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In most rich countries, most people say they want children, yet fertility keeps falling. @PikaGoldin's answer in a 2025 NBER WP isn't that women now prefer careers over kids.
Her mechanism is one of norm-updating at different speeds. When modernization is rapid, women's aspirations shift quickly toward careers and more egalitarian partnerships, while men's expectations adjust more slowly. Willing partners exist but cannot agree on terms.
A common reading is that educated women want fewer children, so fertility falls with education. Goldin argues the desire is still there, but women won't accept arrangements where they absorb all the domestic cost. Fertility falls because of the terms, not the preferences.
The empirics come from cross-country variation since the mid-1970s, when U.S. and European birth rates first dropped below replacement. Norms diverged fastest in countries where modernization arrived quickly, and the within-country variation is sharper than you would expect.
I suspect policy has limited tools here. Childcare subsidies and parental leave address the cost side, but the underlying variable is how fast men's expectations converge to women's, and I don't know what the policy lever for shifting that would be.
cc @lymanstoneky @_alice_evans — if the driver is mismatch in updating norms, what did Nordic countries do to mute the decline? Is fertility holding up there because the gap closed, or only because policy compensated for it?
Paper: <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w34268" color="blue">nber.org/papers/w34268</a>