The global total fertility rate has fallen to 2.25, just above the 2.1 rate considered replacement level for developed countries, because the world has grown wealthier

 

I don't know why it shocks some people that as people get wealthier they have fewer children, but it does.

 

Global tfr is down 53% since 1950 to 2.25 in 2023 as global gdp per capita is up 80% since 1990.

 

The developed world (just 17%) replacement rate is 2.1 vs. ~1.47 actual tfr.

 

 

 

It's hard to escape the conclusion that US GDP has been highly dependent on fertility

Peak Baby Boom 1952-1957 when births per 1,000 of population averaged 25.17 (graph 1) is probably the simplest explanation for outsized GDP performance during the years when this generation turned 22 from 1974-1979. More babies in the 1950s equaled more GDP come the late 1970s.

We only wish for that GDP now.

Jimmy Carter, elected in 1976, still owns the best 4-year GDP record in the post-war, despite everything you've been told (graph 2). It's nothing special he did really, it's just that in 1975, the year before his election, you had the very peak of the Baby Boom turn 18, those born in 1957 when births per 1,000 hit 25.3 for the second and final time in the post-war. They and the rest of their cohort were ready to consume in numbers never seen before. Their era spanning from Nixon/Ford from 1972 when the first of them turned 20 through Reagan in 1984 when they turned 32 represents the coming of age of America's most powerful economic demographic and the period when America's GDP performance hit its highest levels (average 46.3%).

Their failure to have enough children themselves, however, is also a big part of the explanation for the GDP trend heading south after their time. They consumed, but they did not at all produce children like their parents had. In fact, the nadir of births per 1,000 before the current period occurred from 1972 to 1977, precisely the period exactly 20 years after peak Baby Boom 1952-1957. Births per 1,000 averaged just 14.92 during this period, a rate nearly 41% lower than their parents' era. So the most prolific fruit of the Baby Boom had gone on to become themselves the least prolific, having the fewest children ever.

Not surprisingly, without enough bodies the economy inevitably began to run out of gas starting about two decades after that. Clinton era GDP performance was never as good as Reagan's, and the era was marked by various warnings, not the least of which were the bond debacles of 1994 and 1999. The great Reagan bull market ended in August 2000, a recession ensued in 2001, average S&P 500 return has been reduced to 5.2% per annum over the last 17 years, and the GDP growth rate after Clinton has averaged just half what it averaged before Carter (16% vs. 32%). No wonder the trend is down so dramatically (graph 3).

The solution?

Have LOTS more kids, and wait 20 years, if you want America to still be America, that is. Otherwise, let in even more than the 1 million immigrants we already let in annually, and prepare to kiss your country goodbye.

But don't hold your breath. Births per 1,000 have fallen to an average of just 12.5 for the five year period 2011-2015.

They don't call it the suicide of the West for nothing.

graph 1

graph 2

graph 3

Warren Buffett, the king of contraception funding, thinks women waste their brains having children

Two peas in a pod dedicated to deciding against life.

If you want to know why America is dying, look no further than Warren Buffett, a man at war with human nature, who frankly doesn't care that without fertility there will be no one left to consume.

From the story in Bloomberg, here:

“Buffett alone will give more than all of the other foundations combined in reproductive health,” she said. “We already are this year [2008], and that will continue.” [Judith] DeSarno declined to comment for this article, other than to say, “I am incredibly proud of this work and the dramatic decrease in unintended pregnancies.” ...

Quietly, steadily, the Buffett family is funding the biggest shift in birth control in a generation. “For Warren, it’s economic. He thinks that unless women can control their fertility—and that it’s basically their right to control their fertility—that you are sort of wasting more than half of the brainpower in the United States,” DeSarno said about Buffett’s funding of reproductive health in the 2008 interview. “Well, not just the United States. Worldwide.” ...

In the 1960s, the [Buffetts] set up what was then called the Buffett Foundation, which focused on nuclear disarmament and reproductive health, including helping to fund Planned Parenthood as well as the development of RU-486, the so-called abortion pill. In the late ’70s, the duo entered into an unusual arrangement—they remained married, but Susan moved to San Francisco. 

Fertility drops in 2013: Maybe some demographers are under the ILLUSION of economic recovery

They're puzzled by the total fertility rate dropping and staying below the replacement rate.

Reported here:

But the total fertility rate, or TFR, the average number of children a woman would have during her child-bearing years, fell to just 1.86 [in 2013], the lowest rate in 27 years. TFR is considered the best metric of fertility. A TFR of 2.1 represents a stable population, with children replacing parents as they die off.

Demographers expected the fertility rate to fall during recession, as financially strapped families put off childbearing. But what has surprised some demographers is both the depth of the decline and the fact that fertility has continued to drop even over the course of the country's five years of slow but steady recovery. The rate has fallen steadily each year since 2007, when it stood at 2.1 percent. ...

[T]he U.S. only reached a TFR above 2.1 in 2006 and 2007, at the height of the housing bubble years.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

The total fertility rate in the US has been below the replacement rate since 1971 except for the two years noted. This is the real reason behind the immigration liberalization push by Republicans, who didn't have enough children themselves and still don't understand as a political party that it's impossible for America to look like it did in the past, now or in the future, without having done so. They are as guilty as liberals in eschewing family.

It raises the question of what comes first: the GDP or the population which goes on to consume it. Arguably, just as banks create money by writing loans, not by the Fed printing dollars, people actually create future economic growth by having children in the present. It really isn't the other way around, but we haven't been smart enough as a culture to grasp this. Women naturally grasp this. They not only naturally want children on a time schedule dictated by human biology, but also grandchildren. But the liberal war on this natural instinct has succeeded in killing off the goose that laid the golden egg of American greatness. It should not come as a surprise that GDP was negative again.

We do not live. We just survive.

A little Larry Norman from 1973, from the not coincidentally entitled "Nightmare Number 71":

We kill our children swap our wives


We've learned to greet a man with knives


We swallow pills in fours and fives

Our cities look like crumbling hives

Man does not live he just survives

We sleep till he arrives


Love is a corpse we sit and watch it harden


We left it oh so long ago the garden

Lefties say America has 6 million not counted as unemployed

The extreme left Economic Policy Institute here puts the number of missing workers in the US employment statistics at almost 6 million, give or take, since October 2013.

This is premised on a 2007 government projection of labor force participation rates in a healthy economy to 2016 which already controlled for demographic change, including the burgeoning retirements of Baby Boomers and, evidently, emerging smaller workforce cohorts due to declining fertility rates. That can be used against the measurements of labor force participation rates and labor force levels which have actually filled the record over the period to derive discrepancies.

Currently EPI calculates the discrepancies to mean that unemployment is 9.7%, not 6.3%.

And you thought only wild-eyed kooks on the right thought unemployment was still that high.

Why Should Government Support Home Ownership? Babies Need Nests!

America should support home ownership because babies need nests. Babies are future taxpayers. Babies are the future.

Is it any coincidence that in the wake of the housing debacle and the employment depression birth rates have now tanked to record lows?

No nests, no jobs, no babies.

Time has the story here:

[I]n 2011 . . . the general fertility rate (63.2 per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44) was the lowest ever recorded; the birth rate for teenagers ages 15 to 19 declined; birth rates for women ages 20 to 24 hit a record low; and rates for Hispanic and non-Hispanic black women dipped. Some birth rates remained unchanged, like those of women in their late 40s. Only women ages 35 to 39 and 40 to 44 are more likely to have babies now than in the past.

US Birthrate Declines From Replacement Rate To 1.87

So says a report in USA Today, here:

As the economy tanked, the average number of births per woman fell 12% from a peak of 2.12 in 2007. Demographic Intelligence projects the rate to hit 1.87 this year and 1.86 next year — the lowest since 1987. ... The U.S. fertility rate has been the envy of the developed world because it has remained close to the replacement rate of 2.1 (the number of children each woman must have to maintain current population) for more than 20 years.

Fertility In All Tiger Economies Has Fallen Below Replacement Rates

So says Joel Kotkin for Forbes here:

"All Tiger nations now suffer fertility rates roughly half the 2.1 children per household needed to replace the current population. By 2030 these countries could have fewer people under 15 than over 60."

The fault of prosperity, or at least the pursuit of it, at the expense of the old traditional, especially Confucian, ideals of family.

America: Phoenix Rising From the Ashes

From Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, here, not in the least because our own energy supplies and manufacturing are coming back, on top of all this:

The global depression will grind on as much of the Western world tightens fiscal policy and slowly purges debt, and as China deflates its credit bubble.

Yet America retains a pack of trump cards, and not just in sixteen of the world’s top twenty universities.

It is almost the only economic power with a fertility rate above 2.0 - and therefore the ability to outgrow debt - in sharp contrast to the demographic decay awaiting Japan, China, Korea, Germany, Italy, and Russia.

Europe's EMU soap opera has shown why it matters that America is a genuine nation, forged by shared language and the ancestral chords of memory over two centuries, with institutions that ultimately work and a real central bank able to back-stop the system.

The 21st Century may be American after all, just like the last.