Nicholas Eberstadt on What Declining Birthrates Mean for the Future of the West

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2021

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Until recently, America was an outlier: despite rising affluence, its birthrate remained high, unlike in other countries where more riches have brought fewer children. That’s no longer the case today. America is now in demographic decline. Writing in National Review, the political economist and demographer Nicholas Eberstadt observes that

U.S. fertility levels have never before fallen as low as they are today. In 2019—before the coronavirus pandemic—America’s total fertility rate (TFR—a measure of births per woman per lifetime) was 1.71, roughly 18 percent lower than the roughly 2.1 births per woman required for long-term population stability. By then, U.S. fertility levels were so low that even Mormon Utah had gone sub-replacement. And U.S. fertility levels were even lower in 2020. With a TFR of 1.64, America was well over 20 percent below replacement.

Eberstadt goes on to note that there’s reason to believe that the U.S. fertility rate may drop even further in the coming years. He joins this week’s podcast to discuss why this is happening, what it means for American society, whether it can be reversed, and, if it can't, how America can cope with it.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Recently on the Tikva podcast, I spoke with the reporter Susie Weiss, who, in a recent piece,
0:14.8	profiled the lives of several women who affirmed that they were committed to a way of life
0:19.5	that precludes motherhood and the raising of
0:21.7	children. Some were merely child-free, while others were positively anti-natalist, holding the view
0:27.6	that it is not only wrong for them to have children, but indeed that it is wrong for anyone to have
0:32.7	children. As we noted at the time of that discussion, the number of very online women who could afford this luxury belief is probably very small,
0:42.1	and it is not worth highlighting as a widespread force in our public life.
0:46.7	It was worth exploring, though, as perhaps a leading indicator of a tendency of some larger number of women who themselves are less extreme.
0:56.0	Well, that whole conversation was fascinating, and it was built around twice's reporting,
1:00.0	her telling stories of individual women and their spouses and partners.
1:05.0	Today, we stay on the subject of American demographics, but from a different angle of vision.
1:10.0	Today, we zoom out and look,
1:12.3	not at specific case studies at the extremes, but instead at large statistical calculations
1:18.6	of data that capture representative trends. Our question is, can America cope with demographic decline?
1:26.1	Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.
1:29.6	That is the question that the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt asks in a recent feature essay in the National Review.
1:37.5	Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt chair at the American Enterprise Institute.
1:42.3	Let me put some core statistics on the table, quoting from Eberstadt's essay.
1:47.0	U.S. fertility levels have never before fallen as low as they are today.
1:52.2	In 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic, America's total fertility rate, TFR, a measure of births per woman per lifetime, was 1.71, roughly 18% lower
2:06.6	than the roughly 2.1 births per woman required for long-term population stability. By then,
2:13.6	U.S. fertility levels were so low that even Mormon, Utah had gone sub-replacement, and U.S. fertility levels were so low that even Mormon, Utah, had gone sub-replacement.
	...

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