Talk Elections

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3.788 million babies were born in the US in 2018, the lowest number since 1986, resulting in the lowest fertility rates on record.  Teen births were down 8% and record low fertility was recorded in all cohorts under 35.  Only for women in their late 30s and early 40s was there an increase.  Keep in mind these women already had more children earlier on as well.

This will put major strains on school systems as they pay to maintain aging schools built for a larger student population.  Educating each student will become more expensive in real terms.  Many suburban school systems that have never had to deal with major drops in student populations and the budget cuts and school closings that come with it will see local political fights flare up as they decide whose neighborhood school gets the ax. 

This comes at a time when the retirement of the baby boomers gathers full force and there is political pressure to reduce immigration.  Like during the 1920s as births fell and immigration all but ceased and farmers faced huge pain and pressure, much of their own making, I hope things turn out differently this time.  The risk is deflationary pressure coupled with economic stagnation.  Japan says hi!

Welcome to WV!  Amusingly the state slogan is Almost Heaven!  Which I assume is supposed to refer to nature, but when your population skews extremely elderly....

Cataclysmic news. The government needs to implement policies to reverse this ASAP lest we fall into Japanese style stagflation. Our future economic success depends on population growth and this issue should be treated like the national emergency it is.

Two million immigrants per year now! Four million/year by 2030.

Canada lets in around 300,000-350,000 immigrants a year while having only a a tenth of the US population.  The US lets around 1 million or so. Our per capita rate is much higher. The US needs to up it to at least 2 million or so.

As bad as Japanese style stagflation is, raising populations eternally is most certainly not sustainable in the long run (this applies to the US and to the entire world, it's just that developing nations have ridiculous birth rates still while the US are just barely below the ideal)

Immigration is also not a solution. It's a bandaid at best that can't really solve anything long term and has its own set of problems as well.

The only solution is to completely overhaul the economy so it is actually sustainable. How to do that of course nobody knows.

Also overhaul the money system so it's sustainable as well,  which might actually be the bigger problem.

ThE uS iS fUlL

Good. Hopefully they go down further.

The US still has ca. a 1 million birth surplus and a lot of immigration.

Besides, a stagnation or declining population is actually something that we should strive for - so the US has a long way to go.

A growing population just leads to more capitalism, consuming and destruction of the planet.

I can imagine the US TFR going down to 1.6, a lot of states are already at 1.5 and Hispanic fertility will likely continue to converge with white and black fertility. On current trends the US will slip into natural decline by around 2030, the same time China does. Hopefully we stop seeing the so called experts talk about how America has a demographic advantage compared to other countries when it clearly doesn't, America's fertility rate is now below many European nation's such as France or Denmark.

no surprise the birth rate is going down....with Trump's ugly mug on the TV at all times, nobody can get horny anymore

I can confirm. I've basically become asexual at this point :'(

Trump is too fat to even walk anymore, even on the golf course. He drove a golf cart instead of walking with other G7 leaders, and needed Theresa May's help walking down the stairs.

The decline in births isn't necessarily a bad sign. A declining birthrate is actually a sign of increased education among the population.

The decline is pretty much across the board (Maine somehow had 10 more births than the previous year thanks to American Indian and Asian births--really).  Even the Morms are on board with substantial declines in Utah and Idaho. 

I think this and nearly stagnant education levels are our two biggest long term problems. Both of these are a death knell for the smaller metros in this country

If this slump in fertility is generational (i.e., late X'er/Millennial families choosing to delay marriage/childbirth) couldn't this all sort itself out with higher birthrates among the 35-45 age cohort sometime in the near future?  Basically, the median age at first-marriage has been moving later faster than older couples are popping out kids?     

There is a reason women over 35 don't tend to have very many kids.

Anyway, this whole thing is only a problem within an economic system that demands perpetual expansion. Meanwhile, unending population growth causes ecological devastation. Socialism would solve this.

Taking a longer term view, the US has fallen from around 4% of global births in the 1950's to 3% by 2000 to around 2.6% today. It's share of global population has come down from around 6% in 1950-1960 to 4.3% today and will continue to decline. The US  over the coming decades will increasingly resemble much of the rest of the developed world, low fertility, an ageing and old population and a shrinking one.

In terms of what impact migration can have on fertility, one issue is the main source of migrants for America today is Asia and Asian American fertility looks like it fell to around 1.5 last year, when most migrants were from Central & South america they raised overall fertility, today migrants from Asia lower overall fertility, migration will not solve the issue of declining fertility, it may exacerbate it.

This happened in the 90s/2000s.  During the 70s, demographers were anticipating a giant echo-baby boom for the 80s...and it didn’t materialize.  Instead births rose gradually.  

Then they expected that women were having small families and predicted a major decline in births in the 90s.  That didn’t materialize either as baby boomer women in their 30s and early 40s had children and immigrant fertility was high.

And then even as baby boomers passed out of child bearing years after 2000, births rose as Gen X women had slightly more children culminating in a record number of births in 2007 at 4.316 million, surpassing the record 4.308 million births in 1957.  Then the numbers fell to just under 4 million by 2010, then were steady Between 3.9 and 4 million until 2017 when a more substantial decline began for 2017 and 2018.

This would seem to be the Trump baby bust more than anything.  What makes it so substantial is that the largest cohort of people in this country are those born from 1988-1993...they are now 26-31 years old.  Births should be rising...not seeing an accelerating decline.

That said the same thing happened in the 1920s and again in the early 70s.  The women in the 20th century that had the most children were born in 1933...the nadir of the depression baby bust.  And the women who hadmthe fewest were born around 1955, at the height of the baby boom and who came of age right as the oil crisis hit.

Births didn't rise from 1980's to 2007 due to Gen X, they rose due to Hispanic migration combined with high Hispanic fertility. The Hispanic TFR of 2.8 in the 2000's is what kept births at a high level, with the Hispanic TFR falling to 2.0, births have fallen as well.

Yes and no on immigration exacerbating declining fertility. I would like to see some data on whether Chinese, Korean, etc. immigrants actually have fewer kids than "native" Americans - I suspect that they have more. Migration from one country to another itself is something ordinarily undertaken by a certain type of person with characteristics that tend towards higher birthrates.

Also, a large and growing portion of the immigrants to the U.S. from Asia are from countries with relatively high birthrates, like India, the Philippines and Vietnam. It's not like most Asian immigrants to the U.S. are from Japan.

Despite the decline in birthrates for some time now, there's been a steady increase in the number of foster care children

https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/afcarsreport25.pdf

And even with a dropping abortion rate. This is really weird. Pregnancies, abortions, and births are falling and somehow this is happening.

Opioid crisis.  Meth-addicts don't make good parents.

They make loyal Republican voters though.

The geography of this does tend to mostly follow "stereotypes" - birth rates in "red states" in the Mountain West and Great Plains and higher than in New England or the West Coast.

But the way this was interpreted during the Bush Years - "Conservatives will win in the end because we have more babies and will outnumber you barren liberals," - turned out to be a fallacy.

This is because nobody in the United States is having enough children to even maintain their numbers, let alone increase them. In 2017, the only places in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_fertility_rate) where fertility rate was above replacement rate were Utah, South Dakota, Guam and American Samoa.

So the story isn't places with high birthrates overtaking places with low birthrates. It's places with absolutely terrible birthrates making up for it with high domestic and foreign migration, and places with only modestly bad birthrates losing population anyway because nobody wants to live there.

()

Why?

Smaller metros are not monolithic. Some (like The Villages and Myrtle Beach) are growing very fast. Some aren't.

Aren't those retirement meccas?  I mean with the Boomers hitting 65 in droves you'd expect those to grow.

Those two are (though Myrtle Beach's growth is probably more complex than just retirement). But the are other small metros that are growing due to non-retirement reasons. I doubt many retirees are moving to Midland or Odessa, TX, for example.

Midland and Odessa have problematic long-term prospects for other reasons. Just ask West Virginia.

But, in any case, there are always going to be counterexamples in a sample of hundreds. Pointing to a few counterexamples to a clear overall trend isn't that helpful.

Good, that probably means less kids have awful parents.

Almost nothing in demographics is monolithic, there's going to be exceptions to everything.

Here, the exception is the rule, though. In general, small metros (however defined) are still growing. The very largest (NY/LA/Chicago) are slowing and/or losing population in the most recent trends. We’re not in the Great Recession any more (core cities generally grew earlier in the decade; some are no longer growing).

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-24/midsize-metro-areas-make-a-comeback-sort-of

There will be winners and losers among small metros in any demographic scenario - as there will be among large and mid-sized ones.

The record in the USSR and Eastern Europe is that the environment has no value in socialist decisionmaking.

USSR does not = socialism, that was authoritarian communism.

All communist states in the Soviet influence followed a similar pattern of having around or just under 2 children for most of the cold war era.  They did not experience the baby boom to the same extent the capitalist west did...mostly this was thanks to access to abortion and widespread usage earlier than the west.  Many Soviet bloc nations had generous benefits for families with children so getting married early and having kids was not difficult and was seen as the norm, even for the highest educated.

Still, they all experienced fertility declines in the 60s and 70s like the west.  The best comparison is East and West Germany.  West Germany saw fertility rates rise from 2 after the war to 2.5 by the mid 1960s, then a rapid drop to 1.4 with minor fluctuations after that but staying around that level.  East Germany saw a jump upon its foundation to 2.4 and it stayed between 2.2 and 2.5 until the mid ‘60s but then dropped to 1.5 by the mid 70s.  Unlike the west, however, rates recovered somewhat to near 2 in the early 80s and settled back to 1.75 throughout the 80s.

After reunification the west remained constant while the east saw an incredible fall in fertility to 0.77 children per woman in 1994.  Rates have gradually recovered since then and slightly surpassed former west Germany since 2008.  The very small cohort of those born in the mid ‘90s has been referred to as “the Kink”.  Now they are set to be parents.  I think demolishing apartment blocks and returning large areas to green space as people consolidate back into the older city ceters will be the norm.  Much of the legacy of East Germany will be literally erased from the landscape.

Children of Men, here we come! What a nightmare. Especially for anyone who values scientific or artistic progress. Is it time to institute a franchise ceiling? A society dedicated to pampering the elderly or validating their prejudices/delusions has a rendezvous with ... decline. Look at Japan, look at what they've become since the roaring-80's. No thanks.

with automation it won't be bad.  we'll be fine with a lower population.

That typing style looks even worse with <4 letter words

Q1 data is out for US, the number of births per 1000 among women aged 15-44 dropped from 57.2 in Q1 2018 to 55.6, falling by 3% in Q1 2019 which is a new record low for the US. If fertility were to drop by 3% for the rest of the year, US fertility in 2019 would go down to 1.68 from 1.73 in 2018, first time it would have fallen below 1.7

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/natality-dashboard.htm#

In Austria it is the same thing.

After births increased "by a lot" during 2015-16 (immigration wave from the Middle East/Africa*), they are now falling again.

http://www.statistik.at/web_en/statistics/PeopleSociety/population/births/028950.html

In Q1, 2019 births are down 3.1% compared with Q1, 2018.

In Q2, 2019 births were down 2.6% compared with Q2, 2018.

Link to 1st half 2019 numbers (http://www.statistik.at/wcm/idc/idcplg?IdcService=GET_NATIVE_FILE&RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleased&dDocName=027679)

* births also increased among mothers with Austrian citizenship during these 2 years, so it was not exclusively because of immigration.

Austria is now seeing the early 90s cohort start families.  The rise the past few years among native born Austrians was just the catch-up effect of the of the late 70s-mid 80s crowd rushing to have children.  There was a big drop from 95,000 to 75,000 births between 1993-2001.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see births fall below 80,000 in the next 5 years.

The US is seeing a rapid fall in fertility rates as all women under 40 have seen big declines since the 2016 election.  I think there will be a jump after 2020 even if Trump wins.

Birth/Death data for European countries are more up to date than the US data and if the trends here are an indicator, then fertility will be roughly the same as last year - maybe a bit lower.

While fertility rates dropped by 3% in the 1st quarter in the US, that was the case here as well - but picked up some speed during the summer and could be relatively unchanged for the year.

I expect some 3.74-3.78 million births this year (2018: 3.79 million)

For mortality rates, it is the exact opposite: Q1, 2018 had a lot of deaths (flu season ?), while Q1, 2019 had much fewer deaths. In the US and in Europe. Over the summer, the rate of decline became less and less and by September, more deaths have been recorded than last year. Still, deaths should drop by 2-5% this year overall.

I expect about 2.75 million deaths for the US this year (2018: 2.83 million)

Which means the natural increase will probably be higher than 1 million again, after dropping below 1 million for the first time in 2018.

Having a kid is hella expensive and stagnant wages don't help.

The US joins the rest of developed world: News at 11.

Are you sure about that, what if it's the middle classes that are forgoing kids?

Well, there has been an especially sharp decline in teen births and that certainly is a plus.

i mean who cares lmao it's not any of big gov's business anyway.

Not good at all, but also not really news at this point.


Then less kids would have awful middle-class parents.

Raw birth data for Q1 2019 out, births were down 2.3% from 915,000 to 894,000. The fall accelerated as months went on in Q1, in January births were down 1.6% year on year, in February they fell 1.8% and in March births were down 3.5%. If a 2.3% fall occurs for the whole year births will fall to 3.701 million this year.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/provisional-tables.htm

WV is on track for fewer than 17,000 births this year.  In 1950, they had almost 51,000.

Expanding on this a bit, the Yoy decline for 1Q WV was 8% which makes one wonder if there's incomplete or bad data.  Births in WV were quite static from 2010 thru 2014--20.8 to 20.3k/year.  They fell to 19.8 in 2015 and kept on tanking.  Would have thought there'd be a "Trump Bump" (ha) at some irrational exuberance point, but nope.

Good, good.  Fewer innocent souls being subject to the ills and evils of the world is never a bad thing.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_13-508.pdf

2018 final data out, births down 1.7% to 3,791k.

Overall TFR down to 1.73 from 1.77

Non-Hispanic White TFR down to 1.64 from 1.67

Black TFR down to 1.79 from 1.82

Hispanic TFR down to 1.96 from 2.0

Asian TFR down to 1.53 from 1.6

All for the best probably.   We need a smaller population.

From Jan.-Sept. 2019, births in Austria decreased by 2.3% and deaths decreased by 2.5%, which will be very similar to the trend in the US this year.

My state, Salzburg, is the only state with an increase in births (and deaths are down as well).

There were 37.800 marriages in the first 3 quarters, of which 860 were gay marriages (2.3%).

Link 1 (PDF) (http://www.statistik.at/wcm/idc/idcplg?IdcService=GET_NATIVE_FILE&RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleased&dDocName=027679)
Link 2 (PDF) (http://www.statistik.at/wcm/idc/idcplg?IdcService=GET_PDF_FILE&RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleased&dDocName=111888)

Like straight men born in the 1960s and early 70s, straight boys in the US born after 2006 will have a harder time finding suitable mates.