by itself, “accounted for 20% of overall fertility increases during the Baby Boom”; and that these pro-family-formation effects were “driven primarily by wage growth” and “protection against adverse labor market shocks.”
Unfortunately, the relationship also holds in reverse. For instance, in 2017, three years before publishing their book-length discourse on “deaths of despair,” economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case detailed how decades of “worsening labor-market opportunities” were implicated in sizable and persistent declines in marriage rates.
Likewise, “When Work Disappears,” a 2019 study published in American Economic Review, documents how, in the early Nineties, the loss in US manufacturing jobs, owing to the China trade shock, tanked earnings among young working-class and low-income men, and, in turn, resulted in steep declines in their marriage rates.
Now, Good Jobs, Strong Families: How the Character of Men’s Work is Linked to Their Family Status, a new study by the Institute for Family Studies, scholars Brad Wilcox and Grant Martsolf demonstrate that “the nature and character of men’s work play a major role in determining whether men marry and form families.” As they explain, factors like “job stability, predictable hours, good benefits, and high pay help men to flourish and, in turn, elevate their appeal as husbands.” The upshot: “prime-aged men with good jobs are markedly more likely to be married with children when they are well-paid, their jobs are stable, and their benefits are good.”
Based on cutting-edge statistical analyses of differences in married family-formation rates by job characteristics, Wilcox and Martsolf find that, across different employment sectors (construction, retail, health care, food and hospitality, trucking, manufacturing, and others), working-class “men who are employed in stable, good-paying jobs with decent benefits” are significantly more likely to get married, stay married, and become fathers.
So, more and better blue-collar jobs have been, and continue to be, the seedbeds of robust birth rates, stable working-class families, and strong blue-collar communities. If only we had a critical mass of seriously pro-worker and pro-family leaders in both parties, who knows, we might yet one day witness the dawn of a second midcentury blue-collar baby boom.
