Op-Ed: Here's How to Get That Baby Boom for Free

If the Trump administration is hunting for a baby boom, Joanne Lipman argues it's ignoring the cheapest tool on the table: letting people work from home. In a New York Times opinion piece, the Yale lecturer points to research suggesting remote and hybrid work have already nudged US births upward—roughly 290,000 extra babies a year since the pandemic, per a Stanford working paper. Economist Nicholas Bloom tells her that when both parents shift from fully on-site to at least one work-from-home day a week, they average about half a child more. Bloom calls remote work "the most effective fertility-boosting policy out there," aiding opportunity and availability.

Lipman contrasts that data with Trump's push for on-site federal work and broader corporate rollbacks of flexibility and family supports, from child-care funding to pregnancy protections, which are unlikely to result in the "baby boom" he wants. Return-to-office mandates, she notes, are helping drive college-educated mothers out of the workforce when they could be helping the economy. With costly pronatalist schemes abroad delivering little bang for the buck, Lipman contends that flexible work is the rare fertility lever that's already working—and essentially free. For her full argument and the underlying research, read the Times piece.