Before the Fertility Panic, There Was Gary Becker (opens in new tab)

In September 1999, in Madrid, Gary Becker gave a lecture with an almost disarming title: “Economics and the Family.” It reads today like a message in a bottle from a period when the fertility decline was already visible, already measurable, already reshaping the age structure of rich societies—yet long before the topic became the permanent fixture of podcasts, policy memos, and cultural debates that it is now.