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Why has fertility plummeted in the US and other rich countries?

Declining fertility is the shiny new crisis we're all supposed to be losing sleep over, so I've been reading a bit about it lately. Here in the US, fertility looks like this:

The basic state of things is that after the Baby Boom fertility was flat and stable until 2007, when it suddenly began a (now) 17-year decline. Why? What happened in 2007?

For a start, let's break things down by age:

The downward inflection in 2007 is only for women in their twenties. Teen births have been going down since the early '90s, thanks to the end of the lead era, and show no particular shift in 2007. Older women haven't experienced a fertility decline at all.

Now, one thing we know is that fertility is tied to marriage. People are more likely to have their desired number of children if they're married, and the age of marriage keeps going up. Increasing numbers of women aren't married until their late twenties, which might explain the fertility decline in that age group. Let's look:

The age of first marriage has been rising ever since 1970, so it seems like a poor guess at an explanation for something that started in 2007.

So what was it? One obvious possibility is the Great Recession, but that hardly seems likely. It might have dampened fertility for a few years, but then it would have bounced back during the recovery. Right?

That's certainly what I'd think, except for one thing:

The Great Recession was a uniquely devastating event. Even the Great Depression, though deeper and longer, had only a temporary effect. By 1940 we were back to trend growth and stayed there. Nothing—not the go-go '60s or the Reagan recession or the dotcom boom—pushed the economy off its trend growth by more than a hair or for more than a few years.

Until 2007. During the Great Recession the economy declined by a lot and never made it back. It's been nearly two decades and we're still nowhere near making it back.

We've never before had a recession with a permanent effect. This makes it at least plausible that it had an acute impact on people in their twenties that's continued ever since. They're permanently more wary about their future and less likely to have kids until they're financially confident—and by that time the old biological clock is starting to rein in their options.

Of course, fertility has been dropping everywhere in the rich world and beyond. Other countries don't precisely fit the 2007 theory—you'd hardly expect them to—but they're not that far off:

What other possibilities are there? If you squint a bit you could say that the fertility decline actually started around 2010 and social media is to blame. I'm pretty skeptical of this, but it does have the virtue of being a permanent thing, which fits the evidence of an ongoing decline.

Anything else?

112 thoughts on “Why has fertility plummeted in the US and other rich countries?

  1. dotkaye

    the 'crisis' is a right wing propaganda operation driven by racism, xenophobia and misogynism, that is all.
    The declining birth rate as society gets richer is one of the best documented and studied phenomena in the social sciences. The US was an outlier for some time due to its horrible healthcare systems. The recent drop in fertility rates is:
    1. tiny in historical perspective
    2. driven entirely by lower teen pregnancy rates

    Aaron Bady covers this in detail,
    https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-parenting-panic/

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