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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 helel on Tuesday December 08 2020, @06:04PM (1 child)
Who do you think controls the major corporations, lizards? Anything a corporation bribes a politician for is something the rich people that own the corporation want. Attributing the action to a legal fiction is disingenuous. If they didn't want the law they'd spend that money on something else.
And, as you point out, studies have again and again show that piracy is, at worst, a non-issue. So, what do you call it when somebody seeks wildly disproportionate harm in response to a slight they suffered? Vengeance? Revenge? Retribution? Cruelty?
I am not claiming there is a "grand rational" to the law. Different parties want different things and all that influence mixed together makes a maddening mess. What I have been claiming from the beginning is that there are two ways to assign penalties under the law - Protection of the public or Revenge. Going back to the foundation, those who are against the death penalty believe the law should be written to protect the public. The fact that the death penalty exists to be debated at all is clear proof that many, perhaps most, people fall into the later camp and desire the law exact revenge (or retribution or vengeance or other synonym, take your pick).
On the whole adultery thing ... I don't agree with you but I think I can see your argument better now. If we treat any vengeful killing in response to adultery as a result of the act then adultery is perhaps more dangerous, per incident, than most unsafe driving? It's much harder to get numbers on but I expect you'd see the trend continue with lessor injuries as well? Only one speeding in ten thousand results in a broken bone but every adultery leads to a broken heart?
Republican Patriotism [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2020, @07:15AM
I just realized that there's a really great way to describe how a social contract falls outside the dichotomy of revenge/safety that you're proposing! Assault. Should this behavior be proscribed? Absolutely. Are there exceptions where somebody is fully justified in engaging in assault? Absolutely. Should they still be required to face the consequences? Absolutely. Proscribing behaviors simply sets a consequence for behaviors that are deemed outside the values of society.
And it's very arbitrary. This is the point I was making with adultery. We both got carried away in the details because it's fun to try to measure, but obviously nobody would ever suggest there are anything but negative overall consequences, sometimes very extreme, from the behavior. Yet it is in no way legally proscribed. The only reason is because we have a social contract that is little more than a reflection of our own cultural values. And our cultural values place a rather large weight on individual liberty.
The reason I was describing corporations in a more broad way is because relationship with the government is quite nuanced. Bribery implies an outsider and an insider. But who's the outsider? By the time you hear the media speaking positively of a candidate in the US, he's already been vetted and approved by corporate interests. Disney owns ABC, Comcast owns NBC, AT&T owns CNN, etc. And if you don't hear the media speaking positively of somebody? Well it's pretty hard for that person to get elected. And this is just one link in the intertwining between government and corporations, though quite an important one. But in any case it's certainly not just 'a few rich people' enacting their will. That suggests if these few rich people suddenly disappeared, then everything would return to "normal", but I don't think that's the case.