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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.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 28 2019, @05:33PM (9 children)
US Birth rate vs Income [statista.com] Those earning $10k per year pump out 50% more babies than those earning $200k per year. The really disconcerting thing is that the relationship in the incomes in between is damn near perfectly linear.
We've created quite a dysfunctional society. Now the next generations of Americans are going to be increasingly coming from parents who think having kids when they can't even afford to feed themselves is an acceptable thing to do. But don't worry, I'm sure they'll actually be great and completely responsible parents. Or, alternatively, they won't and their kids will be pumping out even more kids by the time they hit their mid teens and we are well on our way to idiocracy.
Aren't welfare and human rights (to prevent any crazy notion like welfare precondition = cord snip) just such enlightened policies.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday November 28 2019, @05:47PM (1 child)
The state has gone to great lengths, legal and extralegal, for a long time to condition them to do so.
Hate the game not the player.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 28 2019, @06:19PM
Absolutely agreed. And no I hold nothing whatsoever against the people taking advantage of the system.
I think any system that is to truly stand the test of time should take, as an assumption, the worst of humanity. That's not because I think we are inherently evil, which I do not believe at all, but because such a system is going to be closer to 'game theory optimal' in that in the worst case scenario (of everybody simply being a greedy self centered asshole) we do okay. And if people are actually kind of okay? Then we do phenomenal. By contrast systems that only function properly when people are good and socially responsible tend to explode into fiery balls of failure each time they're trialed.
But right now I think we are living through a time when objective analysis can indicate we have a number of rather severe problems, but it's often the case that the might of a great country is exceeded only by its inertia. Well that and, lacking a more poetic way of phrasing it, normalized cognitive dissonance.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday November 28 2019, @07:23PM (6 children)
And your alternative is class-stratified genocide?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday November 28 2019, @11:45PM
Why would you massacre your indentured servants when you can squeeze some more of them a while longer?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 29 2019, @12:44AM (4 children)
We could take action on the high-class part of society. We could make them have kids. With exponential population growth, they would soon outnumber the crummy people.
The low-intensity solution involves simple changes in tax law. We provide high-class fathers with a universal income, to be funded by heavy taxes on high-class people who are not fathers. Each additional child is worth more universal income. Single males and working women suffer punitive taxes.
We can go beyond that of course. We could imprison high-class women who do not stay pregnant. While in prison they would be allowed opportunities to remedy the problem.
We could even just directly impregnate them. We could create a new uniformed service (like the coast guard, NOAA, etc.) that supplies the nation with babies. Officers would be male, and the enlisted would be female. We could draft women if we don't get enough volunteers. The enlisted would serve from age 15 to 45, with early departure for those with at least 12 babies.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday November 29 2019, @03:14AM (3 children)
Ooooh I know this movie! This is the one that ended with that guy riding a bomb down to earth hollering and whooping and waving his hat, right?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Saturday November 30 2019, @01:18AM (2 children)
You know how it is - life imitates art.
As for the idea of getting the "upper class" to out-breed the rest, what a joke. Most of the upper class are morons who enjoy their position through inherited wealth. Same as Trump with his father continually giving him more money every time he fucked up. Not because Fred cared whether Donald succeeded or not, but because Donald was an embarrassment.
As per a recent article I submitted that made the front page, all human societies either find ways to reduce inequality voluntarily or the rich have it taken from them. So long-term, the upper class has to yield to the masses one way or another.
What's the big deal anyway with opposing wealth redistribution - your customers need money to buy your products. No customers, your stocks end up being worthless when the company goes bankrupt. And you can't take it with you. And you've got so much if you're one of the 1% that you can't even spend it all if you wanted to.
Economists agree that money squirrelled away in tax havens harms the economy because it's idle.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01 2019, @08:37AM (1 child)
I'm not sure where the assertion that most wealthy are inherited comes from. It's trivial to prove false in a large number of ways.
Let's start with low tiers of "rich" where the notion of inheritance is basically irrelevant. Today in America there are about 5.66 million households [statista.com] with assets worth at least a million dollars. In 2009 that number was 2.54 million. New millionaires are emerging at a rate dramatically faster than old millionaires are reproducing. Inherited wealth is playing effectively 0 role at this level of wealth.
Let's now consider billionaires. At a such a level of wealth you'd expect inherited wealth to play a significant role. With anything vaguely resembling fiscal responsibility, wealth should increase between generations. Yet interestingly enough even these people, billionaires, are no longer primarily born into wealth. Forbes studied the billionare question here [forbes.com]
The measured the role of inheritance on a scale. On one end is the people who just inherited their wealth and have achieved little to nothing with it, such as the Waltons. The other extreme are those born into poverty alongside extreme duress and built their wealthy entirely from nothing. The latter group now outnumber the former group, which a transition that happened sometime around 2014. And suffice to say as you start to include individuals other than those born to "extreme duress" the numbers become even more lopsided.
As for why wealth redistribution is bad, see above - contrast against the numerous nations that have tried and failed to create social economic systems. No Europe is not an example. The United States already [oecd.org] spends vastly more than the OECD average on social programs per capita ($9,875 vs $7,701 average). We have a people problem more than a money problem. Some people you just can't help. You could give them a million bucks today and they'd be broke and asking for handouts in a decade. It dramatically reduces the perceived returns of social spending.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday December 02 2019, @03:09AM
Trump makes a piker out of them. His father gave him 10s of millions, he repeatedly needed more 10s of millions.
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