US Birth Rate Hits New Low – A Nation of Singles

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/12/us-birth-rate-hits-new-low-a-nation-of-singles/

by moocow01 • 14 years ago

50 72 14 years ago

usaar333• 14 years ago

> To get a sense of how powerful the marriage effect is, not just for women but for men, too, look at the exit polls by marital status. Among non-married voters – people who are single and have never married, are living with a partner, or are divorced – Obama beat Romney 62-35. Among married voters Romney won the vote handily, 56-42.

I'd be interested in seeing these numbers adjusted for age, various SES indicators, etc.

clarkm• 14 years ago

You can do all the crosstabs you want here: http://elections.reuters.com/#poll

The marriage gap is much bigger than the gender gap, age gap, and any socioeconomic gap. I think it falls right below the race gap in terms of size, and is probably on par with the religious/non-religious gap.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

Agreed. Young people and single mothers are both very unlikely to be married and already known to hugely favor Democrats.

mtoddh• 14 years ago

Interesting, my guess is this is the demographic the Obama campaign was courting with the Life of Julia [1] slide-show a while back-

http://www.barackobama.com/life-of-julia/

WalterSear• 14 years ago

very interesting, but the part about singles being less concerned with the future is more than slightly ridiculous. IMHE, parenthood brings on a set of priorities that override longer term, less tangible issues in favour of supporting children.

hype72• 14 years ago

Thank god someone else picked up on this. I'm willing to take the article at face value in its description of the results of the research; but the analysis is all nut job territory.

The singles not caring about the future is one perfect example. If it were true, and it were only the regions with high concentrations of parents caring about the future, then you would see much stronger support for actions to prevent climate change in areas where there are higher birth rates. The thing is, you don't - it's the cities - the places that the author is bemoaning for the lack of kids (he even calls cities "pleasure centers") that are at the forefront of trying to fix the big problems. The areas with the high birth rates are the ones that seemingly don't care about the future.

So yeah, take every last bit of his analysis with a grain of salt. He strikes me as a "America has been going backwards since the 1950s" type and he's trying to back the data in to fit his preconceived notions of how the world should work.

lucian3034• 14 years ago

Less stupid people being brought into the world? I see nothing wrong with that. It's about time.

EDIT: And seriously: "The US birth rate has continued to decline to a record low since the recession of 2007-2009. This is alarming."

This is not alarming. The depression never ended. It'll be 2013 soon and we're still in a depression. This is supposed to be a serious educated article? Fail!

daeken• 14 years ago

s/Less/Fewer/; But anyway, saying things like "stupid people being brought into the world" is meaningless. That's not a birth issue, but an education one; you can argue that fewer people in the country makes education a simpler problem, but I don't know that that really matters in the grand scheme of things. Especially since birth rates for lower socioeconomic class families aren't dropping, to my knowledge, and those are the ones generally in the worst position for education.

lucian3034• 14 years ago

There is no decent educational system in the US. Finally, stupid or not, more people in this world is the last thing we need. 7 bil++. The earth has limits (water)! Not to mention the artificial scarcities of non-scarce goods which none of the people in power are willing to stop.

tsotha3• 14 years ago

>This is not alarming.

It's certainly alarming if you have pay-go pension schemes like Social Security and Medicare. The way things are going either the young will live under a crushing tax burden or people who paid into social welfare programs for fifty years won't see any benefit. That's not a recipe for a stable society.

dnu3• 14 years ago

The pay-go pension system is a huge ponzi scheme because it needs more and more people into the game with each generation. It lasted less than a century and it's on the edge of collapse now. Why should we postpone the inevitable?

lucian3034• 14 years ago

True. You have to accept this as it's inevitable. We're already paying for baby boomer's SS. There will be nothing left for us. I just hope that there's enough for the boomers.

eli_gottlieb• 14 years ago

Everyone said, "Bail out the banks and you risk turning into Japan."

You bailed out the banks. Now you're turning into Japan.

Mazal tov, America! You're committing national suicide!

prostoalex4• 14 years ago

Assumption here being that US needs more younger people.

Let's see a couple trends here though:

1) US life expectancy is on the rise, I guess one of the most expensive healthcare systems in the world is good for something.

2) Average retirement age is moving farther ahead - Reuters recently ran an article about startup founders who are 60+ y.o. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/27/us-valley-ageism-i...

3) Rise of robotics outsourced a good portion of typical physical jobs to machines - iRobot, Kiva Systems, Tesla's car-manufacturing robot arms

4) Youth unemployment is on the rise

5) Youth STEM skills, the only applicable skills that matter in current economic climate, are declining

Why does the country need large amounts of young people again? A bunch of the assumptions - you need younger people to slave off to contribute taxes towards the retirement of the elderly - are a bit shaky to say the least. Most of the youth employed at various menial jobs are earning low enough income to qualify them for tax credits, so they're not a huge revenue source.

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

A bunch of the assumptions - you need younger people to slave off to contribute taxes towards the retirement of the elderly - are a bit shaky to say the least.

The assumption that they will be able to supply that revenue is indeed shaky, but the assumption that one needs them to do so is well-founded. Traditionally immigration has been the safety valve for demographic mismatches, as ably documented here: http://www.ssab.gov/documents/immig_issue_brief_final_versio...

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

It's less about having a class of youth, as having a group of people up-and-coming to replace the old guard.

varjag• 14 years ago

> 3) Rise of robotics outsourced a good portion of typical physical jobs to machines - iRobot, Kiva Systems, Tesla's car-manufacturing robot arms

This is really of no consequence. Do you know any janitor who lost a job to roomba?

CNC have been there en mass since 1970s, and robotics since 1980s. A robotic assembly line is featured in final scene of Terminator (1984), and it was very much state of the art then.

However, contrary to doomsday prophecies of the time, what replaced American jobs were not the soulless machines in Japan, but penniless workers in China. The future never seems to play out in the coolest sci-fi way.

3825• 14 years ago

Is this[1] the problem in Japan that you are talking about? Seems like the main idea is we had to find a way to get the banks to start lending again. The government can't open a shop and lend to small businesses themselves. What other option did we have other than to bail out the banks? Honest question. I don't know very much about these things.

[1] http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/bailout.html

tsotha3• 14 years ago

The bank bailout had nothing to do with anything. This is a longer term trend.

jlgreco• 14 years ago

If we are discarding of a distinction between correlation and causation, the best way to increase birth rate is to plunge the public into crippling poverty.

ars• 14 years ago

One interesting thing is that this seems a bit self-correcting.

Assuming there is any genetic component to the desire for having children and religiosity (and I believe there is), that means that non-religious people, and people who are not interested in having children are breeding themself out of existence.

It'll probably be many generations before the results are large, but it should cause a dramatic shift eventually. (Which will probably eventually get too large, causing yet another shift in the other direction.)

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

I wonder if this is one of the major ways (other than conversion) that the major religions of the modern world spread in the first place. After all, they all seem to emphasize having children to a great degree, something that I don't think existed in many other religions.

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

I've read somewhere before that the religious compulsion towards having many children is to keep the meme of religion going through multiple generations. It's certainly highly prevalent through the Catholic Church, especially given that the priesthood is essentially a non-replenishing rank based off the old tradition of following in your fathers footsteps for work.

lkrubner• 14 years ago

"Assuming there is any genetic component to the desire for having children and religiosity (and I believe there is)"

The genetic argument should cancel itself it out. After all, if genetic factors should eventually cause people to have more children, then how is it possible for us to have a 55 year trend toward less children (as the article says, since 1957)? If genetics can eventually correct this trend, then why hasn't it already done so? For you to make this argument solidly, you'd have to establish at least 1 of 2 dependent arguments:

1.) there is some critical number that triggers a reaction

2.) there was, in the past, some force that allowed people to defy the genetic impulse to have children, but whatever that force was, it will no longer have as much power in the future

Here on Hacker News I have, several times, seen people invoke the idea that child-raising is a genetic impulse and that therefore the trend toward less children should be self-correcting. The people who advance this idea don't seem to get the irony of the suggestion.

Here is a bit of personal history: my great grandmother had 16 children. My mother had 4 children. Of the 4 of us, we are mostly past the age where we would consider having children. The 4 of us have so far had a total of 3 children, and I don't think there will be any more children, so my mom has less grand-children then she had children. This surprises her.

There are some powerful forces pushing the trend towards less children. My feeling is that some people are glib in their dismissals of the trend. A poorly thought out genetic argument would fall into my category of glib.

hitechnomad• 14 years ago

Agreed. You could easily argue that in an agrarian society children are an economic benefit (because your wealth is based on working the land), whereas in an urban society having children is an economic burden.

Daniel_Newby• 14 years ago

> If genetics can eventually correct this trend, then why hasn't it already done so?

Is this a joke? Evolution takes many generations. It has been less than 3 generations since 1957.

The question then becomes whether evolution has any pre-existing raw material to work with. The data give a resounding yes. Attention deficit hyperactuvity disorder is almost certainly genetic, and is strongly correlated with early reproduction and more children. Ditto for IQ.

And societies are also subject to cultural evolution. Catholicism and Mormonism confer a high fertility rate, and it appears to be heritable.

henrikschroder2• 14 years ago

...except for the fact that non-religiosity is spreading quite a lot faster than people can breed. Religious indoctrination runs in families, but reason and skepticism are universal.

Pkeod• 14 years ago

I wouldn't count on it. Even if it were possible the genetic pool is too vast for single traits to really have an impact. Plus consider that most (if not all?) homosexuals have heterosexual parents - that is more influenced by number children, but it shows that there is more involved than just people who have the traits being selected out. Most of the biggest advocates against religion were born in religious families. Most parents regret having kids, most couples who have kids are less happy than couples who don't have kids. People wanting to be child free is here to stay and it will grow before it has any chance of being bred out. Choosing to be child free is the rational thing to do if you want to be happy. I welcome people to join more people avoiding having kids here: http://reddit.com/r/childfree

dnu3• 14 years ago

In case of homosexuality it could be that the genes which cause this in a man are also helping his sister in becoming more attractive to other men (and the brother of a homosexual woman to be more attractive to other women).

I have no stats on this, but it would be interesting to see if the sisters of gay men and the brothers of lesbian women do have more kids than the average (for the same education and income levels, of course).

ThomPete• 14 years ago

Wow that might be a little premature. The US do not have anything close to the problems the European countries are facing.

aes256• 14 years ago

Indeed, the latest figures (2012, CIA World Factbook) show the United States' 13.68 births per theousand persons is still higher than most of Western Europe.

The demographic-economic paradox [1] is fascinating.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox

henrikschroder2• 14 years ago

Still, we might hit negative growth worldwide in about 50 years, that's going to be very interesting.

sterna• 14 years ago

It is true that the US has had remarkebly high birth rates during the last 30 years compared to most of Europe and the rich cuntries in Asia. However, once the trend for low fertility has been established it is extremely difficult to break. Even the countries in Europe that have given strong economic incentives to have children have still not managed to keep their fatility rates at replacement level. The only exception is Ireland, which has strong anti- abortion laws. Teherefore it important of the US to confront the problem of declining fertility before it has turned into a permanent problem.

pbateman2• 14 years ago

Not yet. Europe (and Japan) gives us a taste of things to come.

chriscool• 14 years ago

The marriage rate is lower than ever because we are in a transition from a patriarchy to a matriarchy. See my blog post about it:

http://blog.couder.net/post/2012/06/30/Sex-and-Power

lifebar2• 14 years ago

Marriage is also lower because feminism made all women paranoid, made them want to be victims. Man can't approach woman as easily these days - will be accused of rape, harrasement, day rape if he tries. Example - suggest cup of coffe to woman in elevator - instant rapist (I hope everyone still remembers that incident) . By the way, was't there some statistics that it's men don't want to marry thesedays (for obvious reasons - women start most of divorces and takes almost everything. And men that stars divorce are famous for getting their pen1s cut off and thrown in garbage disposer.) Why it's hard to approach feminism indoctrinated wiman (victim syndrome) kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-schrodinger%E2%80%99s-rapist-or-a-guy%E2%80%99s-guide-to-approaching-strange-women-without-being-maced/

hazov• 14 years ago

When I lived in the US I had no problem to call girls for a beer, even one that called herself a feminist and studied feminist literature in her MSc... maybe this is just a moral panic where you live, rape is not that common in New England and people are not paranoid about it, at least this was true in the cities I lived.

But I never approached strange women on the street, only people that I knew or was introduced before.

rorrr• 14 years ago

So? It's not like we're running out of people.

hayksaakian• 14 years ago

Birth rates are low but population continues to grow. The US is still a nation of immigrants, once we accept that with our Immigration laws we'll be fine.

rdl3• 14 years ago

Assuming we can handle the "421" problems, a world population in the 1-2 billion range, purely through low fertility rate, would solve a lot of environmental problems. You could have first-world quality of life for everyone, with reasonable technology advances, and still have a much lower impact on the environment than we have now.

Under 2b seems like the right number unless space colonization is seriously in force.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 14 years ago

Unless we see huge advances, I think we are doomed with space colonisation, since we put more energy in than we can take out, i.e., it produces non-self-sustaining space colonies reliant on Earth.

rdl3• 14 years ago

Yeah, but I'd bet on huge advances over the next millenium, assuming we don't seriously screw things up. I'd bet on robots doing a lot of the work.

There are clearly mineral resources in space which seem worthwhile -- asteroids, and potentially fuels or consumables from some planets.

Something which consisted of U-235/Pu-239 exports from Earth to space, where space then returns some minerals.

I doubt we'd get appreciable human population off the earth and into the solar system, unless we intentionally went for that. It would probably be easier to do high-density earth colonies using resources brought in from off-world. The surfaces of Mars and the Moon don't seem particularly hospitable compared to the Sahara or Antarctica or the oceans.

antidoh3• 14 years ago

We may wish we're doomed to space colonization.j

"The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand." - Carl Sagan, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

What he's saying is that anything viable is too far away. Forget about the Moon or Mars, we cannot protect a population against radiation, and if we could we may as well build that same habitat here on our then presumably inhabitable planet that we're already on.

Don't just use the planet up and walk away from it, because there's nowhere to go.

pbateman2• 14 years ago

The problem is the world isn't shrinking. It's just the wealthy educated bits of it that are. So we're going to have a shrinking number of first world citizens surrounded by ever increasing numbers of the global poor.

Now, if you wipe out poverty entirely and bring everyone up to the same standard of living and education you'll probably see a shrinking global population. But that isn't happening yet and won't happen for a long time.

cpursley• 14 years ago

Actually, it is happening. The western world's wealth has been decreasing over the past 10 years while the rest of the world has been rising out of poverty (for the most part).

onetwothreefour• 14 years ago

You can go first.

rdl3• 14 years ago

I have already basically decided I don't want to have kids, so to that extent, I've "gone first" already.

As for going first to Mars, I think Elon is going to beat us all.

tomwalker• 14 years ago

Why do we need to continue to increase or maintain the population?

DanBC3• 14 years ago

To pay and care for the current population.

People live longer; diseases of old age are not cured yet and are considerably expensive and labour intensive. You need lots of people earning money and paying taxes to provide for that older generation. You also need lots of people to do the physical care of that population.

hype72• 14 years ago

You are promoting the economic equivalent of a Ponzi scheme that by its very definition is not sustainable.

prostoalex4• 14 years ago

This works in some kind of flat tax system, which isn't really how it works in the US.

Fresh college graduates end up with significant education debt, and interest payments on student loans are deductible. For the rest the system of credits allows for zero net tax obligation as far as federal budget is concerned http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Donald-Marron/2011/0728/Wh...

US economy is dependent on high income earners, which might or might not be younger people.

loceng• 14 years ago

The problem is health-related - physical, mental, and emotional - along with not getting the proper support of the community that it takes to raise a healthy child, not just for the child, but for the parents.

Ygg2• 14 years ago

I have a question. How does one solve negative birth rate effectively? What are possible cases in which the trend was reversed?

gte910h2• 14 years ago

I was pretty good then got all ideologue at the end with unfounded assertions.

pasbesoin• 14 years ago

Personally, anecdotally, I would find it exhausting to try to catalog all the ways in which child-rearing has been disincentivised in my own life.

I find this all another instance of the outsized hypocrisy in the U.S. Bemoaning something, while simultaneously taking seemingly every action to reinforce it.

(There are a lot of secondary effects, that I won't go into here, that seem to trigger... "outrage" in some of the very people contributing most strongly to the primary condition. Deceit, or stupidity. Seems to be some of each.)

US Birth Rate Hits New Low – A Nation of Singles

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