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Missing children: can America duck the worldwide baby bust?
Washington Monthly, Dec, 2004 by Phillip Longman
Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future. By Ben J. Wattenburg Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, $24.95
It's happening in rich countries. It's happening in poor countries. It's happening among Christians, Hindus, and especially Muslims. It's a trend that has everything to do with sex, death, money, and power, yet rarely draws a headline. Everywhere in the world, people are having fewer and fewer children.
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Most everyone knows that Europeans are fading in number. Yet the most dramatic declines in fertility are occurring just where you'd least expect them. Even under the tight grip of an Islamic theocracy, for example, Iran has seen its fertility rates plunge to level that lead to long-term population loss. The same is true of Mexico and most of the rest of Latin America. Americans have a long history of fearing the Asian hordes, yet countries like China, Japan, and Korea now face the prospect of losing up to one third of their populations over the next generation.
All told, global fertility rates are half what they were in the early 1970s. The primary reason appears to be the rapid movement of people from farms to cities (nearly half the world's population today lives in urban areas), and the increasing social and economic opportunities available to women. Because of the large numbers of women still in childbearing age, world population will continue to grow for several decades, even as the average woman has fewer and fewer children. Yet within the lifetime of today's young adults, most demographers now believe, world population could well be falling. Long before then, the average age of the world's citizens will increase dramatically, leaving many fewer working aged people available to support each elder.
Two recent books document these trends and explore their long-term implications. Ben J. Wattenberg, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote one. I wrote the other. I suppose you can guess which book I think is more insightful.
That bias disclosed, let me hasten to say that Wattenberg and I essentially argue from the same facts. We both, for example, rely heavily on data and projections developed by the United Nation's Population Division, which in recent years has been ratcheting down its estimates of future population By 2300, the United Nations projects that world population could be below the level of 1960, and that the United States will shrink back to the population it had in 1950--only with a far greater share of eiders. Both Wattenberg and I point out that if current trends in fertility continue, depopulation will be much more extreme. For example, this U.N. projection assumes, for no particular reason, that fertility rates in the developed world will rise substantially. It also assumes, for no particular reason, that as today's underdeveloped regions become more industrialized, they will never experience the same fall in fertility that China, South Korea, and other recently industrialized nations have experienced.
Both Wattenberg and I also agree that falling fertility rates can bring economic benefits, at least in the short term. Wattenberg notes, for example, that while Korea's birthrate was plummeting between 1965 and 1990, real per capita income growth rose by 6 percent per year. As the relative number of children declined, so did the burden of their dependency. With fewer children to look after, more women could join the paid work force, thereby boosting measured GDP.
But if falling birthrates can bring a "demographic dividend," that dividend eventually has to be repaid if the trend continues. Wattenberg is right, I think, to warn that an aging and declining population leads to economic stagnation and exploding public debt, such as we now see in the world's "oldest" nation, Japan.
On some important matters of interpretation, however, Wattenberg and I differ sharply. Perhaps most importantly, Wattenberg is a big believer in American exceptionalism. In a chapter titled "America the Exceptional: the Baby Makers," he stresses that America has the highest fertility rate of any industrialized nation. This, combined with America's high rates of immigration, leads him to see a future of increasing American dominance in world affairs. With more rapidly aging, and eventually falling populations, countries like China, Russia, France, and Germany simply be unable to compete with the fecund United States, Wattenberg concludes.
I'm not so sanguine. The United States does have the highest fertility of any industrialized nation, but American fertility rates, which are already below replacement levels, are drifting downwards, and there is every mason to believe that they converge before long with the low birth rates of Europe and Japan.
The last time white Americans made enough babies to replace themselves was 1970. Now the trend toward low fertility has spread to every major racial and ethnic group. Between 1990 and 2002, fertility declined by 14 percent among Mexican Americans and by 24 percent among Puerto Ricans. African Americans, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, now have a lower fertility rate than whites and are no longer producing enough children to replace their population.
