At the dawn of the Covid pandemic, I wrote a newsletter about the approaching virus that highlighted what I saw as the biggest risk: that the question of whether to take Covid seriously would become a partisan political issue. To tackle something this big, I wrote, we’d have to all be on the same page.

As a country, we have vastly more capacity to grapple with difficult challenges and complex tradeoffs when those issues haven’t been subsumed into partisan politics, so I was relieved at the time that Covid hadn’t become a partisan issue. It seemed to me that we could handle it as long as we worked hard to keep things that way.

That didn’t work out that way, of course.

I’ve had this story on my mind because, over the last few years, I’ve watched as the rapidly falling rates of family formation in the US — and much of the rest of the world — go from a niche issue to a mainstream issue to an increasingly partisan issue. And that stands to be a tragedy, just as Covid’s politicization was a tragedy.

Ensuring that our economy and society support people in deciding whether they want children, and the ability to have as many children as they want, is way too important to surrender to the culture wars. And yet that’s where we seem to be headed.

Yes, it’s good when people are able to have lots of children

Just about everywhere you look, birth rates are collapsing.

Many demographers thought that the global population........

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