Rob Henderson at City Journal writes another summary article about a shift in thinking about what is driving fertility down, Want Higher Birthrates? Promote Marriage. I've been seeing a run on this idea lately, with what look like good numbers to back it up.
The real drivers of falling fertility rates in wealthy countries, it turns out, aren’t professional women but younger, poorer women, who are delaying childbirth and ultimately having fewer children. In the U.S., more than half of the fertility drop since 1990 comes from a sharp decline in births among teenagers, partly because more of them are attending college. Even among those not going to college, birthrates are down. In 1994, the average first-time mother without a college degree was 20. Today, about two-thirds of women without degrees in their twenties still haven’t had a first child.
Yes, I just mentioned urbanism and housing verticality as causes, but I think those are related. It has long been easier for a single person to live in an urban area than a rural or suburban one.
2 comments:
I saw that headline earlier today elsewhere and thought "Nah, probably marriage and fertility covary because they are both affected by the same factors, and boosting marriage on its own is not going to necessarily change fertility".
Now I need to read and see that I'm wrong.
Megan McArdle wrote a brilliant essay 20 years ago (https://web.archive.org/web/20050406215537/http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005244.html) inspired by the gay marriage debate which was very intense at the time. She showed that the institution of marriage, though it has been part of every human society that has ever existed, and has always and everywhere been defined as a formal bond between a man and a woman, is a lot more fragile and vulnerable than we thought.
Well, the gay marriage advocates routed the opposition and, in my opinion, helped to inspire the transgender lunacy that hit us 10 years later and continues to this day. Marriage is (every) society's way of creating and nurturing children; if we create a social environment in which marriage is considered to be a quaint and basically pointless relic of the past . . . we'll get a society without children.
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