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The Consequences of a Plummeting Birth Rate
Back in March, Ben Domenech interviewed Lyman Stone on the Federalist Radio Hour. Stone is an economist who writes for The Federalist, AEI and the Institute for Family Studies. He and his wife live in Hong Kong.
The whole interview is great and I recommend it. Stone shares a great many unexpected insights. The following is the one that stood out to me the most:
Stone: “We are at the lowest fertility rate in our history right now. We just hit it quite recently and we’re still going down, so we’re going to get lower. Whenever you hit ‘lowest in history’ you are in an anomalous moment. The pace of decline is matched by the pace of decline that we saw after the baby boom, in the 60’s, really, which is striking. That was a period of extremely rapid fertility transition and now we’re seeing it again, but starting from a much lower base. We are rapidly approaching the fertility rates we see in East Asian countries like Korea, Japan, Hong Kong (where I live), Taiwan, and where there are serious social problems associated with it.
Domenech: “Tell me a bit about those social problems.”
Stone: “One is simply long-term economic growth, right? So, we think a lot about Social Security and Medicare: if there aren’t young workers, who will pay for those? So then you get this sort of Libertarian response of ‘Well, then I’ll just save for my own retirement.’ But, hold on, who’s going to buy the hot dogs that prop up the value of the company you are invested in? Heck, who’s going to buy the shares when you try to sell them? Where will the value of the home—that you are leveraging for consumption—come from if there’s not a next generation to buy it?
“There’s an increasing amount of research suggesting that faster population growth yields faster per-person economic growth. People have this idea of population and the economy as a pie, that the pie can stay the same, but if you shrink the number of people you each get a bigger slice. It turns out it’s the opposite; the more people there are, the bigger a pie you bake for everyone…. If the number of future consumers is shrinking, companies understand not to invest.”
There are many other gems in this interview.
(If you enjoy Lyman, Jack Butler has a shorter, less formal interview with him on the Young Americans podcast.)
Published in Economics
Miscarriage rates vary with the interest and technology used to detect them
Most very early losses are undetected except in an infertile population. In my patients, who check a home test 13 seconds after their periods are due, the loss rate is indeed 20%. Almost all of these pregnancies die before 8 weeks after last menses = 42 days from fertilization.
In 1970, we had no ultrasound, no early pregnancy tests, no reliable blood tests for beta-hCG. An early miscarriage could only be detected if a woman passed tissue to analyze, which is uncommon. We had no reliable way to know if a women was pregnant 42 days after fertilization. A loss at 6-8 weeks would likely be considered as a late or missed menses. This often happens today in a disinterested or pregnancy-fearing population.
Indeed, the Carnegie Foundation’s incredible collection of early pregnancy specimens was taken from hysterectomy specimens from reproductive-aged women who were unaware that they were pregnant. So were their Docs.
There is no way I am aware of to make a valid comparison of early miscarriage rates in 2019 to those from before about 1990.
Now, mid trimester losses might be compared, say after 12 weeks. CarolJoy, do you have any data on those? I would be interested to see them.
Thanks
Dr Robert. Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility specialist since 1986.
Except for liberal whites in America. https://reason.com/2019/05/29/white-privilege-study-sympathetic-black-people/
This study came out a few weeks ago. Conservatives who learned about white privilege basically didn’t change their attitudes towards either blacks or poor whites. But liberals were another story:
“For liberals, the results were alarming: Liberals who read the educational materials about white privilege were similarly unsympathetic to the poor black man as the liberals in the second experiment, but they were even more unsympathetic to the poor white man.”
“What we found startling was that white privilege lessons didn’t increase liberals’ sympathy for poor Black people,” writes Erin Cooley, one of the study’s authors and an assistant professor of psychology at Colgate University, in an explanatory post for Vice. “Instead, these lessons decreased liberals’ sympathy for poor white people, which led them to blame white people more for their own poverty. They seemed to think that if a person is poor despite all the privileges of being white, there must really be something wrong with them.”
Not even with their own subculture?
They aren’t allowed a subculture.
Yeah. White people are weird.
The thing is, people generally don’t ask for permission from other people to be proud of themselves.
Other people don’t have to agree that you’re awesome for you to believe it. Amirite?
I prefer going mild with this one.
No self-hatred to pride. Just, it’s OK.