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What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

Governments worldwide are trying to increase fertility with cash. But the most famous birthrate "boom" had a lot to do with science and technology, as well.

If that wasn't sufficiently inspiring—the miraculous conclusion of this towering event, the clock of history reset and a whole people's aims limited no longer by the past—there was the neighborhood, the communal determination that we, the children, should escape poverty, ignorance, disease, social injury and intimidation—escape, above all, insignificance. “Parenthood rapidly became much easier and safer between the 1930s and 1950s” thanks to changes in household technology, scientific advances in maternal health, and policies that reduced the cost of family formation, Anvar Sarygulov and Phoebe Arslanagic-Wakefield write in a wonderful review of the subject in the journal Works in Progress. In their excellent new review of the literature, Kearney and Phillip B. Levine conclude that today’s falling fertility rates are not a pure economic phenomenon but rather a "broad reordering of adult priorities" toward personal fulfillment and career and away from early marriage and childrearing.

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