Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2023 for decades of work on women in the labor market. This year she presented at Jackson Hole, the world’s most important economic-policy symposium, her most recent paper: The Downside of Fertility. And what she found should completely change the birth-rate debate under way in Argentina, in Europe and in nearly every developed country.
It is not doing so. Because the conclusion makes too many people uncomfortable.
Goldin’s thesis, built on data from 21 countries, is simple and devastating: countries where women gain more agency, more education, more work, more reproductive rights, tend to have fewer children, except when men change in parallel. When men take on more care work and household tasks, birth rates stabilize or rise. When they don’t, they fall.
South Korea is the extreme case: a fertility rate of 0.72 in 2023, the world’s lowest, and a gap of almost 3 hours a day in domestic work between men and women. It is not coincidence. It is causation.
The argument no one wants to see
Falling birth rates are a rational decision, not a cultural failure
There is a debate running across the world today, and Argentina is no exception, with the following structure: ‘Women no longer want to have children,’ followed by some variant of nostalgia for the past or blame directed at education, feminism or individualism.
Goldin destroys that argument with data. Women did not stop wanting children. They made a perfectly understandable rational calculation: ‘Why have a child if it means giving up my career, my income, my economic security, without anyone, not my partner, not the State, not my employer, absorbing part of that burden?’
In her exact words, presented in August 2025: ‘Why have a child if it means giving up one’s future income and security and the child’s security?’ This is not nihilism. It is cost-benefit analysis done by women who invested years in their education and know what is at stake.
Goldin’s paper introduces the concept of a generational mismatch: women changed their expectations about life (work, autonomy, equality at home) but many men keep their fathers’ expectations about who cares and who provides. That gap in expectations, when it meets the reality of forming a family, produces fewer children.
We have spent decades designing birth-rate policies that encourage women to have more children. How many public policies are designed to get men to do more care work?
The Argentine case
Argentina is importing the wrong debate
In Argentina, the fertility rate fell to 1.5 children per woman in 2024, according to PAHO. We are below the replacement level (2.1) and the trend is downward. This raises legitimate concern about population aging and the sustainability of the pension system.
But the political response taking shape adopts the wrong diagnosis: it aims to convince women to have more children, instead of transforming the conditions that make having children a disproportionate cost they absorb almost alone.
Goldin’s research is explicit about this: the countries that managed to stabilize their birth rates (the Scandinavians are the most cited example, but also France and Germany in certain periods) did so by combining three elements: real parental leave for men (not symbolic), accessible care infrastructure (nurseries, full-day schools), and cultural changes that revalued the paternal role at home.
Argentina has the first on paper. It lacks everything else. And it also has a public debate that, when it speaks of ‘birth rates,’ rarely mentions the word care, or the question of who does it.
My position
This is health policy and economic policy, not a cultural debate
I say this as a molecular biologist, as an MBA, and as someone who has navigated, and still navigates, the tension between global leadership and the everyday realities that such leadership rarely mentions in its presentations at Davos.
The fall in birth rates is, at its core, a problem of systemic design. Health systems, labor systems, tax systems and care systems were built on the implicit assumption that there is a woman somewhere absorbing the burden those systems do not resolve. When women decide they will not absorb that burden alone, the system goes into crisis, and blames them.
Goldin says it with the precision a Nobel affords: it is not a problem of will or of values. It is a problem of structure. And structures are changed with public policy, not with moral campaigns.
At Women in Global Health we work in 60 countries with this through-line: women’s health, including their reproductive health, their care burden, their access to work, is not a ‘gender’ issue. It is the single most powerful variable determining the economic development and the sustainability of any country’s social systems.
If we want more births, the question is not how to convince women. The question is how to redesign the social contract so that having children is not an economically irrational decision for those who carry them alone.
If we want to understand the fall in birth rates, we have to look at the man in the family, not the woman. She has already changed. The question is whether the system, and he, will catch up with her.
This article is part of a series on the intersection of health, economics and power. Next: ‘Why health carries no political cost in Argentina, and what that costs the country.’