Kite & Key Media has a new video on why falling birthrates are no big deal.
Globally, birth rates are down by half. In 1952, the average family had five kids. As of 2022 they had less than three. In 2021 Pew reported that a rising share of U.S. adults who weren’t parents said they didn’t think they’d ever have children.
Are falling birthrates are good, bad, or neutral? I think that in large part depends on the answers to two questions:
1. What are the long-term consequences of falling birth rates?
2. Why are birthrates falling?
Now, I’m happily childfree and pretty ambivalent on whether humanity should continue to exist after I kick the bucket. And we do have ways to keep old people out of poverty without new humans. For example, robots. So I’m personally not super concerned about the direct consequences of falling birth rates.
However, I’ve been told that my biases aren’t the end-all, be-all of what matters.
That leaves the second question open. Why are they falling? If birth rates are down for good reasons, such as women having more freedom to choose, and we can ameliorate the potential negative consequences, then falling birth rates seem mostly fine.
But, falling birth rates may also point to something else that’s amiss. For example, we know the cost of having kids is rising far faster than median incomes. Perhaps the two are connected.
So, even if you don’t personally care about falling fertility rates, connecting the dots between what ails us and fertility may work to get pro-natalists to care about those ills.
When Pew asked people why they didn’t want to become parents, most people said they didn’t just want them. This is even more true for people who said they didn’t want more kids. After that, for more kids people cited age, medical issues, and finances. For not kids, people cited medical issues, finances, and lack of partner.
But looking at the question more holistically, the following are five potential explanations for why US fertility is falling.
Our World in Data Founder Dr. Max Roser says the literature indicates three main causes:
More female empowerment
Lower child mortality
Higher costs for raising children
Seems as good a place to start as any.
1. Girl power
Globally, fertility falls when wives become empowered.
It’s telling, I think, that the reason female genital mutilation is increasing worldwide is that countries with the highest rates of cutting are also those with the highest rates of population growth.
Female empowerment means fewer kids because men tend to want to have more kids than their wives do. So when women have more bargaining power relative to their husbands, they have fewer kids.
As female education rises, fertility declines. There are many theories about how this works. Better-educated women tend to have more access to and better understand how to use contraceptives. Their daughters also tend to get more education, which creates a cycle. The social norms of the better educated also tend to favor smaller families.
A woman with more schooling has more copious and appealing options for ways to spend her time than a less-educated woman. Gary Becker argues that opportunity cost explains the correlation. And it’s true that fewer kids equals less expensive childcare and less time out of the workforce.
In addition, many women don’t want to have kids at all. But large parts of the planet stigmatize women to the point of honor killing, prostitution, or starvation for doing anything other than getting married and having as many kids as her husband wants.
Women getting to have as many (or as few) kids as we want, including zero, is going to decrease fertility.
2. Child survival
Global child mortality halved from around 43% to 22.5% between 1800 to 1950. It dropped to 4.5% in 2015. Evidence suggests that people have fewer total kids when more of them survive childhood.
In Bangladesh, for example, families with no child mortality had 2.6 children on average. If one child died, they had 4.7. If two died, they had 6.2. And if more than three died, they had 8.3 kids.
Interestingly, this study shows no clear correlation between child mortality and fertility rates in the US in the early 20th century. Also of note: Better-educated moms seem to have lower rates of child mortality.
3. Expensive-ass kids
Skyrocketing costs for life’s biggest expenses probably plays a role in declining fertility.
As a percentage of household income, Americans spend the most on food, clothing, housing, transportation, health, education, and child and elder care. The average family in the bottom 60% of the income distribution in 2021 spent around three quarters of their budgets on these necessities.
For all families, the biggest expenditures were, in order:
Housing
Transportation
Health
Home prices have increased 1,608% since 1970, while inflation has increased 644%. Obviously housing more people is even more expensive, especially since an unprecedented percentage of men are paying nothing for housing currently as they reside in their parents’ basements. There’s evidence, perhaps not shockingly, that housing costs in particular drive down fertility.
Transportation and healthcare also get way more expensive after you have kids. People often cite the high cost of childcare. And, it makes sense that as college increasingly becomes a bare minimum requirement for a hope for a better standard of living than your parents had, high college tuition would impact the choice to have kids. Especially as non-degreed Americans face increasing precarity.
And wages are nowhere close to keeping up. While the cost for these categories have skyrocketed way beyond overall inflation over the past fifty years, wages basically haven’t budged for the bottom half of earners since the 1970s.
4. Industrialization
Let’s get real materialist for a second. Industrialization is the simplest and best explanation for global fertility declines.
The more kids you put into your cornfield, the more corn you get at harvest time.
Kids make far worse factory workers than farmhands, when they’re allowed to work. So, most kids in industrialized societies go to school.
A kid in a classroom is an economic drain.
People respond to incentives, so birthrates decline dramatically when countries industrialize.
5. Sticky social norms
This Atlantic article on the South Korean equivalent of Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) but for women points out how when you combine female economic empowerment with male entitlement women simply choose to opt out of dating, sex, marriage, and parenthood. “Chang Kyung-sup, a sociologist at Seoul National University, coined the term compressed modernity to describe South Korea’s combination of lightning-fast economic transformation and the slow, uneven evolution of social institutions such as the family.” Macroeconomics can run around the world while norms are still tying their shoelaces.
Norms aren’t keeping up with macroeconomics in the US either.
Americans are getting married later and less often, which is impacting birth rates. And we’re having fewer out-of-wedlock births too.
Declining male wages and workforce participation discourage marriage because Americans still prefer male breadwinner marriages. And female breadwinner marriages are really unpleasant. It would certainly make sense for women in that situation to choose to forgo reproduction. As these marriages become more common, birthrates will likely continue to fall, at least until culture catches up with the economy.
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