Sometimes a society’s values change sharply with almost no one noticing, much less anticipating the consequences. In 1968, according to a Gallup survey, 70 percent of American adults said that a family of three or more children was “ideal”—about the same number as in Gallup surveys starting in 1938. That number helps explain the postwar baby boom that exploded after Americans were no longer constrained by depression and world war.
Those values and those numbers didn’t last. By 1978, Gallup reported that only 32 percent considered three or more children “ideal.” The numbers have hovered around there ever since, spiking to just 41 percent amid the late 1990s tech boom.
The change in values and behavior took time to register. Just before the 1972 election, Richard Nixon and a Democratic Congress goosed up Social Security benefits. They figured the baby boom generation was just delaying producing a baby boom of its own. They were wrong, and Social Security has needed patching up ever since.
Similarly, the 1970s showed sharp increases in female work force participation, divorce and singe-parent households, and decreased participation in voluntary organizations. This was all unanticipated.
Is a similar values shift happening now? Maybe so, suggest George Mason academic Philip Auerswald and Palo Alto hedge funder Joon Yun in an article in the New York Times.
They point out that Americans’ fertility rate—the number of children per woman age 15 to 44—has hit a post-1970s low. Birth rates typically drop in recessions and rise a bit during booms. They did drop notably in 2007-09. But the latest data don’t show a rebound, despite significant economic growth and record low unemployment.
The trend varies among demographic groups. Native-born Hispanics and blacks used to have above-replacement (2.1 births per woman) rates. Now they’re below-replacement, almost as low as native-born whites and Asians, which are down only a bit. Immigrant birth levels remain above replacement levels among blacks, but only barely above among Hispanics and below among whites and Asians.
One possible consequence: Those often gleeful predictions that whites will soon be a minority will not be realized so soon, or maybe ever. Nor is it clear, as sociologist Richard Alba has suggested, that often-intermarrying Hispanics and Asians will see themselves as aggrieved minorities. They might, as Italians and Poles once did, just blend in.
Also, the sharp drop in Hispanic birth rates, combined with the sharp drop in Hispanic (especially Mexican) immigration post-2007, means a lower proportion of immigrants with low skills competing for jobs with low-skilled Americans. Asian immigrants may outnumber Hispanics and arrive with significantly higher skill levels. So do immigrants from African countries like Nigeria and Ghana. Their capacity for expanding the economy rather than competing for low-skilled jobs may point to unexpected growth. And neither group arrives with grievances rooted in slavery and American racial segregation.
Other familiar trends may be reversed. Demographer Lyman Stone, citing various data, argues that “the decline in fertility is mostly due to declining marriage,” as he writes in IFS Studies. The issue lies with black and lower-income white women having difficulty finding suitable spouses. They might have more success if the recent increase in downscale wages continues.
Similarly, fewer young people would get caught in the trap of incurring huge college debt for worthless degrees (or no degrees at all) if, as the Manhattan Institute’s Aaron Renn suggests, higher education enrollments, already declining, start plunging precipitously around 2025. Might young people who bypass college find constructive jobs and marry and raise families as their counterparts did in the postwar years?
That’s suggested by another recent trend reversal. During the sluggish 2008-13 economy, young Americans stayed put in tiny child-unfriendly apartments in hip coastal central cities like New York and San Francisco. They paid high rents resulting from stringent environmental restrictions. This was hailed as a move toward progressive attitudes.
But evidently not. As NewGeography.com proprietor Joel Kotkin has observed, when growth returned, young people began heading to children-friendly suburbs and exurbs, ditching subway facecards for SUV fobs.
All of which raises the possibility that current stubbornly low birth rates may be on the verge of a rise, away from the economically and culturally divided, low-brith-rate society described of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, and perhaps toward something suggested by Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again.”
For the moment, these countertrends are just possibilities. But because persistently low birth rates lead to population loss, economic stagnation and low creativity, let’s hope some of them come true.
