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posted by janrinok on Thursday November 28 2019, @02:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-guys-know-what-the-solution-is dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Fertility Rate in U.S. Hit a Record Low in 2018

The rate of births fell again last year, according to new government data, extending a lengthy decline as women wait until they are older to have children.

The number of births per 1,000 women in the United States has been declining even as the economy has recovered from the downturn of 2007-8. 

The fertility rate in the United States fell in 2018 for the fourth straight year, extending a steep decline in births that began in 2008 with the Great Recession, the federal government said on Wednesday.

There were 59.1 births for every 1,000 women of childbearing age in the country last year, a record low, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The rate was down by 2 percent from the previous year, and has fallen by about 15 percent since 2007.

In all, there were 3,791,712 births in the country last year, the center said in its release of final birth data for 2018.

Fertility rates are essential measures of a society's demographic balance. If they are very high, resources like housing and education can be strained by a flood of children, as happened in the postwar Baby Boom years. If they are too low, a country may find itself with too few young people to replace its work force and support its elderly, as in Russia and Japan today.

In the United States, declines in fertility have not led to drops in population, in part because immigration has helped offset them.

The country has been living through one of the longest declines in fertility in decades. Demographers are trying to determine whether it is a temporary phenomenon or a new normal, driven by deeper social change.

Fertility rates tend to drop during difficult economic times, as people put off having babies, and then rise when the economy rebounds. That is what happened during and after the Great Depression of the 1930s. But this time around, the birthrate has not recovered with the economy. A brief uptick in the rate in 2014 did not last.

"It is hard for me to believe that the birthrate just keeps going down," said Kenneth M. Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire.

Mr. Johnson estimated that if the rate had remained steady at its 2007 level, there would have been 5.7 million more births in the country since then.

The decline in 2018 was broad, sweeping through nearly all age groups, and reflected a long, gradual shift in American childbearing to later in the mother's life. The rate fell most steeply among women in their teens — down 7.4 percent from the year before. Births to teenagers have fallen by more than 70 percent since 1991.

Women in their 20s had fewer babies last year as well. Historically, women in their late twenties usually had the highest fertility rates of all, but they were overtaken in 2016 by women in their early 30s, reflecting a trend of later childbearing throughout American society.

The only age groups that recorded increases in fertility rates in 2018 were women in their late 30s and early 40s.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 28 2019, @04:11PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 28 2019, @04:11PM (#925666)

    Think about every single child currently being born. They are largely all buy a ticket in the genetic lottery. Fertility rates determine the odds in that lottery which, in turn, determines what conditions these children will be born into and also plays a disproportionate roles in what their outcomes will be as adults. Fertility is, ultimately, the single largest factor in determining what the future of our species will be.

    Across the world today, well actually mostly just in the western world, a number of factors correlate strongly against fertility - education, income, secularity, liberalism. And the opposite factors all correlate strongly with fertility. Pew carried out some religious projects here [pewforum.org]. There's all sorts of interesting data there. Keep in mind that these projections are not some distant future, but merely 30 years away. The world will go from 23.2% Muslim to 29.7% with ongoing growth. Unaffiliated, which includes agnostics and atheists, will go from 16.4% of the world today to 13.2% with a continuing decline.

    The world is and will continue to grow less educated, poorer, more religious, and less liberal. And this isn't even touching on genetics since even if you want to pretend it doesn't exist, this is already a really awful scenario. Fertility will have a far larger impact on this planet than a few degrees of heating might. Yet you now have e.g. the royal family, who could provide phenomenal lives and upbringing for numerous children, instead virtue signaling that they'll only have 2 kids 'to save the planet'. Ok? And now those who couldn't care less about such things will make up an even bigger chunk of the population. And you live in a democracy where whoever pumps out the most kids, matters the most. Some great longterm planning there.

    People always project in the future taking the present as, more or less, something that will always be. Most do not consider that "we", as defined by our current ideology and culture, may be something people look back to in a fashion similar to how we look back to the ancient Greeks. They had democracy, an advanced civilization, amazing arts and sciences, and were centuries ahead of the most of the rest of the planet. Yet for all of their learning - their civilization simply collapsed only to ultimately be replaced by regressive, superstitious, and incredibly resilient feudal orders.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 28 2019, @04:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 28 2019, @04:27PM (#925670)

    Muh collapse and apocalypse coming any day now! 2000 year old tradition with some who started it (jesus) being still the most worshipped overall after all these years. Eat bugs, stop sexing! Queue in carlin: earth doesn't give a fuck, stop saving the planet, worry about your species. Neither greta or jesus will save you, the most destructive in human history were ideological wars and with chinese and muslims having no fertility problems it is coming, repent!!!

  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 28 2019, @07:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 28 2019, @07:52PM (#925745)

    Congratulations, you just echoed the main point of the El Paso shooter

  • (Score: 2) by dry on Friday November 29 2019, @02:50AM (3 children)

    by dry (223) on Friday November 29 2019, @02:50AM (#925876) Journal

    That's assuming that middle class status won't happen to those Muslims along with more Liberalism. Considering that Christianity managed to go from nutcase crazy to liberal, there is hope.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 29 2019, @04:37AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 29 2019, @04:37AM (#925925)

      You mean it went from sane and sustainable to nutcase retarded?

      • (Score: 2) by dry on Friday November 29 2019, @05:35AM

        by dry (223) on Friday November 29 2019, @05:35AM (#925936) Journal

        Go back 500-1000 years, things were pretty crazy in Christian-ism and the religious wars didn't really end until about 300 years bak.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 29 2019, @08:02AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 29 2019, @08:02AM (#925965)

      I think this view is somewhat arrogant. The reason is that we assume we are right, and people will become like us once they "see the light". Trevor Phillips [wikipedia.org] is the former head of Britian's Equality and Human Rights Commission, is now chairman of the National Equality Standard, and so forth. He's also the person who effectively brought the term Islamophobia into normal usage and was extremely vigilant against such vigilant against such back in the late 90s. He's become rather controversial in recent times for making statements [theguardian.com] such as:

      I think it’s pretty wearying to get up each day and tell yourself to go advocate for something that you know not to be true. And what is even worse is if you’re in public office or politics and everyone you’re telling this to also knows it isn’t true. Not only are you a liar, you’re also an idiot. ... I have lost lots and lots of friends. My view is if you can’t tolerate that I want to have this discussion, then we can’t really be friends. What you’re asking me to do is collude in a lie with you rather than argue it out. A big part of it is that on the left, if you look like me, you’re supposed to think in a particular way. And they just hate it if a black person isn’t the person they want him to be.

      In response [zerohedge.com] to a survey indicating that Muslims in the UK are in no way whatsoever just assimilating he stated:

      ...for a long time, I too thought that Europe's Muslims would become like previous waves of migrants, gradually abandoning their ancestral ways, wearing their religious and cultural baggage lightly, and gradually blending into Britain's diverse identity landscape. I should have known better.

      Of course now the genuine racists come out and simply label him an 'Uncle Tom' for having the 'wrong' view. Yet how is what he's saying in any way incorrect? People are different, groups are different. Islamic people are proud and vehement supporters of their culture; the liberal west are proud and ardent supporters of their own ideology. Do you expect to adopt an Islamic worldview should you move to the Mideast? Yet we expect people who feel just as strongly about their own worldviews to suddenly just adopt ours?

      Traditional migrations involved peoples whose primary difference was language and invisible lines we call borders. Imagine you ignore economic and language issues. You could pretty much transplant all of Mexico into the US and society would be, more or less, the same. That's because the cultural differences there are pretty mild. Similarly if you migrated to Mexico, it wouldn't take much of any effort, beyond language, to seamlessly blend into society. But none of this is true once you start talking about cultures that are just radically different. In lieu of assimilation you end up creating countries within countries. And once these micronations reach a critical mass, problems start to emerge.