Our country faces a very real risk of demographic stagnation in the near future, because both fertility and immigration are in speedy decline.

These trends will have unfortunate consequences. With slower population growth, we’ll see slower economic growth and less economic dynamism — as there just won’t be economic space for new firms to grow.

Many Americans are rightly worried about the trend, but the proposed solutions are often diametrically opposed: On the left, some call for increasing immigration, something the current administration is, let’s say, not keen on. On the right, we’re seeing a growing number of advocates for pro-natalist policies, some of whom deploy racially charged rhetoric. (I’m an advocate for both approaches, sans the racism.)

But there’s a tiny problem. These policy-driven solutions will fail. Even with comparatively open immigration policies, the reality is that the surplus population of our Latin American neighbors is running out. Fertility has fallen sharply in Latin America, as incomes rise, so immigration has been naturally falling and would continue to do so even if immigration policy remained unchanged. Plus, in a departure from past trends, immigrants increasingly have similar fertility rates to US natives (or even lower in the case of many Asian immigrants).

So while immigration can be a useful stopgap, it won’t bail the US out of stagnation in the long run.

The answer, therefore, may involve changing not only policies but also cultural norms — and a good place to start might be something as simple as babysitting your neighbor’s kids.

Before we get to why that’s so, let’s talk a bit more about American cultural norms surrounding childbearing and parenthood — which are, in turn, shaped by the deep structure of our modern economy.

As more years of education become necessary for economic success, childbearing is postponed. Changing sexual norms, too, lead to postponed marriage, the main driver of fertility rates.

Government policy tends not to affect fertility much

Financial incentives — such as the child tax credit, recently expanded in the Republican tax reform (an effort spearheaded by Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Mike Lee (R-UT)) — have been empirically shown to have very small effects on fertility, while the best academic literature suggests progressive policies like family leave or free child care have even smaller effects.

To actually make a substantial difference, we need to take a look at our own lives, at our collective behavior. The key to a society-wide change in fertility may not be in Washington at all but in the small decisions of individual households.

The case for fertility being culturally driven is strong. When respected cultural figures encourage childbearing, the research shows, childbearing tends to rise (as when the patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church promised to personally baptize any children families had beyond two). When respected cultural figures discourage childbearing, childbearing tends to fall (as when MTV aired shows covering teen moms in unflattering fashion). And it’s widely demonstrated that religiosity influences fertility (and probably vice versa).  

Of course, our nation’s leaders are unlikely to suddenly start speaking with one voice in favor of having more kids, we can’t order Hollywood to produce positive portrayals of parenting, and 90 percent of Americans aren’t about to convert to a religion that promotes fertility.

But here’s one small thing we can do: We can volunteer to help the parents we already know. Whether you’re a Catholic integralist planning to raise a battalion of little kids, a social activist wanting to build community solidarity, or a militant atheist aiming to undermine the material attraction of church life, you should be able to get on board with babysitting the neighbor kids.

Note that since 1991, average child care costs have risen by 180 percent, as general consumer prices have risen just 80 percent. This phenomenon is known as “Baumol’s cost disease,” after the late economist William Baumol. Basically, because US labor productivity and earnings have been rising sharply in some sectors, like tech, they bid up the price of those sectors where there has been very little innovation — like child care. Industries vulnerable to this disease tend to be dependent on human labor, and they aren’t amenable to scaling up. (The average child care worker today doesn’t monitor twice as many kids as 30 years ago, nor would we want them to.)   

Perhaps as a result, the time parents spend directly “parenting” is rising — and not just on the fun, quality-time stuff like reading together. Parents spend more time even on basics. The graph below shows average hours per week spent by parents on “physical care” of their children, per child under the age of 5, from 1965 to 2012.

Could it be that parents are simply less efficient now? Maybe. Smaller family sizes mean parents can afford to spend an extra five minutes getting their kid to eat just one more bite, and that’s not really a bad thing. But surely at least some of this is the result of less help from non-parents.

Observe that the share of non-parents who spend any time watching other people’s kids has been falling over the past 15 years.

In other words, childless people like me are becoming more and more unreliable babysitters, leaving parents out in the cold.

This is an especially unfortunate situation because there are more potential babysitters today than at any time in recorded history. We can track the number of adults with no kids under age 5 compared with the number of adults who do have a small child all the way back to 1850.

There used to be three (or even fewer!) adults with no child under 5 for every adult who did have a child under that age. But today, we have nearly 10 people with no little kids for every person who does. The upshot of that statistic ought to be that parents shouldn’t be feeling isolated or overwhelmed by child care! There’s lots of help nearby.

So why are parents shunted into market-based child care, with its explosive cost growth?

The answer is simple: cultural norms. Retirees may move to be near their grandkids, or they may move to Florida. They’re mostly doing the latter (in fairness, maybe partly so the grandkids will visit them in a nice touristic location). Parents may make an effort to live near extended family, but modern employment arrangements don’t make that easy. Voluntary intergenerational living is increasingly rare.

When facing Baumol’s cost disease, economists generally say there are two solutions: Either find a substitute-product for which productivity is increasing or innovate to create productivity. I don’t know how to make a day care twice as productive, but I do know how to help parents substitute away from market-based child care if they want to: I can volunteer to watch their kids for a Saturday, or overnight on a Tuesday.

If non-parents donated one night a month. that alone could make a substantial difference in parents’ lives

Let’s say that a mere one out of every three people with no child under the age of 5 is a reasonably competent babysitter, meaning they can keep a child alive, fed, and unharmed for 12 hours. You might wonder how often this competent subset would need to babysit to give every parent with small kids one night (or weekend day) off per week.

The answer may surprise you: just once a month. If just a third of those of us with no small children committed to watching someone else’s small children one time in a month, free of charge, we could give every parent a night off weekly.

Surely we all want to live in a society in which House of Cards or poker night is a lower priority than investing in the smallest, most vulnerable members of our society. And isn’t it obvious that we should all want to lend a hand to those citizens who make the societally essential, forward-looking choice to become parents? (After all, who will fund tomorrow’s Social Security?)

You were taken care of by friends and family for free when you were a screaming poop factory; moral reciprocity demands that favor be returned, even if you, like me, really strongly dislike screaming little poop factories.

So this weekend, you have a chance to strike a blow for the future, be a hero to a parent. Find that friend who you lost touch with once they had a kid. Call them. Offer them the chance to pick one of three nights or days when you could take their kids for at least five hours.

You can even offer to grab the Pack ’n’ Play and take their child to your house. But whatever you do, make one thing clear: You care about them, you care about their child, and you want to help.

The future depends on finding some way to keep American population growth up. If we fail, putting it plainly, the future will include insolvency of our social aid for the elderly and the poor, a permanent decline in economic dynamism, huge swaths of the country locked in intergenerational economic depression and an ever-increasing burden on women in particular, as family life becomes less compatible with a career.

A little babysitting seems a small price to pay to avert those consequences.

Lyman Stone, a Vox columnist, is a regional population economics researcher who blogs at In a State of Migration. He is also an agricultural economist at USDA. Find him on Twitter @lymanstoneky.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

President Trump’s comment about not wanting immigrants from “shithole countries” —  which he has unpersuasively denied — came in a very specific context: He was discussing with lawmakers under what conditions Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, and Honduras might be renewed.

Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, grants people fleeing specific crises in specific countries who have entered the United States without any permanent legal status the right to be to be temporarily shielded from prosecution for illegal residency. It doesn’t give them a visa or permanent status, but it does let them live and work here legally for the time being.

In the ensuing uproar, some on the right have asserted that President Trump was really making a good point, however crudely: Maybe we don’t want immigrants from poor countries, who, they assume, are low-skill immigrants. The administration is known to support a more “skills-based” immigration system, and maybe Trump was just, in a clumsy way, trying to articulate that?

Foreign countries have interpreted his remarks very straightforwardly: A joint statement by all 55 African countries included an apology and a request for an clarification of which of them, exactly, President Trump considers to be a “shithole.” Critics from the left have argued that Trump’s comments were not only offensive but ignorant because, actually, immigrants from Africa perform extremely well in the United States.

Unfortunately, the debate so far has featured a dearth of up-to-date, solid empirical work on the countries that benefit from TPS.

In fact, we have quite a lot of data on how immigrants from TPS-receiving countries (and Africa more generally) do after arriving in the US. Countries receiving TPS have, by definition, experienced a severe disaster creating large amounts of emigrants. They also are almost always very poor countries. (It is precisely because some countries are extremely unsafe, poor, and dangerous that we provide TPS.)

So how do immigrants from TPS-receiving countries do in the United States?

Most are substantially poorer than native-born Americans, though Syrians are richer. It should surprise nobody that desperate people fleeing disaster-prone countries would tend not to be the highest-earning people in the US.

However, it is worth noting that over the 2011 to 2015 period, the US poverty line was about $11,000 to $12,000 per person. In other words, for every single TPS-receiving group, average incomes were above the poverty line: The typical TPS-country immigrant is not impoverished.

Furthermore, notice the income bars of their home countries: extremely low. At one end of the tail, Somali immigrants only closed about half the income gap between Somalia and the average native-born American. At the other end, Syrians surpassed Americans by 14 percent. The average immigrant from a TPS-receiving country closed about 55 percent of the income gap between the typical US worker and their home: Their income ended up looking more like the average American than it did like the average from their home country.

True, poverty rates are fairly high for immigrants from many of these countries. But, again, it’s vital to consider some relevant benchmarks. African immigrants, for instance, are about as likely to be in poverty as are people in the states of Mississippi or New Mexico. Nicaraguans have similar poverty rates as Texas or North Carolina. Somali and Yemeni immigrants, on the other hand, do have quite high poverty rates by any metric.

But income and poverty measures are affected by lots of other variables. Some cultures prioritize family more than work outside the home; they have lower measured income because they have fewer two-income households. Different groups have different age and regional profiles, which also affects incomes. One factor that is somewhat more predictive of core “skills” for an immigrant group is its educational level.

On the whole, about 43 percent of immigrants from all African countries over the age of 30 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, versus just 29 percent of the native-born over-30 population, confirming the view that African immigrants generally are actually a higher-skilled immigrant pool. On the other hand, only about 13 percent of immigrants from TPS-receiving countries have a bachelor’s degree. However, in terms of total years of schooling, these differences are smaller: African immigrants average about 14 years of schooling, native-born Americans about 13.5 years, and TPS-receiving-countries about 10.3 years.  

But while immigrants from TPS-receiving countries may have lower education than most Americans, they represent a disproportionately well-educated subset of their co-nationals. In every case, the immigrants we receive in the United States from TPS-receiving countries are substantially better-educated than their countrymen back home.

As can be seen from the education and income data, the United States, even in its immigrant programs aimed at the most destitute of nations like TPS or the refugee program, is skimming off the best, most qualified, most capable people from developing countries. Far from getting the worst from poor countries, we really are getting some of the best.

But the question of African immigrants more broadly turns out to be an interesting one, and increasingly pressing. The United States is receiving a growing number of immigrants from Africa. African countries certainly felt targeted by President Trump’s comments, and so it’s worth exploring whether African immigrants in particular, as restrictionists might imagine, are poor, indigent, and low-skilled.

Because African population growth continues to be strong while population growth in other parts of the world slumps, there is a growing “pull” on Africans to emigrate. That will be even more true in the future as fertility continues to fall in the United States. But aside from that, incomes in Africa are rising rapidly, with more and more Africans making enough money to be able to finance the cost of immigrating to richer countries. While it may seem counterintuitive, rising incomes can actually drive higher outflows from African countries in the short run as the costs of migration become less prohibitive, although in the long run, improving home-country conditions should help migration flows balance out.

So what are these immigrants like? Are they impoverished, low-skilled people bringing with them the conflicts and troubles of their home countries, jeopardizing American well-being? Not at all! The map below shows each African country. Each country is color-coded by how much more or less money emigrants from that country earn in the United States than the typical native-born American.

Immigrants from some countries, like those in East or North Africa, do very well. Others do less well, like those in West and Central Africa. But here’s the key thing to note: There are lots of African countries where their emigrants to the United States make more money than the typical native-born American.

Turning to education, the evidence of positive selection becomes even stronger. 

Immigrants from some African countries, especially in the Horn of Africa or far Western Africa, do have lower educational attainment than native-born Americans. On the other hand, Africans from throughout East, Central, and Northern Africa have substantially better educational attainment than native-born Americans.

This isn’t because those countries are extremely well-educated, although educational levels in Africa are rapidly improving throughout most countries on the continent. It’s because the United States skims off the cream of the crop from Africa.

Dreaming about Norwegians

When President Trump tarred some countries, he also lauded one. He asked why we can’t get more immigrants from Norway. The answer, of course, is simple: Norway is a pretty good place to live! One indication of this is the data point that Norwegians in America are poorer than Norwegians in Norway.

The truth is that Scandinavians overall earn about as much in America as they would in their home countries. In other words, there’s no reason for them to go to the trouble of migrating to the United States. Back in the 1800s, when Norway was impoverished, emigration rates to the United States were extremely high. It took three or more generations for Norwegian incomes to converge to American norms, but today nobody complains about the economically backward peasant stock of Norway, with their foreign Lutheran customs like pagan-inspired Christmas trees (as used to be the case!).

The United States today, as it always has, receives a lot of immigrants from some very poor and destitute places. And yet today, as always, we succeed in integrating the vast majority of them; they become productive members of society. There are always hiccups of course, and some groups perform better than others, but on the whole, the immigrants we get from the very worst of places often end up being some of our best. African countries, and even disaster-struck countries benefiting from TPS, are no exception.

Lyman Stone, a Vox columnist, is a regional population economics researcher who blogs at In a State of Migration. He is also an agricultural economist at USDA. Find him on Twitter @lymanstoneky.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

What happens — politically, economically — when people have fewer babies? Pundits from across the political spectrum are suddenly wrestling with the question.

Derek Thompson at the Atlantic started things off by suggesting there was a “doom loop” of liberalism — a widespread trend in Western nations that should cause significant concern: Education and feminism lower fertility, and so countries turn to immigration to make up the difference in the labor force. As the number of immigrants increases, it becomes harder to integrate them, which gives rise to blowback populism.

Ross Douthat of the New York Times fired back, respectfully suggesting that secular liberal societies could incentivize fertility of native citizens by deploying some fairly minor policy tweaks, including bigger financial incentives for childbearing — and by promoting different family norms, like increased involvement in religious communities.

And now Bryce Covert, writing from a feminist perspective, has written an op-ed for the Times that tackles the issue from a slightly different angle, arguing that the Trump administration’s curtailment of access to free contraception could have serious, negative economic consequences as women shift from jobs to child-rearing.

The reality of declining fertility turns out to be quite complex. To begin with, it should be noted that while fertility declines in the 20th century were driven by a mix of improved contraception and declining desired fertility, 21st-century declines have occurred with virtually no correspondent decline in women’s’ desired number of children: Women in America continue to report wanting to have more children than they in fact have, and the number has not declined very much in this century; indeed, they desire well above replacement-level amounts of children.

But we don’t make it easy for them to act on that desire. Far from a simple story of secular societies liberating women from the onerousness of child-bearing, declining fertility in post-industrial societies is also a story of disappointed hopes. (The story in developing countries is quite different.) The shortfall in fertility is growing. Now these “missing kids” are becoming nearly as numerous as unintended births.

Higher fertility would be good, but it’s hard to achieve

If we take the expressed desires of American families seriously, and especially the desires of American women, then we need to find a way to help them achieve their goals. Financial incentives, it turns out, are not highly effective. Studies find that policies that encourage parental leave or offer financial subsidies to parents require lots of money for small fertility gains. Likewise, many conservatives wrongly believe that banning abortion or restricting contraceptives might boost fertility, but the best evidence suggests such restrictions have at best weak impacts, at least in developed countries.

Cultural forces, meanwhile, can be extremely powerful but are difficult to engineer, especially in big, culturally pluralistic societies like the United States. Douthat’s preferred prescription (and my own), that people should be more religious, may have a very limited impact. Even societies with high religiosity, such as in Africa or much of Eastern Europe, have seen falling birth rates. This decline in religious countries (including where religiosity is stable or rising!) is surprising, because religious groups tend to place a high priority on family, children, and multi-generational living. But the fertility-suppressing forces of modern economies appear to be even more influential.

In a low population growth society, inequality is more easily entrenched, parental wealth more easily passed on to heirs, new startups are less able to expand rapidly, and declining generational cohort sizes reduce the need for certain classes of labor (child care and education most notably). The logic is not entirely intuitive, but a declining population means the employed share of the population must rise to maintain existing economic functions, and productivity per worker must rise to maintain output. Yet for more than a decade productivity growth in the developed world has been low and the employed population share has been stagnant or falling.

A low population growth environment means the economic pie grows slower too — which means, in the long run, that wealth consolidates. And in the very long run, we miss out on potential Mozarts, Washingtons, and Edisons.

It shouldn’t be immigration versus fertility. Let’s increase both.

Both Thompson and Douthat rightly see a threat in low population growth, but each focuses on just one side of the problem. Douthat, for example, would have us all have more babies to avoid the need for immigrants.

But so long as American values of pluralism, integration, and personal liberty persist, we will need immigrants to fill a vital role in our cultural milieu. Plus, boosting fertility is going to have to be a long-run play: In the short run, US population growth persistently undershoots forecasts. Even if you’d prefer Douthat’s approach, in the abstract, we need immigration to rise from its presently quite low levels to stave off short-run population strains.

No serious population growth agenda for America can lean on just fertility to accomplish its goals, at least not if it wants to avoid serious short-run economic crises and preserve traditional American values, which are inseparable from openness to immigrants.

Thompson, meanwhile — while arguing that integration of immigrants gets harder as births make up a smaller and smaller share of population growth — skips over the sources of those low birth rates. He devotes no time to considering whether, perhaps, we might benefit from making some political, economic, and cultural adjustments to empower women and families to have the kids they want to have. Given how dire his forecast is, it is genuinely perplexing that he basically ignores pro-natal policies.

What we really need is a political movement in favor of population growth from all sources. We need policies that remove fiscal penalties for marriage and encourage marital stability, that recognize the service parents do for society, and that subsidize childbearing and child-rearing accordingly — even if, on their own, such policies won’t restore us to stable fertility levels. We need new cultural norms that make our society more family-friendly. And we need cultural leaders to set an example, have kids, and promote childbearing and parenting.

Proposals for a pro-population growth agenda

What kinds of policies might help? Replacing the estate tax with a per-heir “inheritance” tax would encourage wealthy people to have children and also to break up their estates, killing two birds with one stone. Expanding existing tax credits for children, and consolidating complex child tax provisions into one larger benefit, would help ease parents’ budgets — even more so if refundability were expanded (or if credits came by monthly check).

And we could get even more creative: Should rent control be adjusted for family size? Should bigger families get to cut in lines? Should minivans with car seats get special parking places akin to those for disabled people? Should families with at least four kids be given a public honor or award and a meeting with their senator or governor? Many countries have tried such social or cultural policies: Sometimes they have an effect, often they don’t, but as part of a wide basket of political and social changes, they may be useful.

Here’s an idea that’s even more out there. Since traditional agricultural societies enabled parents to “capture” the economic rents of childbearing because families shared income, the economic returns to childbearing were large. This remains true in developing countries where family networks share incomes, including through migrant remittances, but it’s not true in America. We can fix that. We could set a small payroll tax on each person, and allocate it to their parent (with exclusions for cases of abuse or neglect, of course). Such a “parental dividend” would alter the long-run financial calculation of parenting.

We might also consider higher Social Security payouts, in their retirement years, for people who had more children.

And let’s not forget “personal” policies. If getting ahead in your industry requires happy-hour drinks three nights a week, that’s unfriendly to families and may be preventing your female colleagues from having the family they want. Check your childlessness privilege. If you never volunteer to babysit your friends’ kids, but expect to benefit from their Social Security taxes, you’re a societal free-rider.

If your social activities require your friends to get babysitters because your house isn’t kid-friendly, then make your house kid-friendly. There’s no way to legislate such behavior; that would be totalitarian. But we can each voluntarily change our behavior.

Meanwhile, we need to continue our traditional American immigration policy, meaning an open hand to anyone who will work hard and integrate into American life. We should accept more immigrants, even as we stiffen requirements to learn English. We should accept more refugees, even as we prioritize pro-integration resettlement policies like requiring refugees to participate in native-majority, English-language-using social organizations.

Contra the Trump administration, we should expand the “diversity” visa category massively, seeking immigrants from unusual locations who, the research suggests, integrate faster: But we should screen them for personality characteristics that indicate personal flexibility and preference for diversity, which the research also suggests boosts integration.

More babies, more immigrants, more integration. This will yield an America that is larger, stronger, richer, more diverse, and more American than ever.

Lyman Stone, a Vox columnist, is a regional population economics researcher who blogs at In a State of Migration. He is also an agricultural economist at USDA. Find him on Twitter @lymanstoneky.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com

It’s time for a new emphasis on localism in American politics.

Across the political spectrum, Americans are realizing that they have less and less in common with their geographically distant countrymen, and this is playing out in political disputes: Supporters of the Trump administration want to crack down on “sanctuary cities,” while residents of those cities view it as imperative to resist aggressive anti-illegal-immigration policies they voted against. Democrats in Washington view Medicaid expansion as a crucial initiative, while some red-state politicians want no part of it.

The disagreements about how to be governed are growing. As long as this polarization persists, we can either ratchet up an increasingly irreconcilable debate about how to govern ourselves together, or we can simply do fewer things as one nation, and devolve power to local levels.

As we pursue this goal, a crucial thinker to consult is G.K. Chesterton, the British Catholic novelist, poet, and polemicist from the early 20th century. Aside from being an enormously entertaining writer, Chesterton was also an innovative political figure, deeply committed to the defense of liberalism — but also, as far as American politics would be concerned, an ideological conservative. Indeed, he’s a hero to many American conservatives, who have long had an Anglophilic strain.

Along with his friend Hillaire Belloc, Chesterton articulated an economic and political philosophy called “distributism” which argued for the distribution of economic and political decision-making to very local levels. To Chesterton and Belloc, this meant local control of government, opposition to imperialism, fierce criticism of big business and the monopolies of the day, and a ferocious patriotism (which, disappointingly, drifted into anti-Semitism at several points in Chesterton’s life, although he died an early, ardent critic of Nazism).

This is a confusing time for localism in the United States, as President Donald Trump’s rise has blurred the traditional lines of division. Devolution of powers in America is usually associated with conservatives, who tend to champion the rights of states. Progressives look on these arguments with some disdain, seeing “states’ rights” as code for white supremacy.

Never mind that the Confederacy proved to have an even lower regard for states’ rights than the Union (for example, implementing the first national draft in American history), and never mind that the Southern states actually demanded an unprecedented Federal veto of states’ rights regarding fugitive slaves (whom Northern states were forbidden to protect). In general, however, it has nonetheless been widely believed that devolution of powers will mean a rollback of progressive aims.

The left rediscovers the benefits of devolving power to states and cities

But today, some on the left have begun to make common cause with conservatives and argue for devolution: not as much to states as to cities, where progressives hold most political power. But conservatives have balked: As blue cities have responded to Federal gridlock by experimenting with progressive policies at the municipal level, red states have intervened, passing laws to interdict local efforts on topics like the minimum wage, on allowing transgender people to choose the bathroom they want to use, and other subjects.

The result is a confusing hodgepodge, and probably a recipe for getting nothing done. But the crucial insight of distributism, as Chesterton described it, is that decentralization of power requires more than just devolution of a few powers here or there, but a society-wide commitment to transferring power, authority, and responsibility back down the totem pole. A diverse society can sustain itself peacefully when its members are committed to solving problems as locally as possible, involving higher levels of government only when absolutely necessary.

A few examples may help to clarify what distributism might mean for America. Some kinds of local control seem intuitively appealing across the political spectrum. Rhode Island is very politically unlike Texas, and also economically, culturally, demographically, and geographically different. Given those differences, most people grasp that there’s no reason why those states should have identical laws regarding hunting or land use, or infrastructure strategies.

Where things get much trickier is where a more fundamental issue like abortion is concerned. On this issue in particular, many progressives and conservatives alike hope to achieve a victory that is far more total — more sweeping and national — than I think likely or desirable. That is, conservatives and progressives both seem to think that we need a federal rule about abortion. But we don’t, and indeed such a rule poisons the well of national politics. The reason is blindingly obvious: There is no federal agreement about abortion.

Forcing local majorities to live under laws they cannot change and which they abhor as contrary to all morality is a recipe for political disaster — a disaster we’ve seen play out since Roe v. Wade. Legalized abortion in red states has poisoned the entire political discourse. Millions of voters, myself included, condition their entire vote on whom a candidate will appoint to the Supreme Court; not much else matters. No matter my opposition to President Trump, my vote would never in a million years have gone to Clinton; I’ll cast a futile vote for Evan McMullin even if it leads indirectly to Trump’s victory and the death of the republic before signing my name to genocide, and I am far from alone in this kind of thinking.

And of course, if abortion had been prohibited by the court in blue states, we’d have seen the same effect in reverse. Progressives who see themselves as defending the most basic right of all, the right to bodily security and self-determination, would find their entire political discourse dominated by this one toxic debate.

Letting some states be “wrong” on important moral questions can be the correct political decision

Ideologues on both sides will assert that, where highly charged moral issues are concerned, federalism is terrible: If abortion is wrong, it’s wrong everywhere. If same-sex marriage is right, it’s right everywhere. This is true in abstract moral terms, but it is not true in political terms, and the two are not the same, because it is immoral to compel a people to accept a set of laws with which they do not agree and which they cannot readily change.

Provided that state-level policies do not usurp roles designated as exclusively federal either by congressional statute or the Constitution, what California does is no skin off my back. I am not morally responsible for California’s policies in the same sense in which I am morally responsible for the United States’ policies or for my home state’s policies. And because I’m not responsible for them, my anger over what California does need be no more extreme or politically actionable than my anger over what Saudi Arabia or the Netherlands does. How these places govern themselves may sadden me, I may abhor it, I may sometimes argue with locals about it, but I do not need to vote for candidates running on a platform of forcing them to be more like me.

To arrive at my preferred model, where far more political questions are solved locally, would require a large-scale reworking of many federal laws, and a reconsideration of many time-honored Supreme Court cases. You can’t get state- or local-level management of abortion, immigration, same-sex marriage, or Social Security without radical changes to federal statutes and, in many cases, to constitutional jurisprudence. There is plenty of precedent for such an approach, and it didn’t always result in “conservative” local results: states were beginning to legalize abortion before Roe, and in the absence of a federal rule, it’s likely that the majority of Americans would continue to reside in states where abortion was legal in most cases. Until 1906, immigration and naturalization was largely governed by the states.

Even if I haven’t convinced you that a more distributed political economy sounds like a wonderful future, it may still be the best possible future, given other options.

The basic rules about how we allocate federal power are not going to change soon. The Electoral College is not going away, and the asymmetry in state populations is likely, if anything, to increase. Despite the wishes of some reformers, there will be no major shift to proportional representation anytime soon, there will be no redrawing of state lines. Barring violent upheaval, the current system is likely to persist for a long time, complete with its baked-in bias toward gridlock, presidential empowerment, and polarization.

So I am willing to make a trade. I will give California vastly greater fiscal capacity to implement socialized medicine by hacking off a portion of Federal income tax rates and programmatic spending and designating it for states to use as they see fit. I will give Vermont far greater constitutional liberty to implement whatever pro-diversity policies they think are useful; I won’t object. And in exchange, Kentucky is allowed to ban abortion, and Texas can use its reallocated federal fiscal capacity to lower its tax burden (and its portion of federal program generosity) still further.

Progressives may worry that this would lead to red states instituting the very most extreme versions of their policies. Say we hand over 25 percent of most Federal domestic programs to the states. Perhaps Florida will cut Social Security and Medicare by 25 percent, abolish controls on pollution, forbid abortion, ban affirmative action, and refuse to recognize same sex marriage. What do you suppose will happen next?

When local politicians are freed to do what they want, they have to face the practical — and electoral — consequences

Well, there’d be local pushback. Florida’s many retirees would probably object on the Social Security and Medicare front. Indeed, older people make up a large share of conservatives: Will they cut their own benefits? Draconian changes seem implausible. Suppose pollution problems grow more severe: Will Florida’s many businesses that depend on clean beaches and Everglades tourism not complain? Florida might relax its environmental standards some; but surely the result will be that the Republican Party suffers electoral losses soon after?

And if, extremely implausibly, there’s no effective political blowback and suddenly women can’t get abortions, African-American people can’t get as many jobs, air quality declines, and same-sex marriages aren’t recognized — well, women, African Americans, families with kids, and LGBTQ people will leave Florida.

They’ll move to places with, in their view, better governance, and those places will acquire more political and economic power. Allowing both parties the power to pursue a more complete vision of their platform at the state and local level will make everybody happier, but also, after a few elections, devolution would compel both parties to articulate more disciplined and realistic platforms. Gridlock and powerlessness are the mother’s milk of extremism. To get sane politics, we need to let some extreme policies be tested and experience the consequences.

In this vision, we conservatives cannot forget the cities. The philosophical and practical rationale for devolved power is that problems are best solved by people who have local information and who understand and support local political priorities, with a minimum of hierarchy and intermediation. That’s conservativism, and distributism, at its best. Any grand bargain to devolve power would have to involve federal devolution to states and localities as well as red states taking a more hands-off approach to their blue cities.

And that’s a key problem with conservative opposition to sanctuary cities, and similar local liberal redoubts: As long as conservatives support state preemption of localities whenever localities embrace liberal causes, they will have no credibility in advocating for devolution of powers on other matters. Sure, states are constitutionally protected entities while cities are not, but that’s fairly thin ice to stand on given that the 10th Amendment reserves powers to “the States respectively, or to the people.” The intention was not to specially empower states at the expense of localities, but to specifically empower everybody at the expense of Washington.

True federalism is painful. It requires that we allow our neighbors the right of self-government, even when they do things we believe to be horrible.

In arguing that there must be limits to federalism, advocates on both sides often refer to the example of slavery. And yes, there absolutely must always be some guardrails around our 50 republics, ensuring they do not descend into barbarism; in particular, we must ensure a republican form of government, as the Constitution requires but as the Supreme Court historically refused to enforce.

However, we must also remember that we did not end slavery simply by legislation. We ended slavery at the cost of the Civil War, a war that killed as many as one out of every nine American men alive in 1860, and injured or maimed another one of those nine.

Ending slavery was worth the cost, of course. So if you’re willing to pay such a price of blood to win today’s political debates, if you think that bill’s not too high, then, by all means, carry on solving problems through centralization. But for those of us who prefer domestic tranquility, federalism is the answer.

Lyman Stone, a Vox columnist, is a regional population economics researcher who blogs at In a State of Migration. He is also an agricultural economist at USDA. Find him on Twitter @lymanstoneky

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