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?
Young women today were children in the 1980's and 90's, when their mothers had to do it all. They watched their mom's have careers. And clean the house. And take care of all the doctor's appointments and parent-teacher meetings. And sacrifice their careers to stay home with sick children and elderly parents.
And along the way, young men did not step up, at least not enough, to make them worth the bother. They are like having a child.
Now obviously this isn't always the story, but it is enough of the story to explain the diminishing fertility rate in first-world countries.
You want babies? Stop making it so goddamned difficult to be a mother. Be better men.
🎯
+1
A related argument is made in a recent paper by Claudia Goldin.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w33311
I have seen so very much of this kind of commentary, and it always leaves out a crucial part of the problem: successful men have always been able to expect that the women they marry will take on the "second shift" conscientiously and seriously, but successful women have no reason to expect the same of men. Accordingly, why wouldn't a successful woman at least want a man who'll pull his own weight financially? She can't realistically expect him to do so domestically.
Girls are still raised from childhood to take housekeeping and caregiving seriously, even if nowadays they are also being taught to aspire to educational, career and financial success. Boys are still raised from childhood to know, from very early on, that housekeeping and caregiving tasks are unworthy and degrading to males. Boys are never expected to set the table, wash the dishes, help with laundry, take care of the baby, learn to cook or clean, etc.; rather, they are expected to "help" around the house only with specifically male-identified chores like lawnmowing or taking in the garbage cans.
A man who wants a "TradWife" and can afford to support her has every reason to expect that she will keep up her end of the bargain -- not that all stay-home wives do so, but the cultural expectation is there for a reason.
A successful woman who marries a starving artist might be very happy with him, provided he spends his stay-home husband days combining his painting or writing with meticulously cleaning their home, cooking good meals, caring for the small children (not playing video games while the kids are parked in front of TV cartoons) and doing the laundry, complete with separating out the whites and folding everything when it's dry. But what reasonable expectation does she have that a lower-earning man will actually do those things, without resentment or feeling emasculated?
A high-salaried man who works all day and comes home to a well-kept house, a nice dinner and happy, cared-for kids is getting a fair deal. A high-salaried woman who works all day and comes home to heaps of dirty laundry, unwashed dishes, comatose kids in front of the TV and her "stay-home hubby" on the couch with his Playstation is not.
That sounds just like men not stepping up, tho.
Some families are like that, but not all of them. I know several married men who do their fair share without complaint. Some guys are stuck in the past but plenty of others are embracing the future. There is hope!
My kids are young men and women: 30, 28, 26. They were babies in the late nineties.
You do understand that in 2007, all of them weren't in their 20s, either, right?
+10
👍
"They're permanently more wary about their future and less likely to have kids"
I hadn't thought of that. Anecdotally I see it and think you are right. This bears investigating.
Nailed it in one post 😄
Besides the Great Recession, add wars returning home thousands of amputees and PTSD victims, and the increasing political power of a party selling hate, denial, pollution, homophobia and racism.
Decreasing Fertility? Gee, who could have seen that coming.
1. Educated people feel they must invest more in their kids. You buy a lot fewer Mercedes than Chevys.
2. Uneducated people have access to birth control.
3. Women are no longer willing to trust that a man will provide for them and their children.
4. Thanks to the destruction of labor unions, men are no longer single-handedly able to provide for a family.
5. Housing, health care, and higher education are expensive.
6. Middle-class people don’t want to live with four kids in a 3BR, 1 BA 1,200 square foot house.
7. Without a huge network of stay-at-home moms, the alternative (day care or nanny) has become increasingly unaffordable. And grandmothers are no longer stay-at-homes in their 50s. They’re retirees in their 70s. Even if they haven’t moved to Florida or Arizona, they’re not a reliable source of child care.
Close friends (she was a Microsoft executive, he was a former teacher who became a stay-at-home dad) said their neighborhood had lots of kids, most of whom were attended to by their immigrant (Chinese or Indian) grandmothers. These may be the only families who can reproduce the conditions of the 1950s.
8. By the time women have completed their education and found the right husband, they’re fortunate to have two kids by the time they are 40. Very few will have four. Or six.
9. Others?
The grandmother thing is spot on, and it’s in part driven by age of marriage and childbirth. When I was born my mom was 23, and my grandmother was 40 and had the energy to help. My SIL is about to have her first; she’s 35 and her mother is 65 and has zero interest in dealing with a baby, and I don’t blame her. 65 is not 40, even if people are healthier now, and she does not have the energy to help out much with an infant.
Also Grandmother's often don't live near their grandchildren.
I'm old, no grandchildren (yet) and I would not want responsibility for an infant now, though I'd be fine with an older child.
My own childrens grandmother's lived a 5 hour drive away and a six hour flight away; they were not much a part of their grandchildren's lives.
I was a stay-at-home mom because both me and my eldest born are highly neurodivergent. In my case, lighting in most buildings gave me severe migraine. But I always worked from home at something; often organizing big community projects.
The lack of stay-at-home mothers today comes with a loss of volunteer labor that makes neighborhoods better places to live, though older women seem to pick up some of the slack (probably because they're not full-time babysitters for their distant grandchildren).
This last observation is so true. Empty nesters and young retireds are the backbone of neighborhood organizations, as long as the meetings are held in the evening.
These items seem plausible reasons to have fewer children, but none of them point to a precipitous fertility fall starting around 2007.
2007 is when the morning after pill went OTC.
That’s definitive enough for me.
All the other arguments are why a woman would want to take a morning after pill, which is definitely cheaper and easier then an abortion.
2007 is when the morning after pill went OTC. That’s definitive enough for me.
Yes...that one makes sense. But the post I was responding to (which is impossible to discern given the shittiness of this commenting software) didn't include that one.
The economy collapsed and never recovered for anyone but the top 10%. And every one of those trends accelerated.
Seems a stretch. You really think zero Americans in the 70th-89th percentiles aren't doing better than they were eighteen years ago?
Just plain false. *Median real* household income is up 15% since the Great Recession.
Just ask the St Louis Fed.
Also, perhaps check the rate of female full-time employment.
Kevin's obsession with trend lines is out of control again. The Real GDP Per Capita trend is presumably exponential, but what natural law dictates that the the economy should grow in this way? And why would that affect fertility? As Kevin himself has mentioned before, the overall correlation between personal wealth and fertility is negative - being poor did not prevent people from having lots of children in the past.
Kevin doesn't mention birth control. How have the availability of it and attitudes toward it changed? I think that there have been changes in who makes the decisions about this - males vs. females - although I don't see offhand any exact correspondence with the recent decline in fertility.
If you do think that economic factors are important, then total GDP is probably the wrong measure. Real wages
https://www.skeptometrics.org/BLS_B8_Min_Pov.png
took a terrible dive in the 70's and 80's, which probably forced many women to take jobs (not "careers") out of the home to maintain family standard of living, which would surely be discouraging for having more children. Kevin's fertility rate graph shows no decrease at that time, although this graph obviously does not correct for the changing age distribution of the reproducing population. Although real wages have not grown as fast as GDP/cap since the 90's, there was no decrease in rate of growth at the Great Recession.
By the way the Real GDP plot would probably be more informative with a log vertical scale. The linear scale tends to make older trends and changes disappear.
Your two comments contradict each other. But I prefer this one.
Oh, come on, skep, GDP/capita is driven by average hours worked, which hasn’t changed much since the 40-hour week became the norm, and productivity growth, which has been positive and pretty steady, with a few artifacts. And exponential growth is exactly what will happen because productivity growth compounds.
Of course most things like GDP will be exponential, but what is the exact equation that Kevin uses? By "this way" I meant that equation, not the exponential nature. Plotting exponential growth on a linear scale tends to obscure deviations from any such equation except for those in the recent past.
Not that big a mystery. Plan B was approved for OTC sales on 8/24/06. OTC Plan B started shipping to pharmacies in November.
Pregnancies started dropping in 2007.
There should be actual data on this somewhere - sales OTC vs prescription.
I think that chart is the data you’re looking for. Much easier to get the morning after pill at a drugstore then make a doctors appointment. How many accidentally pregnant women do you think have that kind of money?
This is nonsensical, the number of unplanned pregnancies didn't suddenly drop. Abortion was already available, if not as good.
You think abortion is as easy as the morning after pill?
Look at the only category that didn’t drop, 35-39 who most likely wanted the pregnancy.
That is a very good theory. I wonder when similar drugs were released in the other charted here.
Given the large increases in income and wealth inequality, I don't think GDP per capita provides any useful metric at all. Didn't almost all of the post recession recovery go to the top 1%? So per capita the US recovered, sure, but for most of the population, not so much
Social media made it possible for women to connect to and trade stories with each other all across America, and at all socioeconomic levels, and they learned that men are generally shitty spouses and fathers everywhere at all income and education levels? So once there was no hope of finding A Better Man anywhere, women noped out of marriage and having kids?
Social media also made it possible to be constantly bombarded by stories about Everything Going To Hell Everywhere With No Prospect Of Improving, including things like daycare costs outstripping wages year over year with no end in sight and kids facing gunfire everywhere they might go with no abatement. Since most people don’t consciously want to have kids who have futures worse than their own, people consciously decided to use more birth control until they see Permanent Signs Of Things Getting Better, which never happens on social media anymore because Outrage Always Gains More Clicks/Shares/Revenue and Republicans went full jihad on any effort to improve the lives of regular people during the Obama years?
Honestly, I’m a 47yo man and I hear all the time from the (few) friends my age who do have kids and they’re all like “I wouldn’t have done this if I knew the 21st century was going to be like this.” Eventually that sinks in early enough to affect birth rates.
I disagree emphatically that men are shitty spouses. Some of them are, to be sure, but plenty of women are awful spouses.
Women take a massive career hit when they start having children, their overall earnings drop and now they have to balance a marriage, children, and a career. It's a daunting task. Maybe that trade off is worth it, maybe it isn't. At some point the kids fledge and you've lost years of professional development and you still have a couple of decades left before retirement - with no way to make that lost time up.
The retrograde misogynists over on the other team would chime in here that a woman's only real job is bearing children - like biology is some kind of limiting disability. Just because you CAN do it doesn't mean you have to. It could also be said that the only job of men is to impregnate (sit down, Elon, I'm not talking to you) based on biology.
Drum is fitting curves again and as usual there is no explanation of why this curve is better than any of the other curves that one could fit. And the y axis should be on a log scale.
Just one more thought: does anyone have any idea why NOW, of all times, when the population of humans on Planet Earth has surpassed 8 BILLION INDIVIDUALS, it is suddenly some kind of crisis that More Babbies aren't being born?
I don't know about any of you guys, but I am WAY more concerned about the population sizes of African elephants, pangolins, Amur tigers and Monarch butterflies. Seems to me that we've got plenty of humans.
The problem is that modern capitalism relies on an ever expanding pool of customers to grow revenue. Additionally, the other problem is that it relies on taxing workers to pay for the old people. Fewer workers means money has to come from somewhere else to take care of the old people - who are a very large voting block and will actually show up at the polls.
And that's what immigration is for!
(Oh, oops -- I'm probably not being sufficiently respectful to racist morons who agree with Dumpf that immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of 'Murka.)
Then this will force us to find a system besides capitalism.
Immigration would handle this simply.
But most people don’t want to emigrate. They want to live peacefully and prosperously in their own country.
Immigration is a sign of trauma, not success.
How does this capitalism thing work if all the jobs are being done by AI and robots?
I think this will come about more gradually than AI optimists like Kevin think. We’ll have time to work on the system that will succeed the present one. Not that long ago 80% of the working population were engaged in agriculture, now I think it’s less than 2%. I don’t think our great-great-grandparents could have imagined such a change.
Obviously, the problem is that not enough white babies are being born.
Because the 11 kids born to a mother in Gaza won’t pay your Social Security benefits.
it is suddenly some kind of crisis that More Babbies aren't being born?
It isn't sudden. Global population growth peaked in the 1960s, and has been slowing down ever since, with an increasing number of countries actually shrinking.
(1) Once upon a time overpopulation was probably the biggest problem facing humanity.
(2) Thankfully, the slowdown in human population growth means this threat is fading, and all the demographic projections now point to both a continuing slowdown, and a plateau within four or five decades (followed by a gradually accelerating decline in the planet's human population). On balance this is obviously a good thing.
(3) Nonetheless, widespread population shrinkage is a thorny challenge, and is causing problems that are difficult to meet, in a growing number of problems.
Al three can be true.
Just to be clear: there is a slow down in growth.
That's like the slow down in inflation.
There are still more than 8 billion people, and the 'slow down' happened in the decade we went from 7 to 8 billion. Not the 20 years before that it took to go from 6 to 7 billion, not the hundreds of years it took to go from five to six billion souls.
Human growth is sort of like Al Gore's carbon curve, and once you're up there on the handle of the hockey stick, you've probably already lost the game.
There are still more than 8 billion people, and the 'slow down' happened in the decade we went from 7 to 8 billion. Not the 20 years before that it took to go from 6 to 7 billion
Not so. Look it up: the rate of human population growth in the modern era peaked in the 1960s. Since then we've seen a reduction in the rate of growth every subsequent decade. Even in absolute numbers humanity's decade-by-decade expansion is slowing (we peaked way back in the 1980s, believe it or not).
I'm happy this is the case! But it is the case, and in my view therefore makes "population explosion" alarmism very much outdated.
If anything, forecasts have mostly underestimated the slowdown in global population growth, which suggests to me we may reach our plateau (and then start declining) sooner than many of the projections predict.
Mind you, this is undoubtedly a good "problem" to have. But managing this slowdown (and eventual decline) will be a big challenge, especially at the level of the nation-state.
https://theconversation.com/global-population-growth-is-now-slowing-rapidly-will-a-falling-population-be-better-for-the-environment-235781
Elon is worried that there aren’t enough white babies and he keeps posting about it.
Your comparison with Great Depression leaves out one important thing - there was no birth control then. Of course birth rates rebounded once the men were home from war, people started having getting married and having sex again.
You REALLY need to watch Tom Nicholas breakdown of the subject.
https://youtu.be/J4Xhx4BH-qA?si=_pqIXeDxIb2kur_M
It's a combination of money issue, housing issue, career issue and people just not wanting a lot of children. They want to do their own thing.
This isn't going to change short of a world wide take over by misogynists forcing women into baby servitude (don't go there), so the world is going to have to learn how to tax corporations and the wealthy to pay for the old people.
“This isn't going to change short of a world wide take over by misogynists forcing women into baby servitude (don’t go there)…”
Too late. They’ve been working on it since at least Monday.
“…so the world is going to have to learn how to tax corporations and the wealthy to pay for the old people.”
Haha never gonna happen. Corporations will get Soylent Green legalized before they submit to higher taxes.
That’s what tumbrels are for …
Now THAT is an exciting reminder. Perhaps we can manufacture some in the shape of a cell phone, in honor of the riders in the carts?
Even if misogynists don't take over the world, global population decline may eventually get us to the point where the division of labor needed to sustain a modern, high-tech economy becomes impossible, modern products including birth control become unavailable, and women lose the ability to avoid having children. I read an article saying that Venezuela's economic collapse has left women without birth control, leading to a lot of unintended pregnancies. I hope it won't come to that... maybe robot nannies can save us?
The thing is, fertility is much worse in South Korea and China than here, and they have quite a different life. You have to wonder about this because the conscious choice to have a child has to battle with our hormonal/instinctive desires to procreate.
Some species will simply keep multiplying till they exhaust the food supply then there is a population crash. Many species seem to be able to moderate the urge to procreate in response to overcrowding.
In South Korea there seems to be an actual war between men and women leading to a fertility rate of about 0.78 while in China it is about 1.18. In the US the overall rate is about 1.78.
I wouldn't put this all on subcultural and psychosocial trends and determinant, actual fertility is down too (sperm counts), apparently due in part to a toxic stew of unregulated chemicals and microplastics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_infertility_crisis
+1
+1 from me, too. It's just one more way that the awl bidness and it's offshoots are poisoning us, every other species and the carrying capacity of the planet itself.
I call BS. Your trendline in the GDP/capita is only one of many that could be drawn with equal validity. I could just as easily draw a trendline that goes right through the 2008-present data, making the 1995-2008 data higher than the trendline. That's the problem with empirical trendlines - there are an almost infinite number of them that you can draw. And as skeptonomist points out, the linear y-axis smothers changes at the lower end of the scale.
For the US, I suspect our recent fertility decline was a product of *three* things: the Great Recession, Obamacare, and smartphones. You've already covered the Great Recession, so:
Obamacare made free birth control available to poor women and teens who didn't previously have access. It may be that America stayed at replacement-level fertility while other countries were falling below because we had high rates of unintended pregnancies among poor women. Once we got rid of those, we got below-replacement fertility just like everyone else. (I also suspect this kicked in just as the effect of the Great Recession on fertility was wearing off.)
Smartphones are a likely cause of the global fertility decline since 2010, because they are crazy addictive and it is just too easy now to endlessly entertain yourself without actually talking to people in real life. Social media is just one aspect of the problem, there are lots of addictive games and apps that are not social media. Also, dating apps have become very bad, seeking to hook people in and get them to pay instead of actually pairing people up.
Or being able to the morning g after pill at the drug store, instead of needing to be prescribed it by a doctor.
The morning h after pill pill became available 11/06.
Dating apps are pretty good actually, judging from folks I know. One of the few really beneficial things about the Internet (along with Jabberwocking, of course!)
For people with IQs over 70, it's objectively clear that we're going to continue digging up and setting fire to as much of the earth's finite resources so that a few billionaires can become trillionaires by the 2030s, while we watch the planet become more poisonous so that those billionaires can become trillionaires.
Then we listen to the future trillionaires lament on how AI is going to take away our jobs if we even dare to ask for more than $7.25 an hour as a minimum wage, because it's clear our future trillionaires just want more serfs to dig up the earth's finite resources so they can become the future trillionaires they know in their hearts that they are.
Any other explanation is a bunch of bullshit.
I know! it's lead!
Kidding aside, it could be a combination of cultural factors, including a cultural shift among young people that we see in declining rates of smoking, alcohol, and teen pregnancy. The fact that it looks like something happened in 2007 may just be a statistical artifact of several cultural factors happening to come together at that time.
I think you're on to something there....lead does affect impulse control and reasoning.
This is almost assuredly the answer. It isn't one thing, it never is.
"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."
I am deeply skeptical. Lower birthrates are a world wide phenomenon, and they are associated with HIGHER not LOWER standards of living.
Standards of living did not fall in a recession - and you're making an association which isn't clear enough. It's educational attainment that is associated with birth rates - and educational attainment is associated with standards of living.
People of the same educational attainment have always as a group had more children with more wealth and less children with less wealth.
I think it's generational. I'm old enough to remember when "get married, have kids" was the clear expectation for women; in fact, the *only* expectation for women - and it took a social revolution (aided by birth control and legal abortion) to change that. There are now 2 generations of women who've grown up without that default setting, for whom marrying and having kids is a choice, not an inevitable destiny.
And when having kids is something you can choose whether or not to do, you can make more rational decisions about it. Do you have the capacity to be a Good Parent? Can you afford to have kids? Is having kids important enough to give up a serious career path? Can you expect a spouse/partner to be around for the entire dependency of the kids, or are you likely to wind up having to do it all yourself?
When looked at as a rational choice, I'm not at all surprised a lot of people, esp. women, are saying "No, thanks."
About 30(?) years ago, maybe even longer, there was a survey to see which demographic group considered themselves "happy." Single women were happiest, then married men, then single men... married women were the least happy of all the groups. Some of them even said that they wish they never had gotten married or had kids.
Marriages can be more equitable now, but I'm not sure society has changed enough to change the reasons women felt (feel) that way. And the current political climate in this country will not help one little bit: the GOP is making it clearer and clearer every day they want to return to the time when women were infantalized, trivialized, and had minimal autonomy.
+1
I'm 70 next year. My father's family all went to university (in Sydney) - although none of their direct ancestors did. There were 4 boys and 1 woman. The woman did not marry until she was in her late 50s and did not have children, all of her brother's did have children.
My mother's Aunt studied (in Melbourne) and never married or had children. Until at least the 60s this was the norm. So I believe the people who saw it is education of women that has made all the difference. Today the majority of students are women (even in the 70s when I went to university the vast majority of students were men. The other difference is mobility (the distance of grandparents from their children). In my case this had already happened as my family moved away from my grandparents and then my mother's grandparents moved away from here, so I grew up without grandparents. My children did too. So social changes are relevant - and now the outrageous price of housing (related to the silly policy mix we adopted from the 80s on of loose monetary policy and tight fiscal policy - and stopped building social housing) and then worsened by the insecurity that the 2008 crash brought to people's expectations of the housing market.
And our host should have noticed that the inflexion point in different countries are all different and after 2008.
"Get married, have kids" was challenged as the default when I was a lad in the 1960s. I would make it four generations that have grown up without that expectation (Boomers except for the oldest ones, X, millenials, Z).
But, importantly, the fertility rate decline is an unalloyed good thing that is easily addressed. 9 billion or 10 billion people, and maybe even 8 billion people, is really too many for the Earth to support. And it's easy to increase immigration. More importantly, one can tune immigration to increase the number of smart, motivated, young adults coming in, thereby reducing the costs of having to raise children.
Picking France as a random sample, the population has been increasing every year.
People whining about fertility rate declines are either just whining or are just racist. In either case, they should be ignored.
What about Japan? The population decreased from 128.5 to 126.4 million people from 2010 to 2020. Increasing migration by 210 thousand people per year, about 0.2%, would keep population stable.
Why should some countries entice the smart, motivated, young adults away from other countries?
Excellent question. We can’t assume that we can solve all of our demographic issues by raiding the best and brightest from other countries.
The people whing about the fertility rate are racists worried that Africans are going to out breed white people, rich people worried that their taxes will go up, investors worried about long term revenue, and patriarchal assholes who think women belong in the kitchen (these buckets are not exclusive, there's lots of overlap).
+1
Given the steadily increasing number of poorer countries that are reaching ZPG, where do you expect to get the immigrants from in the longer term?
Looks to these Mk I eyeballs that it was circa 1960.
When the US population declines to where it was when the world population was between 2 and 4 billion then you can start worrying about fertility rate.
Hopefully the world will be on a similar trajectory…
It's most definitely because of the Great Recession.
- Lacking an immediate, massive stimulus as large as Biden's, job growth was slow. With slow job growth, all of the people on the fringe end of employment had been pushed out of the economy. Labor force participation rate plunged following the Great Recession until it stabilized from 2015 - 2019.
- GDP may have resumed its growth, but as you can see, there was a big loss of potential output and it has only just reached potential in the last few years. But even with increasing GDP during 2009 - 2019, PCE as a percentage of GDP was declining over that same period. That suggests the economic recovery wasn't tangible for many Americans.
- Just before the official start of the Great Recession, as people were being forced to cut their hours and earnings, suicides, which had been stable the prior 6 years, started to grow again. The cumulative effects, suicides kept growing right up until what most people consider to be full employment, in 2018-2019.
And this episode of "More Theories Than Data" has been brought to you by Kevin Drum. Seriously, this is ridiculous. It could be any of these things. Or some of them. Or all of them. Or none of them. The paucity of data makes it indeterminate.
It's not ridiculous to look at these.
Why do you expect simple answers?
It's ridiculous because it's entirely speculative. There's one observation: birth rates have declined. You can spin an unlimited number of theories as to why that is, but they're based on nothing but speculation. Anyone can pick their favorite hobby-horse to blame it on. It might just as well be anti-fertility rays from the planet Mongo.
This is a forum for discussion, not a panel reviewing doctoral dissertations.
I don't think there's a paucity of data.
I think that there's a paucity of men accepting women aren't swooning to have their babies.
We can rule out purely domestic American factors when seeking a cause. Birth rate decline is world wide, so world wide causes should be sought.
Birth control has been wide spread since what the 60s? Did access to it suddenly explode 2007, and across the western world all at the same time? That seems an unlikely part of this.
Bunch of these other arguments in the comment section appear to be trying to find some problem or way to blame women ('full employment', for example).
Yes, birth control has become significantly more available since the 1960s.
Contraceptives were illegal in Connecticut until 1965, when the prohibition was struck down by the Supreme Court.
Sex toys are still illegal in Alabama.
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.
I'm skeptical of this claim. It would appear that real per capita GDP in the US is up about 25% since the start of the Great Recession. IOW we're now fully about a quarter richer than we were at the end of the Bush administration. And we were already a very rich country. I find it implausible that becoming a staggeringly rich country (US, Switzerland) instead of becoming an eye-wateringly rich country (Singapore, Luxembourg) is the difference-maker.
The big picture suggests the economics of family size have been shifting since the early 19th century in one direction (at least over the longer term) toward fewer children.
So yeah, the economy tanked at the end of the aughts, people understandably had even fewer children, and the numbers haven't recovered because, by the time things were fairly prosperous again, Covid arrived, then the inflation burst. And here we are.
Another observation: All of the other G7 countries saw declining fertility rates through the 80's and into the mid-90's. Then fertility rates increased to a maximum between 2005 and 2010, declining after that. Canada experienced two maxima. It would be pretty difficult to concoct a story of economic-driven fertility changes that explains all these ups and downs. Things are never that simple. There are a whole host of factors that influence fertility around the world.
GDP per person is not GDP per person. Who is this WE you are talking about? Inequality has exploded.
GDP per person is not GDP per person.
That's some mighty exotic logic you're employing.
Inequality has exploded.
In fact inequality was stable and or modestly improving during most of the post 2007 period:
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/09/income-inequality-increased.html
This is false. Real median household income at the bottom of the post-financial crisis in 2012 was $65K; it is now $80K. That's *median* household income in 2023 dollars.
As a matter of fact, today's median household income is about 14% over its pre-recession peak in 2007 ($71K). The median household is richer than at pretty much any time.
It isn't only the wealthy that have benefited from recent gains.
[reference https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N%5D
It isn't only the wealthy that have benefited from recent gains.
+1
It's almost as if there's a set of folks out there who are literally incapable of consuming anything but negative news on the subject of inequality.
I'd like us to look a lot more like Denmark as the next liberal, but in the meanwhile, it's not all bad.
Listen to Jim B 55.
Measure PCE as a percentage of GDP. It allows one to exclude the rich people's excess earnings that are never spent, but rather, are used to accumulate even more wealth. This way, you get a truer picture of the economic health of a large portion of America.
Is declining fertility actually the crisis we are supposed to worry about? Maybe I have missed the broader story, but I have only seen certain people worried about declining fertility amongst their preferred social group, religion or race.
Kinda like.......did we have a school attendance problem in the 50s, or was it a black kids might attend my school problem?
Very different problems.
I dunno -- by 2010 per capita GDP was back as high as it was in 2007, so if people were wealthy enough in 2007 to have kids, why not in 2010-now?
Dumb question.
Why did Kevin interject GDP into this?
GDP is defined broadly as
"GDP measures the monetary value of final goods and services—that is, those that are bought by the final user—produced in a country in a given period of time"
Since our population hasn't started declining, wouldn't GDP go up so long as the population is working? More people = more goods and services being bought by those people.
Reagan, Clinton and Obama kept our ever increasing population working by promulgating polices that created jobs to absorb that increasing population.
But now that Trump is favoring reducing immigration there is a real threat that our population will start to decline. Already some farmers are complaining that they do not have enough immigrants to prep and plant crops and there surely won't be enough come harvest time
Kevin used births per thousand then blended in a "gross" unit of measure which obfuscates the issue at hand.
But keep in mind that those folks bon in the 50s are now in their 70s and retiring in greater and greater numbers. THEY had fewer children and those offspring had fewer still. We made up for that with immigration but that may be ending.
In 20 years there should be a glut in housing, shortages of food, more cars than we need and so on - IF THE GOVERNMENT is successful in driving down immigration. And I do believe that the drive to reduce illegal immigration will have a drastic affect on LEGAL immigration as well
Our job market - technical side (those jobs using knowledge - medical, research, engineering etc) may make use of AI to lower the need for smart humans but at the other end, farmers, factory workers, construction workers all will suffer due to lack of available bodies to fill their job openings - if they are needed at all.
We need to make it easier to immigrate here legally, not harder
Decreasing "fertility" (aka reproduction) is a "problem" because our economies are built on and dependent on growth. Social Security expects it.
Meanwhile, the environment would really appreciate fewer people, especially if they expect to live an American lifestyle. The environment is in real trouble now, because of us people. So lower repro rates and declining populations are actually good.
We ought to be smart enough to figure out how to rejigger the economies to handle this, instead of insisting women get pregnant more often and then stay home with the kiddos.
I think the case of Japan shows that it may not be true that economies depend on growth and that populations must increase.
This assumption seems disproven.
Yes. I think looking at Japan, which has lived much longer with low birth rates, might be instructive. The older generation is long-lived, but also capital rich. People are worried about financing future generations - but most of their debt is held by their own pensioners. There is an easy solution. Tax inheritances.
It’s really simple.
1. Easy access to birth control. Some of the most prescribed medications on the planet are birth control, and they’re only taken by half the population.
2. Young people today despite media reports and stereotypes are more responsible than older generations were at their age. The numbers back this up. Teenage pregnancy, young crime, etc. have all collapsed.
2. Young people don’t have the money to have children, so because of #1 and #2 don’t.
3. Children born today won’t have an adulthood even resembling modern expectations unless our trajectory on climate change is reversed immediately. Because of #1, #2, and #3 children aren’t being born.
4. Men are getting drastically more right wing while women are getting drastically more left wing. This is very pronounced in the youth of today. They might as well live on different planets. Women are choosing abstinence over having relationships with subhuman manchildren.
5. Young people are in general having less sex than older generations. This is easy to understand when taking all items above into account.
If any of these are removed from the picture birth rates will increase. Republicans are doing their best in the US to remove #1 and increase #4. They want women to be baby making factories again.
Yes - but one thing you are forgetting is that raising a child to middle class standards is ENORMOUSLY capital intensive. It is not income that is the issue, it is capital. The price of housing, the cost of obtaining an education (loans), the problem of specialized couples finding a location where both can work makes many hurdles to being ready to start a family. The gap between generations increasing is an inevitable consequence.
The decline in birth rates is world wide. Most of the factors you cite are unique to the US or nearly so. Climate change is really the only world wide phenomenon of your five.