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Half a million fewer children? The coming COVID baby bust:
The COVID-19 episode will likely lead to a large, lasting baby bust. The pandemic has thrust the country into an economic recession. Economic reasoning and past evidence suggest that this will lead people to have fewer children. The decline in births could be on the order of 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births next year. We base this expectation on lessons drawn from economic studies of fertility behavior, along with data presented here from the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and the 1918 Spanish Flu.
[...] When the public health crisis first took hold, some people playfully speculated that there would be a spike in births in nine months, as people were "stuck home" with their romantic partners. Such speculation is based on persistent myths about birth spikes occurring nine months after blizzards or major electricity blackouts. As it turns out, those stories tend not to hold up to statistical examination (Udry, 1970). But the COVID-19 crisis is amounting to much more than a temporary stay-at-home order. It is leading to tremendous economic loss, uncertainty, and insecurity. That is why birth rates will tumble.
[...] There is ample evidence that birth rates are, in fact, pro-cyclical. This is shown, for instance, in the work by Dettling and Kearney (2014) described above. Their analysis of birth rates in metropolitan areas finds that all else equal, a one percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate is associated with a 1.4 percent decrease in birth rates. Schaller (2016) analyzes the relationship between state-level unemployment rates and birth rates, and finds that a one percentage-point increase in state-year unemployment rates is associated with a 0.9 to 2.2 percent decrease in birth rates. Other evidence shows that women whose husbands lose their jobs at some point during their marriage ultimately have fewer children (Lindo, 2010). This suggests that transitory changes in economic conditions lead to changes in birth rates.
[...] What are the likely implications of the COVID-19 episode for fertility? The monthly unemployment rate jumped from 3.5 percent to 14.7 percent in April and to 13.3 percent in May. Note that the BLS also indicate that technical issues in collecting these data likely mean that the actual unemployment rates in those months were likely 5 and 3 percentage points higher, respectively. That would bring them to about 19.7 and 16.3 percent. Although it is difficult to forecast the 2020 annual unemployment rate, assuming a 7 to 10 percentage-point jump to 10.6 to 13.6 percent seems reasonable. Based on the findings presented above, this economic shock alone implies a 7 to 10 percent drop in births next year. With 3.8 million births occurring in 2019, that would amount to a decline of between 266,000 and 380,000 births in 2021.
On top of the economic impact, there will likely be a further decline in births as a direct result of the public health crisis and the uncertainty and anxiety it creates, and perhaps to some extent, social distancing. Our analysis of the Spanish Flu indicated a 15 percent decline in annual births in a pandemic that was not accompanied by a major recession. And this occurred during a period in which no modern contraception existed to easily regulated fertility.
Combining these two effects, we could see a drop of perhaps 300,000 to 500,000 births in the U.S. Additional reductions in births may be seen if the labor market remains weak beyond 2020. The circumstances in which we now find ourselves are likely to be long-lasting and will lead to a permanent loss of income for many people. We expect that many of these births will not just be delayed – but will never happen. There will be a COVID-19 baby bust. That will be yet another cost of this terrible episode.
Journal References:
1.) Melissa S . Kearney, Phillip B . Levine. Subsidized Contraception, Fertility, and Sexual Behavior, (DOI: rest.91.1.137)
2.) Melissa S. Kearney, Riley Wilson. Male Earnings, Marriageable Men, and Nonmarital Fertility: Evidence from the Fracking Boom, Review of Economics and Statistics (DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_00739)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 03 2020, @11:41PM (32 children)
We still have places like Syria where, for example, one man complained that 11 of his 20 children have died from disease or malnutrition.
Religion doesn't help, with its view of men being in charge of women, and urging over-reproduction.
A baby bust is a good thing. Humanity is like a plague of locusts. We need to get our numbers down before nature does it for us.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday December 04 2020, @12:39AM
Yes/No. That's an overly simplistic analysis. Certainly a "baby bust" CAN be a good thing, but that's not guaranteed. It depends on lots of variables, not all of which are known, or even guessed at. (I mean, we don't guess that the variable is significant.)
Certainly there are too many people in the world, probably by a factor of about 10. But how you get from here to there is extremely significant. Easy access to video games and the internet is probably a good way to do it, but I'm not sure, because it decreases socialization, and leads to "pile on" bullying, etc. And people believing all sorts of garbage because that's what those they communicate with believe. And since they've never met them they can't tell that they're drooling idiots or mono-maniacal fanatics. (People are pretty bad at making that kind of determination of their friends, even if they know them well.)
So that's one thing. Having lots of expensive toys that people can buy tends to decrease population growth, but at the expense of greater use of resources. That's another thing.
Actually, a plague is probably the only thing that has the potential to work rapidly enough (baring things like nuclear war), but COVID isn't deadly enough to do the job. And "long COVID" means that it causes an increased use of resources. It needs to be about 5 to 10 times as deadly, and it would be nice if it went for a "clean kill", though I can't imagine any natural disease that operated that way. COVID is probably as close to that as a natural disease could ever get. The way it gives a lot of people hypo-oxygenation without them being aware of it while they're spreading the disease is about as painless an effect as a natural disease could manage. But it appears (based on reading) that only some people get that effect, and it's also transitory.
Given everything, I think we really need to be working on durable nearly-closed ecosystems. There seems to be a good chance that the natural ecosystem will end up broken. E.g. plankton are the source of most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, and there have been several reports that they are dying off. Well, there's lots of different species of plankton, and so far a new one has (usually) moved in when an old has died off. But when you decrease diversity, the whole network becomes more fragile. (Also see "oceanic dead zones" https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/oceans/dead-zones/ [nationalgeographic.com] and realize that we don't really understand what causes them or how to fix them. We've got very reasonable ideas, and they *MAY* be correct.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 04 2020, @01:30AM (27 children)
Yes, a baby bust is a good thing.
The thing that only clicked for me tonight is what a mis-information fest the whole "prosperity will lead to population decline" argument is. I always knew it was false, but I thought that the people who believed in it actually believed the stats they were standing on. It's so much weaker than that, it's a matter of: grasp at a few trends, don't even bother to do the sums, and claim that "in the future it will be true."
Earth's overall population has been growing steadily around 75 million humans per year for a long, long time now. I know the theoretical models are for exponential growth and not much logical can explain the continued linear growth, but there it is - that's what the data show.
Birth rate declines in the "prosperous nations" aren't a result of prosperity, they're a result of wage slavery oppression and distraction of the fertile population from child rearing with shiny baubles. Free up the masses to follow their biological instincts, take the endless-mindless screen entertainment out of their bedrooms and birth rates will remain well over replacement levels until the ecosystem completely collapses. The only way the prosperity hypothesis holds is if it is coupled with continued exhausting school followed by exhausting work in an economic climate of mostly working couples who don't get off the career hamster wheels until after menopause.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 04 2020, @04:12AM (15 children)
Why? It hasn't been refuted! The US and such is still prosperous and is still subject to population decline as predicted.
~70 years - which isn't a long, long time!
This is just confirmation bias. We've talked about this again [soylentnews.org] and again [soylentnews.org] and again [soylentnews.org]. I guess you'll apologize in a few decades when the absolute population growth rate starts to decline right?
Not that "wage slavery oppression" or "distraction of the fertile population" from creating a massive problem are bad things.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @06:10AM
Human reproduction is the one area where khallow has no experience, expertise, or even reasonable fantasies about. Shut up, khallow!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 04 2020, @01:47PM (13 children)
In your head. US population in 2020 is adding 12 births for every 8.88 deaths (both per 1000 population) which is a net addition of 1 million people per year, that's not just sustaining population, that's continued growth by fertility inside the US borders, and 100% of those births are US citizens, by definition.
Population 1950: 2.5B
Population 2020: 7.8B
Not only is it a long long time, it is a critically damaging 3x increase of world population of h. sapiens, directly responsible for the 6th mass extinction event.
In your head.
Sure, except you'll be dead long before that ever happens.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 04 2020, @07:10PM (12 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 04 2020, @07:24PM (11 children)
Not declining fast enough to result in population stability. At 75 million per year added, the "fertility rate" can decline forever while population continues to grow forever.
Examine your own reasons for wishing that population stability will be here "any day now"? How much wishful thinking is driving that belief? Now, examine the likely reasons for the sources of your opinions/data, what would be their motivation to present unbiased truth - and is it anywhere near as strong as their likely motivations to blow sunshine up your ass?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 05 2020, @02:18AM (10 children)
As I told you before, there's no stable mechanism by which a population can increase linearly forever. The problem here is that near constant increase in population means a decline in percent growth rate - that decline and has gone negative in a number of populations.
So we have every population declining in percent growth rate with no obvious stopping point and a number of populations that have already gone negative. And your present excuse for claiming this won't happen for global populations is that there might be a bias against unbiased truth, maybe.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 05 2020, @01:44PM (9 children)
Worked way too close to academia and scholarly publication for the past 30 years to believe that there is anything but bias in published works. Not maybe, an overwhelming majority of what is published is biased, prejudiced, myopic, and confirmed in the echo chamber of "peer review." A significant minority is also self-serving.
Science is better than religion in that it attempts to confirm itself with a broader set of observations and remain (somewhat) more open to revision in the face of overwhelming evidence, neither can predict future human behavior worth a damn.
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(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday December 05 2020, @03:11PM (8 children)
Which is quite irrelevant to the thread.
Demographics != human behavior.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 05 2020, @04:19PM (7 children)
Demographics is observation of past human behavior. If future human behavior could be predicted, the stock market would be risk free.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 06 2020, @01:16AM (6 children)
Concerning population growth, one of the biggest changes in demographics dynamics over the past couple of decades was the development of treatments for AIDS. Even with no change in human behavior, it means a significant slowdown in the decline of future population growth in Africa. That's not past human behavior.
Because a prediction has to be perfectly accurate in order for it to be a prediction?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 06 2020, @04:04AM (5 children)
The difference between population decline, maintenance, and growth is an extremely fine line. Human women can easily produce 10+ offspring by the time they are 30 years old, and it's all basically a matter of choice, free will, and not procreating at those rates actually requires suppression of some of the strongest of natural instincts for decades. Predictions of that kind of behavior decades into the future on a global basis are no better than any of the other "Sociology Sciences." The presumption that global societies 40 years from now will resemble societies today any more than societies today resemble the 1980s is clearly, deeply flawed.
Given access to "the pill" and a reasonable level of prosperity, it _seems_ like we might slow population growth, but there is zero historical evidence for a reversal, only optimistic projections.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 06 2020, @05:00AM (4 children)
Aside, of course, from the entire developed world, including the US.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 06 2020, @01:52PM (3 children)
So, when the top of the heap behaves one way, it's logically sound to assume the entire heap will follow suit?
Let's not forget, the U.S. has less than 5% of the world's population, but uses over 15% of the world's resources. Just "giving" the rest of the world U.S. levels of prosperity is arguably equivalent to a greater than tripling of the world population's current environmental impact.
China under a "one child" policy still grew their population over 40%, but as their birth rates drop their resource consumption is trending upward toward U.S. levels - with 18% of the world population China now emits 28% of the CO2.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 06 2020, @04:20PM (2 children)
Or when the front of a train goes one way down a track, it's logical to assume the rest of the train will follow. What's missing from your statement above is an acknowledgement that everyone is heading towards developed world status. There is a universal move towards greater personal wealth, lower fertility, more infrastructure, and so on.
Which, let us note, doesn't mean much. Since that also means a great collective reduction in pollution and habitat destruction.
Yes, the CO2. That's a tradition Chicken Little approach. Find the few metrics that still appear to get worse like CO2 or wealth inequality (of cherry picked regions, of course) rather than the ones that don't, like most other pollution emissions, human prosperity, peace, human fertility, etc.
There is a point here to my continued insistence. When we see only the worst in the world, it gives us cover to make the worst decisions. If humans are going to die of massive, horrible Malthusian disaster (and deliberate use of negative language to describe highly positive and successful phenomena), then just about anything that we can spin as reducing human population is justifiable. One can't sell the bug paste utopia [soylentnews.org], if one describe the present in too glowing terms. The present has to be as wrong as one can spin it.
My point all along is that we have an approach that while perhaps not as low in environmental impact as you would like, is already working on about a billion people. That's a pretty big prototype. Rather than ignore it, I think we ought to make it successful on a global scale as fast as we can do it. Among other things, that means spreading strong capitalist/democratic systems everywhere with strong legal protections for businesses and property owners. And yes, that means continued "wage slavery" and continued "distraction of the fertile population" - huge positive impacts for everyone everywhere.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday December 10 2020, @01:34AM (1 child)
Where's the evidence for that? The developed world only slowed up destroying their own wild habitats when they had already destroyed vast amounts of them and also developed the capability to outsource their manufacturing and resource acquisition to developing countries. If the developing countries stop their slash and burn, where's the production going to come from for the massively increased demand for consumption (in all countries)?
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 10 2020, @01:50AM
In other words, evidence. The developed world isn't a small part of the world. Thank you for answering your own question.
Because we can't make anything without slash and burn? I would suggest here production that doesn't require the massive environmental impact of things like slash and burn - another thing which the developed world has figured out.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Socrastotle on Friday December 04 2020, @06:45AM
I think it's more about propaganda than anything else. An anecdote most people are not familiar with is Iran. [wikipedia.org] Iran is, of course, a Muslim majority nation and Muslims worldwide have extremely high birthrates. Except in Iran. Here [worldbank.org] is a graph of their fertility rates to contrast the dates.
In the late 80s Iran decided they wanted to start controlling their population simply because they realized that the growing population was going to rapidly outpace their resources. So they launched a massive and widespread fertility + propaganda campaign including widespread distribution of various birth control mechanisms, free vasectomies, and even requiring mandatory birth control classes before couples could be married. It worked, big time. Their fertility rate went from 5+ in 1989 to 2.2 in 1999 and then entering into sub-replacement levels in 2009 at 1.8. Then they realized *this* was an even bigger problem and reversed course around 2006, again. And so now the propaganda and messaging is back to being in favor of nice big families, and their fertility rate is back on the rise - up about 17% since 2009 and again starting to rise above sub-replacement levels.
In the US our cultural propaganda tends to put women working in corporations and other fields on a pedestal. Whereas, women who choose to raise families are generally negative portrayed. This trend, to varying degrees, started about the same time that are fertility rate started plummeting. I think a big test case will be China. China is has developed a culture very similar to the US where women are expected to participate in the workforce in lieu of raising a family. And their family planning regimen was the strictest in the world effectively outlawing having more than 1 child. But now they're aggressively trying to reverse the trend, but while also staying with their current secular + capitalist style society which is much more similar to what we have, in contrast with Iran. If they do succeed (and it's looking like they will) then it's fairly safe to say that propaganda is the sole driver. If they don't, then it's likely that economic factors do play a significant role.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Friday December 04 2020, @03:45PM (9 children)
That alone is enough to turn exponential growth to linear growth, irrespective of economics.
It's also why religions target the pill as evil. It cuts down on events that bind families to religion, such as baptism and christenings. Even though the pill means fewer abortions.
Religion - the original political scam.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 04 2020, @03:56PM (8 children)
But what people miss is that the "declines" are declines in the rate of growth, growth has never stopped, it is only proceeding more slowly than before, but still proceeding in a single direction: more and more people.
Religion was government in the Middle Ages, separation of church and state was an attempt to get religious dogma out of government.
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(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday December 04 2020, @04:39PM (1 child)
There is no such thing as separation of state and religion in US politics.
Just look at your pervert-in-chief and his shameless manipulation of the religious right. Because both Trump and evangelical leaders like their flocks dumb and ripe for fleecing.
Try going to a country where politicians who try to bring their personal religious beliefs into public debate and are roundly condemned for it.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 04 2020, @05:42PM
They're not the only ones, pretty much the whole conservative side these days seems to need that.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @05:53PM
Are you bad at math? You think that even if couples had only one kid, the population would continue to grow? It would until the old folks DIE OFF, and then you must see that 2 people having only 1 kid results in the couple not replacing themselves in the population. If growth is decreasing, and this continues, you eventually get to where growth becomes negative. Car analogy: you are driving at 50 miles per hour. You gently step on the brake. Your speed decreases, but you say, I am still moving forward! Keep your foot gently on that brake. Eventually, your speed becomes zero.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 04 2020, @07:12PM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 04 2020, @07:21PM (3 children)
And the sun will rise in the east until it doesn't. Human population growth will stop, one way or another, likely before the sun stops rising in the east, but there is nothing beyond conjecture and opinion shaping propaganda to say that it will stop at any given level.
Malthus wasn't wrong, just early.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 05 2020, @01:52AM (2 children)
Notice that you're blowing off evidence you presented yourself in this very thread that was to the contrary.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday December 05 2020, @01:37PM (1 child)
That conjecture that you call evidence is in conflict with the conjecture you have presented... neither contain a shred of evidence about the future.
Of course I believe that "my" conjecture is the more likely to end up correlating with the future - from my perspective it has the best correlation with and extrapolation of patterns of behavior I have seen in the past. However, the variability / noise / unpredictability of those patterns is overwhelming. Honest statisticians call it the flaw of averages.
Insurance companies were certain they understood the risks presented by Hurricanes, then Andrew hit. Water management types have been drawing "500 year flood" lines on maps for a century, they have been redrawing those lines every few years over the past several decades. Human population is living on low lying beachfront property in the Caribbean, soaking up the rays and enjoying the lifestyle. There could be another post-Malthusian reprieve, fusion power is one such candidate, it would be foolhardy to bet the future of civilization that it will happen, but old men have the perfect bankruptcy clause: they're going to die before anyone can collect on their bad calls.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 05 2020, @03:10PM
That's why we have evidence.
So you claim. That's already been refuted several times.
In other words, just a typical argument from ignorance fallacy. Because our knowledge about a few cherry picked examples aren't as complete as we'd like, that means you're right. Where's the long tail to short term population predictions?
And we don't need post-Malthusian reprieves with negative population growth.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @02:52PM (2 children)
It's not rape you stupid harpy, you don't like it? Don't get married.
(Score: 4, Informative) by barbara hudson on Friday December 04 2020, @03:50PM (1 child)
Women are not property. That the laws used to say otherwise is solely the responsibility of men who used force, violence, and marital rape to perpetuate the scam.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 08 2020, @01:03AM
Just like property is a construct of society, the notion that women - or people in general - are not property is also a social construct, not an absolute law of anything.
I think it's a good social construct, but it's no more absolute, real or natural than money or taxes.
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