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| Ever consider that the US birthrate is dropping precipitously since it's a rather s--tty place to live? |
Like most developed countries, the United States is experiencing cratering birth rates. If the replacement rate is 2.1 birth per woman, its current reported rate of 1.6 is well below that. In other words, depopulation will set in for America just as it has for the likes of Japan and others if births continue to crater and anti-immigrant sentiment scares off would-be migrants. Fewer birth and nobody being welcomed inevitably spells depopulation.
Although the United States likes to portray itself in all sorts of self-aggrandizing ways--the promised land, shining city upon a hill, and all that jazz--the truth is that its livability is rather worse than any number of other places.A Bloomberg interview with demographer Lyman Stone has some interesting things to say on the matter. First, flexible work may not be the solution:
I think policymakers still have this delusion that the path to high fertility is everybody having an awesome job with great benefits allowing them to be “flexible” for their family, but this just isn't reality. As jobs, even “family-friendly” jobs, turn into careers, and careers turn into essentially religious or spiritual vocations, family is deprioritized and birth rates decline. In empirical studies of surveys across nearly 100 countries, a co-author and I found that this effect was actually as strong for men as for women, so this isn't just about breadwinners. The boss in the movie “Elf” is the bad guy because as far as a child is concerned, a parent's work is always the biggest competition for that parent's mental and emotional energy.
Another observation is that Trumpian racists tend to gain favor as birth rates fall, which obviously has ominous portents:
But as birthrates fall, far-right anti-immigration parties tend to do better, not worse. So if a traditional value of being welcoming to immigrants is something important to Americans, again, low fertility is a problem, because it threatens the viability of political coalitions that support an attitude of welcome and hospitality. And of course, in a more literal sense, the absorptive capacity of a society with regard to immigrants is related to population size: 1 million immigrants has a very different social significance to a society with 100,000 births than a society with 1 million or 10 million.
Completing this downward spiral of falling birth rates mobilizing far-right ultra-racist groups is that low birth rates tends to quash innovation, too:
Another thing we appear to value is something like, “Having a dynamic economy with lots of innovation and entrepreneurship, without inherited wealth that dominates the economic landscape.” But I've shown in extensive work that low birth rates directly predict less innovation, lower entrepreneurship and a higher salience for inherited wealth.
America with all its problems has too far to go in fixing its broken society. It won't become much more livable anytime soon, so expect its birth rates to continue stagnating.
