The Empathy Channel in Fertility

Submission:

Being around babies makes adults more likely to want children, argues a new paper by Sebastian Galiani and Raul A. Sosa. They dub the mechanism the “empathy channel”. Seeing and interacting with infants appears to trigger emotional and biological responses that raise fertility intentions. Fewer babies therefore weaken this feedback loop, helping to push birth rates down further.

Therefore, the paper insists, governments can best implent policy targets groups where each subsidy euro produces the largest knock-on effect on others’ fertility, not necessarily where the spillover per child is greatest. Their research is interesting considering the contemporary notion of the "fertality crisis".