"We gave 1000 lucky participants $3.50 and a used bubblegum wrapper to share between them, but it didn't measurably increase their marginal propensity to have kids at all! Clearly the root problem couldn't possibly have anything to due with economics!"

It's wild how quick and eager economists are to discard money as a driving factor when the solution could possibly involve more social spending. If this were about taking credit for success, they would be tripping over themselves to explain how economics drives the cultural factors, lol.

It's mentioned in the piece:

As Lyman Stone wrote in 2020, “pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies… But it takes a lot of money. Truth be told, trying to boost birth rates to replacement rate purely through cash incentives is prohibitively costly.”

Did you just make that up? I don't see what that has to do with the linked study

> Money is not the issue according to this from 4 days ago

The article does not say that. In fact, it notes that money (and correlated housing) are significant, generous incentives have a positive impact, but most importantly they need better data because there are complex trade offs around opportunity cost which are inadequately captured by the available data.

> According to that the issue is culture.

This is a much stronger claim than the article makes, especially given their careful recognition of limits in the data, the global nature of the trend, and especially the interrelated nature of economic constraints and preferences. The speculation in your last paragraph aren’t discussed - they’re talking about things like how much people derive satisfaction from careers or the way people’s choices are influenced by their peers, which again are highly related to economic constraints (e.g. if housing costs are a major barrier, odds are that your friends are also affected and so you’re all having fewer kids later). They mention things like travel in the opportunity cost category, but that needs better data to tease out whether people are not having kids because they want to travel or whether people who have decided to delay/not have kids are making the much smaller financial commitment to have a vacation. There’s a lot of thoughtful discussion in that piece about teasing out the interrelated factors and it really highlights that there isn’t a single magic fix.