Not Everyone Is Worried About America's Falling Birth Rates

Matter of Opinion

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Ross Douthat, News, New York Times, Journalism

4.2 • 7.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2021

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

U.S. birthrates have fallen by 4 percent, hitting a record low. And it’s not just America — people around the world are having fewer children, from South Korea to South America. In some ways, this seems inevitable. From an economic standpoint, there’s the expensive trio of child rearing, education and health care in America. From a cultural perspective, women have more financial and societal independence, delaying the age of childbirth. What might be troubling are the consequences on our future economy and what an older population might mean for Social Security. This week, Jane Coaston talks to two demographers who have differing levels of worry about the news of our falling birthrate. Lyman Stone is the director of research at the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence, an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a Robert Novak Journalism fellow and a Ph.D. student in population dynamics at McGill University. Caroline Hartnett is a demographer and an associate professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina. You can listen to this episode of “The Argument” on Apple, Spotify or Google or wherever you get your podcasts. A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today on the argument, what's the big deal about the falling birth rate?
0:07.0	The U.S. Census reports over the last decade the population grew at the slowest rate since
0:16.6	the 1930s.
0:17.6	The number of babies the average woman is expected to deliver in her lifetime has dropped from
0:22.2	nearly 4 in the 1950s to less than 2 today and that could present an entirely different
0:28.1	threat to society as we know it.
0:30.1	You have an economy that since the end of the Second World War has grown based on consumerism,
0:35.1	what happens when all your consumers are old and they have everything they want?
0:41.1	A lot of headlines about falling birth rates in the United States elsewhere make it
0:45.0	sound like a major disaster.
0:47.3	That fewer babies spells doom for our future economy and that an older population means fewer
0:52.1	workers and fewer people paying into social security.
0:55.6	I'm Jane Kostin and to me having kids is the result of individual choices and societal
1:00.5	context.
1:01.5	Do you want to have kids and does it feel possible to have kids?
1:06.1	That's why I'm interested in all the debates around declining birth rates.
1:09.8	I wonder what's driving the choices families are making and how policymakers are thinking
1:13.8	about changing them and I'm wondering should we be concerned about this?
1:18.1	How concerned or not should we be?
1:24.3	My guest today study population growth and shrinking and have different ideas on how
1:28.3	worse and falling birth rates are than what we should do about it.
1:32.1	Flemingstone is the director of research at the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence,
	...

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