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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: 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?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(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.