The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

The other day someone was complaining about too many people in the housing thread: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35962521" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35962521</a><p>The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent <i>decades</i> working against &quot;teen moms&quot; and &quot;single parents&quot; and &quot;welfare queens&quot;. Everyone is very clear that you <i>must not</i> have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, that has to be enduring economic security across their childhood. Now, how many people can comfortably afford to do so?<p>Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? To help make sure that enough housing and infrastructure is built for them?

&gt; This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes.<p>I disagree with this statement.<p>Put yourself in the shoes of 25 years old and ask why don&#x27;t you want to have kids?<p>* (economic) difficult to manage finances<p>* (economic) can&#x27;t buy house, too expensive<p>* (economic) to compete with others in the workplace, I need to work &gt;12 hours&#x2F;day, can&#x27;t do with kids or will be laid off.<p>* (sociologic) more porn, more entertainment, more fake lives through mobile phones and social networks<p>* (sociologic) shift in mindset: less religion, less community, more money, FIRE, travel while you are young and so on

&gt; No obvious policy or economic factor can explain much of the decline.<p>I mean, if people literally can&#x27;t afford to have kids what do we expect to happen to the birthrate? I want kids more than anyone I know yet realistically I&#x27;m never going to have them. I&#x27;m 33 now and like most people in their early 30s I&#x27;m no where near in a stable enough position to raise kids. I mean who the hell even owns a home &lt; 30 these days? Then add student debt to that mix... It&#x27;s really difficult unless you have wealthy parents who will help you out.<p>Here in the UK there&#x27;s a very clear trend – if you work for a living you don&#x27;t have kids because you have neither the time, space, or money to do so. However most of my family has lots of kids but that&#x27;s because in UK you get a free home and living expenses paid for for choosing to have kids instead of working. Realistically this is the only way a working class person is able to &quot;afford&quot; a place of their own and have kids because you just can&#x27;t do it on a salary of £25,000.

Here&#x27;s another possible cause that I don&#x27;t see mentioned: The spread of the internet removed a lot of the mysticism surrounding births and allowed any woman to look up how it&#x27;s really going about. Some might simply not want to take the risk because potential complications during and after birth are manifold.

Unsurprisingly the UK birth rate has done a similar roughly 20% drop of that period:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;428262&#x2F;birth-rate-in-the-united-kingdom&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;428262&#x2F;birth-rate-in-the...</a><p>Gone from 12.6 to 10.1 per 1k people.<p>Anecdotal evidence, I&#x27;m in my mid 30s, a lot of our friends and family are stopping at one kid.

&gt; But something changed around the time of the Great Recession; the birth rate fell precipitously, and it did not recover when the economy improved.<p>I&#x27;m going to guess that this is generational shock. That generation got burned hard, and now they are weary. I suspect when another generation passes they will forget.

That this analysis tries to claim this doesn&#x27;t correlate to economic conditions only demonstrates that economics has failed. When we say &quot;the economy recovered&quot; we don&#x27;t mean anything that&#x27;s meaningful to people on the ground, making decisions like whether they can have a child, because for a long time it has been the policy of basically any official macroeconomic analysis to ignore distinctions between the &quot;real economy&quot; and the increasingly unwieldy labyrinth of financial instruments, from stocks to commodities futures to real estate prices - which dwarf it completely - and to ignore &quot;distributional outcomes&quot; and favor analysis of dry gestalts that, again, can be skewed by extreme levels of quantifiable prosperity for a vanishingly small number of people and firms. This approach means that as inequality increases, a &quot;recovery&quot; or really even &quot;the economy&quot; has less and less to do with the majority of people&#x27;s real fortunes and stability improving - the economic conditions that actually affect birth rates<p>As the long con of neoliberal policy drags on, more and more phenomena in our society can be attributed to the interplay between Goodhart&#x27;s law and the utter willful ignorance of it on the part of the people and institutions that measure outcomes and get to make policy decisions

“””<p>If the recent decline in annual birth rates simply reflects women pushing off having children from their 20s to their 30s, then annual birth rates will eventually rebound and the total number of children the average U.S. woman has over her lifetime will not change. But the decline in annual birth rates since 2007 is consistent with more recent cohorts of women having fewer births. Those cohorts have not completed their childbearing years yet, but the number of births they would have to have at older ages to catch up to the lifetime childbearing rates of earlier cohorts is so large that it seems unlikely they will do so. If the decline in births reflects a (semi)permanent shift in priorities, as opposed to transitory economic or policy factors, the U.S. is likely to see a sustained decline in birth rates and a general decline in fertility for the foreseeable future. This has consequences for projected U.S. economic growth and productivity, as well as the fiscal sustainability of current social insurance programs. “””<p>Will have to check back on this in a few years.

There was a funny diagram I sawed that presented the birth rate of my country and placed the launch of Tinder to the timeline. The same year Tinder was published the birth rate started going down. Most likely there are other better explanations for this but it made me think. How has the radical disruption of dating market affected the way people form relationships and start families?

&gt; In general, a smaller workforce and an aging population would have negative implications for economic productivity and per capita income growth. In addition, the combination of a smaller workforce and an aging population puts fiscal pressure on social insurance programs, like Social Security, that rely on tax payments from current workers to pay the benefits of current retirees.<p>This is from economofact.org so I understand that they translate this to metrics like “economic productivity” yet, this kind of framing irks me. Also the implication that this impacts social security may be true for the existing system, but it may only imply that this system may need to change.<p>Yet I feel that the implicit message is: get policy in place to get people to make more babies.<p>But why isn’t the falling birth rate just a good thing from a human well-being perspective? Or: why is there even implied that there is a problem?

&gt; The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes.<p>What a load of bull. Obviously, there is no <i>single one</i> explanation - the entire point of such articles is that they don&#x27;t get just how bad the combination of causes actually is.<p>To explain: my generation (i.e. 1990 and onwards) have experienced <i>multiple</i> and, to make it worse, <i>overlapping</i> devastating crises with long term impact. We graduated right in the midst of a multi-year recession (first the banking crisis, then the euro crisis), as soon as that was over Europe had the refugee influx and America still reeled with the aftereffects of the banking crisis, then COVID came along, and directly afterwards Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to exploding costs of living - at the moment about 2&#x2F;3rds of the population struggle to make rent and bills, forget about &quot;luxury&quot; purchases.<p>The worst problem is rents are sucking us dry. We want to offer our children a better perspective than we had while growing up - but we can&#x27;t even do <i>that</i> as housing is barely affordable for us with our partners, if we don&#x27;t have to live at our parents&#x27; or in shared housing (=roommates). Also, both parents have to work to make rent, but that makes childcare a necessity - but childcare itself eats up a lot of money. And children <i>themselves</i> cost a lot of money as well - clothing, food, diapers, insurance, all that easily adds up to hundreds of euros a month.<p>Americans, additionally, have to fight with political changes - if I were living in the US, I would do <i>everything</i> to not make my s&#x2F;o pregnant, simply because <i>women have literally died or gotten permanently infertile because they were denied abortions for non-viable pregnancies</i>, and even if that were not the case I would not risk getting stuck with a 50.000$ bill for the birth.<p>Oh, and on top of that those of my generation who think about ethics have yet another problem... can it be ethical to birth a child into a world firmly heeded towards environmental destruction? With politicians in power actively denying climate change?<p>The US has to fix access to healthcare, and we all have to fix rents - the primary cause of people not having kids is because they literally cannot afford them.

Had a job in SV, we moved to EU when my wife was pregnant. We would have loved to stay but as many of immigrant friends, we had difficulties figuring out how to be a happy family in USA. We couldn’t afford a house, education without becoming slaves to our career and not to feel threaten by the constantly changing immigration policy.

As an interesting contrast China (which is also suffering fertility issues) just launched a new pro family&#x2F;fertility campaign [1]. It&#x27;s so weird how little coverage this issue receives in the West. Fertility will be one of the biggest factors in shaping our future, to say nothing of its more immediate impact on economic factors, retirement, and general social stability.<p>I think the big issue is that we live so much longer than we&#x27;re fertile that it masks the impact of fertility changes by ~60 years. So this makes many people not really appreciate what&#x27;s happening. To give a toy example, imagine a world with a fertility rate of 1, where everybody reproduces at 20, and dies at 80:<p>---<p>(100) Year 0: 100 births, 0 twenties, 0 forties, 0 sixties, 0 deaths<p>(150) Year 20: 50 births, 100 twenties, 0 forties, 0 sixties, 0 deaths<p>(175) Year 40: 25 births, 50 twenties, 100 forties, 0 sixties, 0 deaths<p>(187) Year 60: 12 births, 25 twenties, 50 forties, 100 sixties, 0 deaths<p>(93) Year 80: 6 births, 12 twenties, 25 forties, 50 sixties, 100 deaths<p>(46) Year 100: 3 births, 6 twenties, 12 forties, 25 sixties, 50 deaths<p>Year 120: 1 birth...<p>---<p>Various observations:<p>- Everything looks fine (if not great) until the first generation born from a high fertility generation starts to die. Somebody in year 20 saying there&#x27;s a major fertility crisis would probably be considered eccentric.<p>- A fertility rate of &#x27;n&#x27; results in an n&#x2F;2 ratio of younger:older. Fertility rate of 1 = 50% as many people in each succeeding generation that will be ultimately responsible for economically supporting the previous generation.<p>- By observation 2 one could recreate the entire demographic distribution of year 0. If we assume a fertility rate of e.g. 4, then it would be a ratio of 4&#x2F;2 younger people per older generation. So it would be: 100 births, 50 twenties, 25 forties, 12 sixties, and 6 deaths.<p>- The effects are exponential with relation to our window of fertility, and not our life expectancy. From year 60 onward in the above sim, the population would drop by 50% every 20 years. All life expectancy does is add a longer period before you hit an equilibrium.<p>- The minimum sustainable fertility rate is 2. This would, when equally distributed, be a society where 100% of women are having an average of 2 children each. It&#x27;s unclear that anything like this is obtainable in our current economic and social models.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.globaltimes.cn&#x2F;page&#x2F;202305&#x2F;1290693.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.globaltimes.cn&#x2F;page&#x2F;202305&#x2F;1290693.shtml</a>

Just offset the lack of new people being born by opening up borders to everyone, problem solved!

I don&#x27;t understand why this is a problem. We are moving through demographic transition, as the world reaches its carrying capacity for human populations. So, we are safe from overpopulation crisis, from future unemployment crises, etc.

Besides, having children is extremely bad regarding climate change. I personally find the argument a bit hilarious, but hey: Never forget that virtue signaling can also reduce the amount of children!

Hopefully we can do this for the species as a whole and gradually find equilibrium at a more sustainable population.