As the birthrate has fallen for the past 17 years, we have been constantly warned against “panicking” over it. The “don’t worry” folks and the “actually this is good” folks both have a favorite argument: People aren’t forming families less, they’re just forming families later.
Often this is presented as not merely a personal choice, but as a sign of progress: Older marriage means more mature marriage, and later births mean more educated and more financially sound parents.
Economics writer Mike Konczal is the latest to make this argument, with a blog post titled “The Eldest Millennials Had the Same Fertility as the Youngest Baby Boomers.”
THE BABY BUST HITS THE 30-SOMETHINGS
The message of this post was received by liberal academics this way: “What looks like people having a lot fewer children than they did 25 years ago, is really just people having children later.”
Konczal is handy with statistics, and he points out the differences between two different measures of the birthrate: the Total Fertility Rate and the Completed Fertility Rate.
TFR is the most commonly cited measure. It’s a modeled number — kind of a prediction — of how many children are being born per each woman across all her childbearing years.
CFR is how many children were actually born to the women who have just exited their childbearing years.
Both of these numbers are very informative, and both have drawbacks.
CFR is only backward-looking. If younger millennials and Gen Z have all decided to never have babies, or if they just lose the ability to find spouses and afford families, that won’t show up in CFR numbers for another 15 or 20 years.
TFR is not sensitive to sudden shifts in family timing. If suddenly, women start shifting their births from their 20s to their 30s, the TFR — modeled on the timing of women before today — will show a decline in babies when really that’s not happening.
This is exactly what Konczal claims is happening:
“The eldest millennials have the same completed fertility rates as the youngest boomers. There’s been no drop within the 21st century of the number of kids a woman has once she reaches 44 years old.”
“The youngest boomers” is an interesting point of comparison because the youngest baby boomers had a historically low brood sizes. We Gen Xers are outperforming them.
Konczal argues, “U.S. fertility is happening later, not less.”
He’s half right. Women are having babies later than they used to. But they’re also having fewer babies.
Here’s a stat Konczal should wrestle with from the CDC, relying on a different measure of births: “The birth rate for women ages 30–34 was 94.3 births per 1,000 women in 2023, down 3% from 2022; the rate has generally declined since 2017 by an average of 1% per year… The number of births
to women ages 35–39 was essentially unchanged in 2023.”
Put another way, the current trend is this: Women in their 30s are having fewer and fewer babies every year.
Yes, women in their 40s are having more babies, but this is from a much lower baseline, and this gain can’t make up for the decline in births to women in their 30s.
So the age-specific birthrate data for the past decade looks like this: Women are having a LOT fewer babies before age 30, and they are having slightly fewer babies after age 40.
WE NEED MORE BABIES, AND THE LIBERAL MEDIA STILL CAN’T HANDLE IT
By my calculations, the birthrate-per-thousand women ages 30 to 49 has ticked slightly down from 42.76 babies in 2016 to 42.73 in 2023. The provisional data for 2024 suggest a tiny tick back up, but the point remains: The birthrate isn’t rising for American women past their 30th birthday compared to the middle of last decade. It rose a lot from 2000 to 2016, but it’s been flat since then.
Demographer Lyman Stone has a bigger take on this latest “not-fewer-just-later” argument.
