By James Pethokoukis

In “Children of Men,” the 2006 dystopian masterpiece from director and writer Alfonso Cuarón (based on the novel of the same name by P. D. James), it’s 2027, and humanity has mysteriously gone infertile. It’s not a feel-good film, underscored by the dialogue (“As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd, what happens in a world without children’s voices,” one character, formerly a maternity ward nurse, says) and the score (it includes “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” by Krzysztof Penderecki).

The global malady doesn’t happen all at once, so perhaps at some point demographers produced a chart that looks like this real-world one:

Puzzling out what happened to American birth rates after 2007 is the subject of the recent Journal of Economic Perspectives paper “The Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates since the Great Recession” by economists Melissa S. Kearney (University of Maryland,) Phillip B. Levine (Wellesley College), and Luke Pardue (PhD candidate in Economics, University of Maryland). While the obvious first-pass answer would identify the Global Financial Crisis/Great Recession as the culprit, two factors suggest a more comprehensive explanation is needed: first, the ongoing nature of the decline; and second, the decline is widespread across demographic subgroups, even if concentrated among women under the age of 30.

So if arguably the biggest economic shock since the Great Depression isn’t wholly to blame, what then? From the paper:

The Great Recession contributed to the decline in the early part of this period, but we are unable to identify any other economic, policy, or social factor that has changed since 2007 that is responsible for much of the decline beyond that. Mechanically, the falling birth rate can be attributed to changes in birth patterns across recent cohorts of women moving through childbearing age. We conjecture that the “shifting priorities” of more recent cohorts, reflecting changes in preferences for having children, aspirations for life, and parenting norms, may be responsible. . . . This line of explanation is potentially related to a concept referred to by demographers as the “second demographic transition.”

So not a shocking explanation. One interesting bit of data backing it up: According to the World Values Survey, the researchers note, 32 percent of American women between the ages of 20 and 44 in 2005–2009 reported that work is very important to them versus 47 percent in 2017–2020.

What happens next? Fewer kids without an offsetting increase in net immigration will result in a smaller and older US population. And that has some potential negative economic consequences, from slower productivity growth to financial pressure on social insurance programs. Those impacts, then, argue for “a greater emphasis on technological improvements, along with investments in human capital and productivity-enhancing infrastructure, and a greater emphasis on putting the finances of Social Security and Medicare on a secure basis for the long-term.”

Do they not also argue for pro-natalist policies? Again, from the paper:

The evidence about pronatalist policies that have been implemented and evaluated in the United States and in other high-income countries suggests that these types of policies lead to modest increases in birth rates in the short-term, but are unlikely to lead to sustained higher birth rates (Brainerd 2014; Lopoo et al. 2018; Sobotka, Matysiak, and Brzozowska 2019). Stone (2020a) concluded that a pro-natalist policy would cost $200,000 or more per additional baby born; using such policies to close the gap between current fertility in the United States and the replacement level of fertility would cost somewhere between $250 billion and $1 trillion in new spending per year — a daunting sum.

All in all, a strong case for higher immigration to the US. Or else, maybe, hope for a miracle as seems to have happened in the conclusion of “Children of Men.”

The post The reasons for America’s birth rate decline seem more obvious than possible solutions appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.