America’s Continuing Bad Mood Could Be Resulting in Fewer Babies

 

The Economist050216babies presents a mystery in the decline of global fertility rates (seen in the chart to the right) since the Great Recession and Global Financial Crisis:

The crunch was unsurprising: anxiety about jobs and money puts people off children. But a rich-world baby bust that began predictably turned into a puzzle. Fertility rates have fallen in countries with woeful economies, such as Greece and Italy. But they have also fallen in countries that sailed through the financial crisis, such as Australia and Norway. Although the American baby bust was expected, the lack of recovery after seven years seems odd. “I was fairly confident that women were just delaying births, and that we would see a rebound,” says Mr Johnson. “I’m beginning to wonder now.” In Britain the drop came late: the fertility rate fell from 1.92 to 1.81 between 2012 and 2014. Then there is France, where couples looked at the economic slump and shrugged. The fertility rate there has barely moved.

So the decline is global, in both countries hard hit by the downturn and those less so. Also, the upturn is seven years old and yet no rebound. Apparently, it seems, cute pictures of Prince George are not enough of an offset. Some possible explanations:

Ann Berrington of Southampton University points to housing.… You can have a baby in a rented flat, of course. But in a country like Britain, where earlier generations found it easy to buy homes, that seems to flout a psychological rule for some. In the 1960s Richard Easterlin, an American economist, suggested that people would avoid having children if they felt unable to bring them up in a style that at least matched the way they were raised. It might be time to dust off that idea.

Some couples could be delaying having babies not because they cannot afford them, but because of a vague feeling that family life is harder than it used to be. A Pew poll of 11 rich countries last year found that 64% believe that today’s children will be worse off than their parents. Perhaps the gloom has spread even to countries with strong economies. Mr Sobotka suggests that Scandinavians could have overreacted to repeated news reports about hard times elsewhere in Europe. “It gets below people’s skins,” he says.

In this, childbirth might be a little like politics. When a surly, anti-politics mood first took hold in Europe and America after the financial crisis, it was tempting to think it would dissipate as economic growth returned. Today Donald Trump is the probable Republican presidential nominee in America, the National Front is rampant in France and the British government is fighting both Scottish separatism and Europhobia. Bad moods can linger.

Yes, bad moods can linger. In some ways the Great Recession is still with us. (It also doesn’t help when politicians exaggerate a nation’s economic challenges.) Perhaps this can also be seen in things like the decline in stock ownership, weak business investment, and — as the Economist mentions — politics. In his recent New York Times column, economist Robert Shiller writes about the psychological impact on market crash and big recessions to change human behavior:

Back then, immediately after the [1929] market crash, church sermons were a powerful influence. Congregations were told that many businesspeople had behaved like gamblers and hucksters. Through these sermons and other word-of-mouth sources, moralizing about the stock market crash spread, affecting mass psychology. Frederick Lewis Allen, in the epilogue to his 1931 best seller “Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s,” wrote that cultural values changed after the crash: People began to dress more modestly, adopting a new formality and religiosity, reviving Victorian sexual taboos. It is reasonable to assume that many of these changes had an economic impact, mainly by discouraging spending.…

Consider the recession of 1975. Along with oil prices, common ways of understanding and describing daily life also changed. The oil crisis was widely said to signal the end of an era of abundance. Lower highway speed limits were imposed to conserve fuel, and cars grew smaller. Americans were told to lower their home thermostats to 68 degrees. In large numbers, people began wearing sweatsuits, flannel leg warmers, thermal underwear and long johns. Among all this austerity, the economist E. F. Schumacher’s 1973 best seller “Small Is Beautiful” became a global morality lesson.

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Published in Economics
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  1. Aaron Miller Inactive
    Aaron Miller
    @AaronMiller

    To the man with a hammer…

    • #1
  2. Kate Braestrup Member
    Kate Braestrup
    @GrannyDude

    Delaying childbearing, as women in wealthy countries tend to do, will tend to limit the numbers, and skipping childbearing altogether is getting a whole lot easier as birth control becomes more user-friendly and efficient, and women start to outnumber men in professions (medicine, for instance) that don’t reward taking time out to raise a half dozen little ones.

    Plus— I have a relative who has strongly advised her young-adult offspring not to have kids. Because of global warming, she assures them, ours is the last generation to get to live at this level of abundance, and probably the last generation on earth to have any fun or happiness at all.  (Why “this level of abundance” needs to be the standard, she doesn’t explain…)

    In her lifetime and mine (50 years +/-) meanwhile,  the idea that there are too many people on the planet has been constantly invoked. As a mother of four, back in the 80s, I remember commiserating with another friend with four children (two planned, and a set of “oops!” twins) about how guilty we felt whenever overpopulation was discussed at (!) church.

    I would imagine that Europeans have been getting this message at least as sternly and strongly as Americans have? Perhaps the idea that there are Too Many People lends a gloss of high-minded self-sacrifice to voluntary childlessness, and maybe a little analgesic for the involuntary kind?

    • #2
  3. Fake John/Jane Galt Coolidge
    Fake John/Jane Galt
    @FakeJohnJaneGalt

    There is no ROI in having children.  All long term expense with little benefit.  If you get bad kids then you set yourself up for a lifetime of heartache.  If you get good kids then as soon as you can no longer fend them off they take your stuff and lock you up in a home.  Better to just get a pet.

    • #3
  4. Marion Evans Inactive
    Marion Evans
    @MarionEvans

    Fake John/Jane Galt:There is no ROI in having children. All long term expense with little benefit. If you get bad kids then you set yourself up for a lifetime of heartache. If you get good kids then as soon as you can no longer fend them off they take your stuff and lock you up in a home. Better to just get a pet.

    Until… you hit 67 and there aren’t enough of them to pay for your Medicare.

    • #4
  5. Fake John/Jane Galt Coolidge
    Fake John/Jane Galt
    @FakeJohnJaneGalt

    Marion Evans:

    Fake John/Jane Galt:There is no ROI in having children. All long term expense with little benefit. If you get bad kids then you set yourself up for a lifetime of heartache. If you get good kids then as soon as you can no longer fend them off they take your stuff and lock you up in a home. Better to just get a pet.

    Until… you hit 67 and there aren’t enough of them to pay for your Medicare.

    That is what the Mexicans and others are for is it not?  That is why the Democrats and Republicans are so keen on unrestricted immigration both legal and illegal so all those new citizens will pay all those high taxes to pay for the elites, cronies and retired.

    • #5
  6. BD Member
    BD
    @

    This is another Reform Conservative  commercial for the Child Tax Credit.

    • #6
  7. Luke Thatcher
    Luke
    @Luke

    As smarter men than me have warned… Demography is destiny.

    So, where are all the babies coming from? World population is up.

    • #7
  8. Paul DeRocco Member
    Paul DeRocco
    @PaulDeRocco

    I have another theory. Feminism has taught women to regard their own fertility as a health problem–“women’s health” is always a euphemism for contraceptives, sterilization and abortion. Feminism has also made women much more like men, thus making men and women much less attractive to each other. The “gender binary” is the life force. Without it, there will not be as much life.

    • #8
  9. Marion Evans Inactive
    Marion Evans
    @MarionEvans

    Luke:As smarter men than me have warned… Demography is destiny.

    So, where are all the babies coming from? World population is up.

    Europe, America, China, Japan: low birth rates.

    Sub-Saharan Africa, India, Pakistan: high birth rates. Very high in some cases.

    • #9
  10. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Paul DeRocco:I have another theory. Feminism has taught women to regard their own fertility as a health problem–“women’s health” is always a euphemism for contraceptives, sterilization and abortion…

    It’s not just feminism, though. At least among the women I know, several do find fertility (PMS-related migraines, asthma attacks, etc, essentially becoming incapacitated during pregnancy, mastitis while nursing, etc) essentially a health problem – others can tell them they’re not “ill” all they like and it won’t change the fact that it really does feel at least as bad as illness and impairs these women’s function at least as bad as illness.

    Granted, when women were less expected to work like men outside the home, this was likely less of an issue – people who don’t depend on keeping an outside job can afford to be more run-down, more cognitively distracted by pain, hormones, or what have you. And yes, it’s possible to blame feminism for women’s thinking that their work ethic in the workforce should equal men’s if you like. But I’d say it’s more a natural product of women entering the workforce (something which medicine to treat the side-effects of female fertility now allows them to do), whether they ascribe to any sort of feminism or not.

    • #10
  11. I Walton Member
    I Walton
    @IWalton

    So materialism, family life, children, secularism, self absorption and at least a century of cultural erosion are irrelevant, because babies are just dependent variables in a macro equation?

    • #11
  12. Arizona Patriot Member
    Arizona Patriot
    @ArizonaPatriot

    Looking at the graph, the decline in US fertility rate appears to coincide better with the Democrat victory in Congress in 2006, rather than with the recession that started in late 2008.  It also coincides with the legal recognition of same-sex marriage.

    I don’t know if either of these has a causal effect.  I am very confident that it is the result of multiple factors.  I suspect that cultural factors are more significant than economic factors, and this seems supported by the data.

    • #12
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