Plunging Birthrates
Please consider the Covid Baby Bust.
“All evidence points to a sharp decline in fertility rates and in the number of births across highly developed countries,” said Tomas Sobotka, a researcher at the Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna. “The longer this period of uncertainty lasts, the more it will have lifelong effects on the fertility rate.”
In the U.S., a survey by the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization, found that one-third of women polled in late April and early May wanted to delay childbearing or have fewer children because of the pandemic.
The Brookings Institution estimated in December that, as a result of the pandemic, 300,000 fewer babies would be born in the U.S. in 2021 compared with last year.
Birthrate Declines
- Italy: -21.6%
- France: -13.5%
- Japan: -9.3%
Likely Permanent
No rebound followed the global financial crisis. The U.S. birthrate—after rising to its highest level in decades in 2007—plunged after the 2008 crisis and has declined gradually ever since.
Not to worry. The Fed has a plan to make things more expensive for everybody. That will help, right?
Mish
Tough to pick up a kid with a cellphone in your hand every hour of the day.
I’ll never understand social dynamics. A blackout or snowstorm keeps people home for two days, we get a spike in births. A quarantine keeps them home for six months, we get racial extinction.
What if countrymen are more than fungible consumer units?
As I have said before, if our economy depends on an every growing population then we are doomed. A declining birth rate is fine as long as we aren’t moving towards Idiocracy.
It’s moving past idiocracy at this stage.
Are we headed there? Has anyone tried to compare the IQ of people today to people of 200 years ago, or 400 years ago, perhaps by comparing writings from various eras?
women are not baby factories. Unless you impose, Gilead (per Margaret Atwood) policies, birth rates are not going to up.
Also, you claim that robots are going to take over anyway so why the worry about birth rates.
Such cultural attitudes are precisely the reason birth rates are down. As time passes, things balance out as pro-family people outbreed the “modern” people.
The only reason government is concerned about lower birthrate is that they don’t believe that the robots are coming. They want a continuous supply of new taxpayers so that they can count on to fund SS, Medicare and the government itself.
But this time really is different. The robots ARE coming and the labor participation rate is going to fall like a stone over the next 20 years.
There is no need for more workers. SSN will fund 75 % of the projected benefits in 2034 . therefore, the SS is safe.
Medicare
the problem with Medicare is that the Healthcare here is terrible . it consumes 17 or 18 % of GDP and delivers poor outcomes See the opoid crisis & the response to Covid 19 which lowered the life expectancy by one year.
If the US has spent the amount on healthcare as Canadians do, the US fiscal deficit would be cured, per Dr. Dean Baker
Maybe we can blame the six foot rule
When you lock people up at home, usually you get a baby boom, so this is kind of backwards. That’s why I agree that it’s not temporary.
With Covid, the divorce and domestic abuse complaints, not to mention OD’s and suicides are all up.
You may be referring to black-outs where everyone knows its temporary. Here a large segment of the population became afraid of going to the hospital and were laid off or impacted financially. During such times housing formation is impacted. Until the job picture clears up the birth rate won’t recover.
….and a divorce boom too…
Even Mexico is nearing below replacement level fertility. While I agree that extremely expense of housing, education, day care is discouraging fertility it has more to do wtih urbanization, agressive secularism, cultural relativism. The Amish and Hasidic population is exploding.
Jerome “Irving Fisher” Powell – you think he knows it yet ?
I think population needs to fall…and will fall. When deaths and births start to look like that chart you posted…it doesn’t take that many generations to have far fewer people on the earth. No pandemic or catastrophe is required. The math is interesting.
But it’s not the best thing for a consumer economy that only understands y.o.y. growth to infinity.
The worst part for me is no grandchildren. I had hoped the family line might not end with my children’s generation. But we are a very long generation family anyway, and I only knew one of my grandparents. My wife never knew her grandfather, who was born in 1867.
I haven’t given up hope, and I suppose it could happen even after I’m long gone.
Five years ago my wife and I were in the same situation. My two girls were working on careers and didn’t have time or so I thought. Then in the space of five years we had four grandchildren with another on the way. The kids chose husbands who wanted children and just went ahead. You might be surprised one day too.
Have noticed that economic incentive programs in places like Russia and Japan have been abysmal failures so far. One could argue that the incentives aren’t strong enough but I think the problem is much deeper than that.
A lot of women either don’t want kids anymore, or they want to wait until they’re about 40 to start, when it’s much tougher to do so. I also personally know a lot of women who had one child and refused to have anymore, often after splitting up with the father.
Stable relationships would help a lot too, but as a divorced guy I have no room to talk here. Women need to want children for populations to rise again, or be faced with the African model where they have no say in marriage or children.
Then again, I’m not convinced that deflationary populations are such a terrible thing. Sure, they don’t work with the Fed model of perpetual growth, but that monstrosity fails whether each of us has one child or ten!
The hordes swarming in across the Southern border are not “illegal aliens” or “ asylum seekers”.
They are “REPLACEMENTS”.
Birthrates havent declined in my locale in California. Demand for schools is higher than ever. New middle and high schools are being built and elementary schools are expanding.
Probably people with school age children moving into the area.
Partly. My wife use to work in labor and delivery and they are busier than ever. The pandemic did nothing to slow down birthrate in this area.
Do you live in an Amish area?
Nope. It’s a flood of folks from the bay area with school age kids.
Everyone who projects declining world population always has an asterisk with Ex-Africa. Fertility is only falling if you say ex-Africa in the sentence.
Even within Africa it’s mainly the Sahel driving birthrates up. In far northern and southern Africa they’re falling like everywhere else, at least last I checked. Also southern Africa has shorter life expectancy due to rampant HIV.
The problem the Sahel faces is that while it’s mainly Muslim, it’s on the southern end of Muslim Africa, bordering Christian populations. This and other factors make it ripe for conflict in coming years.
That’s good. The World Population is too large.
It already costs the parents hundreds of thousands of dollars and taxpayers hundreds thousands more to raise a baby to adulthood. Not to mention climate change.
Another idea is that when a population reaches a certain density and resources needed to raise children become scarce then certain members remove themselves from the breeding population. Studies on rat behavior seem to confirm this.
The future belongs to the descendants of those who reproduce. The very religious have more children than the others so eventually the population will be dominated by ultra-religious nuts which is exactly who our own ancestors were, religious nuts since the Palaeolithic.
The only place in the world with much population growth is Africa. The Worlds future is a world like our current inner cities.
very good point. the only girls who don´t post 10 million obsessive carefully staged selfies every year are usually religious/home schooled. but they are few and far between. that minuscule minority are the only ones who will have children in the future—generally speaking.
Wouldn t it be great if this were to happen on a global scale ? But, no worries Mish, Joe’s 300$/ child policy is gonna work miracles, if necessary they d break down Trump’s wall with their bare hands, but it wont be necessary of course, under woke sleepy Joe….Breeding paradise is open for business!
Have you made any Brussel Sprouts yourself?
yes I cook the sprouts in salted water for 15 minutes, drain, add a generous lump of butter, smoked bacon cubes and fry for a while…slightly bitter taste but ever so delicious …. :- )….but to answer your real question, I have 1 spruit (that s indeed what kids are called in dutch sometimes)…
Glad to know that.
Cut the bottom third off the sprout and remove the dark leaves. Much less bitter.
Can’t feed a baby when the ultra wealthy have hovered up all the cash…. but you can look at their yachts.
Can’t feed a baby when government shuts the economy down and destroys jobs people depend on, to feed a baby.
Yet somehow the ultra rich got a trillion richer from it.
Where did the child rearing money go? It’s truly a mystery!
ROFL. You forgot the “/sarc”
I think if you look, you will find that the poorer states tend to have higher birth rates, and the states that are wealthier have lower birth rates, and the same is true on a country by country basis. The poorer the country, the higher the birth rate.
The rich get richer and the poor get children.
Can´t pick up a baby with a phone in your hand all day. Ever see Trainspotting? The level of self-absorption on social media is worse than heroin addiction. We are all doomed, most of us anyway.
Seems deflationary for sure. Not sure how a bunch of clowns at the fed will “solve” this lol
Hav-A-Kid!
Name one thing that the Fed has solved… just one. I can think of a bunch of things they have caused.
Absolutely nothing. I agree
There is an entire generation of investment professionals that has never experienced a bear market without Fed intervention. Last one I can remember is before LTCM
We, the USA, has a trivial solution.
More visas/green cards for immigrant babies.
Lots of babies.
We offshore all other production. So why not reproduction?
Looking over our mostly obese and stupid population, I’m beginning to wonder if caucasian genetics are fit to survive anymore.
Unfortunately the darker skinned races have a similar problem. Fortunately our maters do not want a smart and healthy population that might change the system.
then becomes a third world shithole, lol