IN the eternally recurring debates about whether some rival great power
will knock the United States off its global perch, there has always been
one excellent reason to bet on a second American century: We have more
babies than the competition.
It’s a near-universal law that modernity reduces fertility. But compared
with the swiftly aging nations of East Asia and Western Europe, the
American birthrate has proved consistently resilient, hovering around
the level required to keep a population stable or growing over the long
run.
America’s demographic edge has a variety of sources: our famous
religiosity, our vast interior and wide-open spaces (and the
four-bedroom detached houses they make possible), our willingness to
welcome immigrants (who tend to have higher birthrates than the
native-born).
And it clearly is an edge. Today’s babies are tomorrow’s taxpayers and
workers and entrepreneurs, and relatively youthful populations speed
economic growth and keep spending commitments affordable. Thanks to our
relative demographic dynamism, the America of 50 years hence may not
only have more workers per retiree than countries like Japan and Germany, but also have more than emerging powers like China and Brazil.
If, that is, our dynamism persists. But that’s no longer a sure thing.
American fertility plunged with the stock market in 2008, and it hasn’t
recovered. Last week, the Pew Research Center reported that U.S. birthrates hit the lowest rate
ever recorded in 2011, with just 63 births per 1,000 women of
childbearing age. (The rate was 71 per 1,000 in 1990.) For the first
time in recent memory, Americans are having fewer babies than the French or British.
The plunge might be temporary. American fertility plummeted during the
Great Depression, and more recent downturns have produced modest dips as
well. This time, the birthrate has fallen fastest among foreign-born
Americans, and particularly among Hispanics, who saw huge amounts of wealth evaporate
with the housing bust. Many people may simply be postponing
childbearing until better times return, and a few years of swift growth
could produce a miniature baby boom.
But deeper forces than the financial crisis may keep American fertility
rates depressed. Foreign-born birthrates will probably gradually recover
from their current nadir, but with fertility in decline across Mexico
and Latin America, it isn’t clear that the United States can continue
to rely heavily on immigrant birthrates to help drive population growth.
Among the native-born working class, meanwhile, there was a retreat from
child rearing even before the Great Recession hit. For Americans
without college degrees, economic instability and a shortage of
marriageable men seem to be furthering two trends in tandem: more women
are having children out of wedlock, and fewer are raising families at
all.
Finally, there’s been a broader cultural shift away from a child-centric
understanding of romance and marriage. In 1990, 65 percent of Americans
told Pew that children were “very important”
to a successful marriage; in 2007, just before the current baby bust,
only 41 percent agreed. (That trend goes a long way toward explaining
why gay marriage, which formally severs wedlock from sex differences and
procreation, has gone from a nonstarter to a no-brainer for so many
people.)
Government’s power over fertility rates is limited, but not nonexistent. America has no real family policy
to speak of at the moment, and the evidence from countries like Sweden
and France suggests that reducing the ever-rising cost of having kids
can help fertility rates rebound. Whether this means a more
family-friendly tax code, a push for more flexible work hours, or an
effort to reduce the cost of college, there’s clearly room for creative
policy to make some difference.
More broadly, a more secure economic foundation beneath working-class
Americans would presumably help promote childbearing as well. Stable
families are crucial to prosperity and mobility, but the reverse is also
true, and policies that made it easier to climb the economic ladder
would make it easier to raise a family as well.
Beneath these policy debates, though, lie cultural forces that no
legislator can really hope to change. The retreat from child rearing is,
at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that
first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe.
It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses
stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might
be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging
off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first
place.
Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by
political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow
accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural
recoveries are ultimately made.
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