Lower Birth Rates Threaten Everyone’s Flourishing

Idea in Brief

U.S. birth rates are declining and will almost certainly stay low for the foreseeable future, largely because of societal shifts in expectations of and desires for parenthood.
This decline will affect the safety net, social programs, economy, education system, infrastructure, and politics – including America’s ability to address climate change. Everyone, regardless of political leanings, should be wrestling with the birth rate issue.
These effects are predictable and can be addressed. We must focus both on changes in policy and in our way of thinking about social ties, stressing the importance of connection and community.

By Elliot Haspel

Preface: I wrote in May 2021 that “The low-birth-rate asteroid is headed our way. It cannot, and should not, be ignored. While it may not seem so calamitous at first glance, the impact will reverberate through all of society. That threat is already visible to many on the right, and in my experience, when those on the left absorb the consequences, they will see it too. This is a new connective tissue around family flourishing that has the potential to generate that rarest of political phenomena: common cause. It’s time to look up, and then it’s time to act.”

Nearly two years later, these trends have only intensified, but little action has occurred. I thought it would be worthwhile to revisit the topic and emphasize the need for all political ideologies to start contending with this onrushing reality.

There have been myriad stories in recent months about declining birth rates, both in the United States and worldwide. Everyone from the New York Times to the Economist to CNN to Fox News has run articles on the trend. The lion’s share of the concern within the U.S. has come from conservative commentators, in particular a wing that takes the undeniably awkward label “pro-natal.” As a blue-blooded progressive, I worry that political flavoring is starting to turn what should be a universal concern toxic. I want to suggest that there are two connected realities that everyone – progressive, moderate, conservative–needs to reckon with:

Good family policy, especially around affordable child care and child allowances, can help raise birth rates on the margins.
The U.S. birth rate is likely never going to substantially increase or return to “replacement level” during the 21st century, and now is the time to start planning for what that means.

Some of the reflexive resistance on the Left to engaging fully with birth rates is understandable: there is, to put it kindly, an “ick factor” to reducing women to their reproductive status. (Yes, men have a role to play in reproduction too, but I think we all know this conversation is about women and their “fertility.” Again, the language around this is awful!) That factor was taken up to 11 when Roe v. Wade was overturned. Thus, pro-natalism sets off any number of alarm bells, and conservatives do themselves no favors by implicitly or explicitly shaming women who choose to not have children.

However, just because the person pointing out a gas leak may be your obnoxious neighbor doesn’t mean you ignore it. Lower birth rates pose a real and predictable threat to nearly every goal progressives hold. Thus, we need a new kind of conversation. As Paul Constance wrote in a recent piece titled The Heresy of Decline:

“Public discourse around depopulation is firmly anchored in the previous century. On the Right, depopulation is still reflexively described as an aberration, a symptom of moral decay, or a signal of impending economic doom. On the Left, it is too often dismissed as a non-issue or welcomed as a step toward degrowth – one whose environmental benefits will surely outweigh any social costs. Policymakers and academics tend to avoid the topic, wary of its proximity to the agendas of authoritarian regimes and culture war battlegrounds around abortion or immigration. That is unfortunate, because the era of depopulation poses new dilemmas that require fresh thinking and open debate.”

So let’s ramp up the debate.

Why Birth Rates are Down

First things first, what’s going on? I’m going to draw heavily on an excellent recent paper economists Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine published for the Aspen Institute’s Economic Strategy Group: “The Causes and Consequences of Declining US Fertility.” Kearney and Levine are no ideologues, and this is as neutral a paper on the topic as you might hope to find. The pair concludes that while there are surely multiple factors at play, none of the rogues’ gallery of proposed explanations – from increases in the use of long-acting reversible contraceptives to rising housing costs to declining religiosity – appear to be primary.

Instead, Kearney and Levine write: “We speculate that the key explanation for the post-2007 sustained decline in US birth rates is not about some changing policy or cost factor in recent years, but rather shifting priorities across cohorts of young adults. These shifted priorities likely reflect differences in the ways more recent generations of young adults were raised, experienced childhood, and had their aspirations and preferences shaped.”

In short, we are living out the consequences of changes in expectations and desires around parenthood – and, in corollary, around work. The average age of an American woman at her first birth is now over 27, up from 21 in 1970. Now, some of these changes should be celebrated! I, for one, find it difficult to argue that the improvement in women’s ability to pursue career aspirations (or other life opportunities that delay childbirth) is a bad thing. I would not trade a high fertility rate for a return to an era where contraception was restricted and marital rape legal, and I imagine that is not a controversial opinion. The point is simply that this type of deeply entrenched cultural root is quite difficult to influence with policy, which is why Kearney and Levine “expect that US birth rates and total completed fertility rates are not likely to rebound soon.”

Difficult, but not impossible.

The Impact of Family Policy on Birth Rates

All of the above said, there is clearly downward pressure causing American women to have fewer children than they would like in an ideal world. Demographer Lyman Stone, a self-identified conservative and pro-natalist, has found a substantial and persistent gap between stated preference and reality.

Moreover, we know that strong family policies can have some effect on birth rates. Kearney and Levine, who are skeptical about how much family policy can do in this arena, still acknowledge that “the empirical evidence on the relationship between cash benefits or child tax credits and fertility is mixed, but in general, it suggests that policies that directly subsidize the birth of a child might lead to a modest increase in fertility....Policies that help parents to balance work and family, such as subsidized childcare or paid parental leave, can also be considered pro-natalist and could plausibly lead to an increase in birth rates even if the policies are not implemented with expressly pro-natalist aims.”

Those modest improvements can have a major impact. Fertility rates play out in the real world in more logarithmic than linear fashion: Constance cites research showing that “at a fertility rate of 1.85, the [depopulation] process is so gradual that it can take more than two centuries for the number of newborns to shrink by half. But at lower fertility rates, depopulation accelerates because of reverse momentum. At a fertility rate of 1.6, it takes around 90 years for the number of newborns to drop by half. At 1.3, it takes some 50 years.” (The current U.S. fertility rate is slightly below 1.7; South Korea is below 1, facing a halving of newborns in less than 30 years.)

“I don’t think that the case for, say, child care, should be made purely in terms of its effect on birth rates. But if good child care policies have the effect of modestly increasing births, then that should certainly be part of the conversation. No couple should be having fewer children than they want because of the lack of affordable, accessible child care.”

Yet we know that for some, that is exactly what is happening. The same goes for paid family leave, child allowances, birth costs, and so on.

There is one other policy area with major implications for population: immigration. It is absolutely true that increasing levels of legal immigration can help offset lower domestic birth rates. However, birth rates are dropping all around the globe (and among recent U.S. immigrant groups, for that matter). Some of the steepest declines are in regions that previously had the highest rates, such as Africa (1). Moreover, there aren’t enough potential immigrants to make up for global shortfalls; 7 in 10 people worldwide live in countries that are on a depopulation curve. Immigration is therefore an important potential short-term salve but not a sustainable long-term solution to the birth rate issue.

So What?

OK, you may be saying: I still don’t get why this is such a big deal. At worst, fewer children may cause some issues with social security; at best, it may actually help the environment, right?

How is a low-birth future bad for the nation and the world? Let me count (just some of) the likely ways:

It could do huge damage to the pay-ahead concept behind social safety net programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, potentially necessitating tax increases or eligibility changes.
It could cause a major economic slowdown and decline of entrepreneurship and innovation, with ripples across the entire population and world economy.
It could substantially reduce the cohort size of school-age children, sending public education into a fiscal crisis since fixed costs remain high and most U.S. education spending is allocated on a per-pupil basis; higher education could see similar impacts.
It could put tremendous strain on maintaining infrastructure, such as roads and water systems, as jurisdictions contend with high fixed costs amid significantly shrunken tax bases.
It could require a reallocation of social spending to be more heavily skewed towards elder care, leaving less for child care, antipoverty efforts, climate change-related projects, and so on.
It could shift the electorate into even more of a “gerontocracy,” in which voters over 65 have greater power in voting numbers than younger voters (before taking into account different age-band voting rates).

Several of these predictable consequences will directly impede America’s ability to respond to dangerous planetary instability caused by climate change – both internally and on the global stage. For instance, seniors tend to be less alarmed about the climate than younger generations, meaning future politicians may have little electoral incentive to prioritize the issue. Similarly, an America facing economic torpor is less likely to play a major role in international climate financing that helps the world decarbonize and build climate-resilient systems for children and families.

“This demonstrates the thinness of arguments that fewer children are better for the environment. A weaker, slower America constantly trying to backfill commitments to the safety net with short-term measures is precisely the opposite of what the Earth needs.”

More fundamentally, while a society remaining below “replacement birth rate” doesn’t mean it will die off or enter a Children of Men situation, it will seriously change the nature of the population over time. Some of these changes may have societal consequences whose knock-on effects we cannot fully predict. Consider Japan. By one government estimate, a Japanese woman born in 1990 has a “better-than-even chance of completing life with no biological grandchildren.” That is a societal sea change. America is not there yet, but should not consider itself immune; we are already facing the effects of lower birth rates and the demographic picture will look quite different in just a few decades.

Planning for a Low-Birth Future

So what does this mean?

First, we should maximize the family policy opportunities and wring out every bit of gap-closing potential we can between people’s ideal and realized family size. A strong child care system, vibrant paid leave, births that cost little-to-nothing, a robust child benefit: these are the right thing to do on any number of levels, and since they can at least modestly help with birth rates, even better.

Second, there should be wheels turning to consider other policy options for a low-birth future. All of the threats I named above are predictable, and there are ways to adapt. Consider education funding, for instance. There is no ironclad reason that funding formulas must be tied so tightly to the number of pupils; alternatives exist, such as a more operations-based approach. Yet as you can imagine, turning deep-seated policies like education funding or social safety nets is like turning a battleship: it takes time and planning. As Constance notes, “large-scale depopulation remains a sort of creeping abstraction, too vague and too gradual to engage our jittery attention spans.” Those of us working on child and family policy must keep elbowing this issue to the fore.

Third, and arguably most important, now is the time to begin rebuilding ties of interdependence and community. The idea of individual families as an isolated unit is ahistorical and hasn’t worked for a long time, but it’s going to become untenable as families shrink. We will need to consider everything from the physical design of communities – more parks and public squares, more inclusive ‘third spaces’ – to programs that promote intergenerational solidarity. We will need to balance supporting the smaller population of parents with supporting a larger adult population who will age without the kin networks of previous generations. On a more cultural level, a shift in demographic tectonics requires a reconsideration of deep questions about meaning and purpose and the good life, questions we are often too reluctant to ask.

This is a vital conversation. I respectfully submit that if conservatives have been taking too narrow and instrumental a view about the implications of low birth rates, progressives have been too busy trying their best to ignore those implications altogether. That should change. One can reject the label of pro-natal while accepting the label of pro-future. And make no mistake: the number of children coming – or not coming – into our world is going to indelibly shape that future.

Note (1) Birth rates remain high in an absolute sense throughout much of Africa, and due to the continent’s very young median age, populations are expected to keep growing for most of the century. That said, with rates dropping rapidly, it is clear that Africa too will eventually be facing a population peak and decline.

Caroline CassidyApril 11, 2023