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LS Lyman Stone Lyman Stone Demographer and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, writing on fertility decline, birth rates and the cost of raising ch...

“We live in a world that has a magical force that makes money called the stock market. So all you've got to do is when a baby is born in your country, you put some money in an investment fund, maybe $5,000, maybe $10,000. And then when they have a baby, they get that account at its matured value. … You very quickly realize, oh, I can give you $100,000 baby bonus per kid for like 0.4% of GDP spend on the front end.”

Freakonomics Radio · Ideas & Essays · November 2026

“We live in a world that has a magical force that makes money called the stock market. So all you've got to do is when a baby is born in your country, you put some money in an investment fund, maybe $5,000, maybe $10,000. And then when they have a baby, they get that account at its matured value. … You very quickly realize, oh, I can give you $100,000 baby bonus per kid for like 0.4% of GDP spend on the front end.” — Lyman Stone, Freakonomics Radio

Context

Stone had just estimated that buying replacement fertility with cash checks would cost about 4% of GDP. Asked how else it could be paid for, he proposes seeding an investment account at birth that the child collects only when they have a baby of their own.

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Transcript

Freakonomics Radio Around 31:45 into the episode
Lyman Stone

…fertility would be like $150,000 check for every baby. Like the baby's born, here's $150,000. I would not advise doing that for like a lot of reasons. It's something like 4% of GDP is what you pay for it. So then the question is, could you pay for it another way? And the answer is yes, you could.

Stephen Dubner

Oh, how's that?

Lyman Stone

We live in a world that has a magical force that makes money called the stock market. So all you've got to do is when a baby is born in your country, you put some money in an investment fund, maybe $5,000, maybe $10,000. And then when they have a baby, they get that account at its matured value. And by the way, if you marry another person who is also born in the same country and has that benefit, then you both get it. You very quickly realize, oh, I can give you $100,000 baby bonus per kid for like, you know, like 0.4% of GDP spend on the front end.

Stephen Dubner

What's this called and where has it been tried?

Lyman Stone

No one has tried it. There's a proposal to do it in Finland right now called Volvo Sampo, which is a delightful Finnish word that sounds like some elvish technology. And it actually is a reference to the Kalevala, this Sampo device that Vinemoyen uses. But if you're not into Finnish mythology, it…

Stephen Dubner

What do you think of the Trump version of funding for babies born?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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“Globally, if both members of a couple work from home at least one day a week, you see they have a third of a child extra. In the US, that's almost half a child extra. These are really huge effects.” — Nick Bloom, Freakonomics Radio “The idea that this is still women just delaying childbearing gets harder and harder to buy with each year. Right now, it's like 50% of 30-year-old women have not initiated childbearing.” — Melissa Kearney, Freakonomics Radio