This week, Lyman Stone and W. Bradford Wilcox of the American Enterprise Institute and Demographic Intelligence debate economist, writer and speaker Marina Adshade about whether America’s falling birthrate is problematic. We hope you find it both entertaining and enlightening.
Josh Hammer, Newsweek opinion editor, is also a syndicated columnist, of counsel at First Liberty Institute and a popular campus speaker.
No more. The number of empty cradles across the United States is growing. In the immediate wake of the Great Recession, fertility fell. First, it fell during the lean years after the recession, as many expected. But then, to the surprise of many commentators, the birthrate continued to fall even as the economy recovered. This year, in 2020, our firm Demographic Intelligence forecasts that the total fertility rate will fall below 1.7, potentially putting the nation on the road to the kind of exceptionally low fertility rates we have seen in East Asian countries like Japan (1.43) and China (1.68)—the latter of which only recently lifted its one-child policy. And the COVID-19 fertility fallout will only make things worse.
Be very wary of how births are measured. For example, say you are told that 43 percent of women under the age of 40 have no children. That seems shockingly high, right? But that measure—the share of women under the age of 40 who have no children—is very sensitive to the age at which a woman gives birth to her first child.
