MinnesotaSmith
Membership Revoked
The Global Fertility Crisis
By LYMAN STONE
January 9, 2020
(Hill Street Studios/Getty Images)America is not immune
South Korea recently denied draft exemptions for members of the K-pop boy band and international sensation BTS. BTS is one of South Korea’s most dynamic economic and cultural exports, worth about $4.65 billion annually to the South Korean economy. But despite the hundreds of millions of dollars of lost economic output involved, the boys of BTS must serve. The South Korean military cites many reasons for the denial of exemptions, but one reason may simply be urgent need. Thanks to the nation’s critically low birth rate, just 0.88 children expected per woman at 2019 levels, the army is expected to shed over 100,000 troops in the next four years.
Korea’s case is severe, but it may be more common in the future. Birth rates have fallen around the world for decades. The global total fertility rate (a simple metric of how many children a woman entering her reproductive years would have if current age-specific birth rates remained stable over her life) has fallen from 5.04 kids per woman in 1963 to about 2.43 today.
U.S.A. DATA: LYMAN STONE’S ESTIMATES FROM CDC, CENSUSES, AND STATE VITAL-STATISTICS OFFICES. WORLD DATA: GAPMINDER
The change in the United States in recent years has been particularly rapid: Fertility rates have declined from about 2.12 children per woman in 2006 to just 1.72 today. The figure could head even lower in the near future, especially if another recession hits. In the long run, if fertility remains low, the result will be increasing economic stagnation, greater intergenerational economic and political tension, and, ultimately, strategic insecurity. There is still time to address the problem by proposing pro-natal policies, but not much. Moreover, for pro-natal policymaking to work, it will have to confront numerous disparate issues at the same time. Labor conditions, family income supports, housing policy, and education finance are all involved.
However, the much-discussed decline in global birth rates over the last half century is overstated. Adjusting for children who died before age five, fertility in 1963 was just 4.4 kids per woman, and today birth rates are around 2.3 kids per woman. Human birth rates actually peaked in 1963. Global, mortality-adjusted fertility rates probably rose from 1800 until the 1960s, with fewer than 3.5 children born per woman surviving to age five throughout most of the 19th century. Based on plausible population estimates of historic human populations, it’s likely that three surviving children was the norm for most of human history. Modern hygiene, better birth control, improved education, and better nutrition all worked together to reduce child mortality over time.
Meanwhile, the shift away from rural agriculture and towards urban wage work changed the economics of childbearing. Pre-modern people would not understand the idea that the cost of living is too high to have kids; they would respond that if your costs are too high, you need more kids, since kids help with farm labor. But today, instead of being investment capital, children are a form of consumption.
Contraceptive technology hastened that shift, but academic research does not support the idea that it caused it. Economists attribute at most 40 percent of the post-1957 fertility decline to improved contraceptive access. The first country to undergo a fertility transition was France, in the 18th century, long before modern contraceptives, and academic research has pinpointed numerous cases of discrete economic or cultural shocks that triggered fertility transition quite independently of contraceptive access. Tellingly, the United States first reached birth rates around two children per woman during the Roaring Twenties, not during the Great Depression or after contraception became widely available. Today, fertility rates are falling in countries with rapidly expanding contraceptive access, and also in those without.
Besides those related to contraception, other government policies may matter too, including intergenerational transfers such as Social Security, which reduce fertility by creating a moral hazard. Historically, children were the primary means of old-age support. This support is now state-provided. The state in turn depends on families to produce enough children to finance society-wide retirement programs. An expanding old-age safety net may be a very good thing for many reasons, but one of its adverse consequences has been reduced fertility.
But again, it’s important not to overstate the case here, because in societies with stingy old-age programs, such as those in much of East Asia, fertility rates have fallen even lower. In such societies, which have long life expectancies and high standards of living, deficient pensions can motivate higher savings rates. This can make the cost of having extra children much higher, because having more kids makes it harder to save. Children born in these societies are often pushed to be extremely competitive so that they have good employment prospects and will be able to support their parents.
Aside from these material and policy influences, another trend is at work around the developed world: delayed and declining marriage. The share of reproductive-age women in a society who are married, or alternatively the age at first marriage, is one of the best predictors of that society’s birth rate. This holds up across countries but also across individuals, because a woman’s lifetime fertility is well predicted by her marital history during ages 15–50. Within the United States, married women are still two to four times as likely to have a child in a given year than are unmarried women of the same age.
The decline in marriage is driven by many factors, some of them praiseworthy. For example, longer life expectancies change the incentive to marry young. Isn’t it worthwhile to spend a few extra years looking for the right life partner if life is getting much longer? Relatedly, divorce rates are falling across the developed world as young adults become more deliberate in choosing a spouse.
In most societies marriage is delayed until culturally sanctioned initiation rites into adulthood have been completed, and in virtually all societies the transition to adulthood also signifies an end to education. The initiate is no longer primarily a learner and dependent, but now a teacher and contributor. In pre-modern societies with little formal education, high demands for manual labor, and short life expectancies, the ritual transition to adulthood comes early in life. But in most modern societies, thanks to the intense demands for knowledge and human capital in our economy, “ritual adulthood” is achieved later and later, as years of education continue to rise across virtually all occupational categories. That is to say, the more years of school needed before a person is done being a student, the more other key transitions, including marriage, are likely to be delayed.
Young Americans who anticipate “adulting” are not being frivolous; they are correctly recognizing that society has postponed their ritual entrance into adulthood.
Finally, some researchers have identified changed ideas about transcendence as an even more abstract source of fertility decline. In this telling, the economic calculus takes a back seat. People had more kids in the past not because it was necessary, but because it was their duty: to God, to their family, to their people, or simply to the idea of humanity. According to this theory, best supported by research on the United States, fertility rates represent the extent to which individuals conceive of themselves as part of, and beholden to, a transcendent community that reaches across lifespans. To the extent that Christendom or the American experiment or the continuation of the species matters to you, you have kids. But as society has become wealthier, life expectancies longer, and childbearing costlier, the “price tag” on living out a commitment to a transcendent community has risen. Therefore, fewer people hold such values, and in turn fewer children grow up with them. The end result of this cycle is the low-fertility trap, a situation in which intergenerational changes in norms make it nearly impossible to return to replacement-rate fertility, the level needed to keep a society’s population stable.
The aforementioned explanations of low fertility may do a great job explaining why fertility fell from between three and seven children per woman in the 1960s to one to three children per woman today, but they are just about useless for explaining why the birth rate in every developed country has plummeted in the last decade. It is implausible that Finland’s attitude to transcendence or its contraceptive access or its urbanization or the extent of its wage labor has changed enough in the last decade to account for its nearly unprecedented decline in birth rates, from 1.9 children per woman in 2010 to approximately 1.3 today.