Fertility decline can be reversed. Human behavior is not a physical constant, and the future has repeatedly escaped a straight-line forecast. The harder truth is that no modern country has yet demonstrated a durable path from very low fertility back to replacement. We know much more about stopping births than restoring the conditions in which people welcome them.
That asymmetry should sharpen the search. Governments have spent decades testing family benefits and ways to adapt around the missing births. Some measures raised fertility at the margin; others made aging easier to bear. Their record also shows why a national budget cannot substitute for marriages formed in time or a culture that treats motherhood and fatherhood as honorable ambitions.
The chapter begins with an uncomfortable part of that record. Before asking what governments can do for fertility, we should remember what governments did against it—and why the damage was so much faster to inflict than to repair.