America’s 250th birthday is cause not only for celebration but for examination of what made America great in the past – including the dynamic population growth experienced in the colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. While obviously due in part to immigration to the New World, our rapid growth was primarily driven by robust fertility rates. Even into the Jacksonian era, Americans were reproducing so rapidly that one politician referred to “the American Multiplication Table.”
In The Demographic Dead End, a new report on American fertility from the Institute for Family Studies, demographers Lyman Stone and Peter Foreshaw Brookes examine how that train has gone off the tracks. Though this country is called a “nation of immigrants,” they calculate that around 80 percent of everyone who has lived in America since 1600 was born here. They conclude that “the true source of our growth has been in family and fertility.”
As the title of their report indicates, however, family and fertility are in bad shape. Moving from an American Multiplication Table to Population Subtraction is bad. If our birth rates continue to fall, they write, the scenario will almost certainly bring “economic and political… retreat” before the end of this century.
The remarkable American fertility in the colonial period was so impressive that, in 1775, a Harvard professor named Edward Wigglesworth penned a tract called “Calculations on American Population” predicting that the American population would exceed 1.2 billion people by the year 2000. Wigglesworth’s calculation was based on his documentation of a doubling of the American population about every 20 years.
As Stone and Brookes observe, Wigglesworth’s predictions held till about 1900, when birth rates started trending downward, with several sharp dips, until today’s very low fertility rate.
Some scholars, and indeed many government agencies forecasting what will happen, assume that the period of sub-replacement fertility that started in 2009 will reverse. After all, as Stone and Brookes themselves document, relatively low fertility rates from 1933-1941 and 1972-1989 gave way to healthier levels thereafter. While the authors believe this is possible, they do not think it likely absent societal and perhaps even governmental action. As the subtitle of their report puts it, “Without Decisive Action, American Population Will Soon Decline.”
While the “replacement” fertility rate is 2.1 births per woman, American women now bear just 1.6 children on average.
True, some regions of America are doing better than others. In their section “Fertility in the 50 States,” Stone and Brookes show that the Northeast and the West Coast are particularly short on children. Massachusetts, which mandated reporting on births in 1639, has had ups and downs. Today, however, it has the lowest birth rate in the country: 1.35 children per woman.
Much healthier is the heartland – and the difference isn’t just economic. “Only in the upper South and the Great Plains does some vestige of the old American family culture still remain for reproductive-age people,” they write. Even there, however, the results have been mixed. South Dakota is the only state with “fertility rates high enough to be near or at the long-run population-stability level.” Stone and Brookes summarize “the state of American fertility” as “not good.”
What’s causing this slow-moving crisis? They allude to digital culture that has caused Americans to have far fewer friends than in the past. This might be connected to a contagion effect in which people don’t know enough married, parent friends to find the prospect plausible. The authors demonstrate that having peers with more children correlates with higher fertility.
So, too (especially for women), does following celebrities with more children. Many have joked that if the newly married Taylor Swift starts having babies, it will provoke a new baby boom. The authors don’t discount this possibility. “It is empirically possible,” they write, “that paying Taylor Swift a billion dollars to have children might produce more children in society than spending the money on child tax credits.”
It isn’t just influence, however. As important as simply having friends with children is to increasing fertility, more important is having what the authors call “helpful friends,” that is, those whom people can count on to help with the baby or bring meals.
That this often happens in church groups is probably a big reason why religious practice is correlated with both higher desired fertility and higher fertility itself. Stone and Brookes suggest several legal strategies for encouraging friendship, including legislation or regulation “to ensure that informal care arrangements are not punished.”
The authors do think economic incentives are important, too. Among their propositions are: “American Birthday Accounts” that would invest $15,000 for every child born that would be progressively accessible when the grown child had children of his own; reforms to Social Security calculations that would “credit” caregivers who stay at home with their children with the income levels they had in the years before they had children; an end to marriage penalties, either by ending joint income tax filing, as other countries have done to increase birth rates, or “going through existing tax and benefit programs, line by line” to get rid of any penalties for marriage; and legislation to address the “housing crisis,” in which Americans have seen “zero increase in residential square footage per capita in 25 years,” despite large gains in American population.
If one can criticize the suggestions, it is that most of these policy suggestions are likely to help married people, whose desire for children is often higher than what they have, achieve their desires. This is good, but what we really need is more marriage.
The authors are aware of this. Their final policy proposals are aimed at achieving more “real-life socializing.” Marriage and babies are “in-person” activities that require more experience of real, incarnate relationships than many “digital natives” have acquired.
The Demographic Dead End is sobering reading. Yet it is also hopeful. Too few realize how low fertility levels are. Too many don’t realize that even immigration couldn’t be a long-term solution since worldwide fertility levels are shrinking too. Stone and Brookes remind us that making American greatness last will require that we reinstate the American Multiplication Table.
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