From Lyman Stone, who has taken the article out from behind the paywall Completed Family Size Will Soon Plummet to Unprecedented Depths . We are below replacement and going lower in the next decade or two. There is a theory that it's not fewer children, but delayed fertility ending up with the same number of children. That doesn't turn out to be true.
Stone has pointed out elsewhere that this decline tracks with the decline in marriage. Married people have almost the same number of children as they did decades ago, and unmarried women have the same amount each. It's just that there are a lot more unmarried women now.
"Demographic winter" was one of the first forbidden topics I learned on the internet. And then, like the fist-sized cloud in scripture, the terrible topic grew. I then became interested in the many ways sub-replacement fertility is obfuscated in human geography textbooks, and even more so in the lectures of junior faculty I observed. I'd say very few of today's college graduates understand how the demography of this country is changing, or how fast. Back in the days of the "population explosion," my professors explained the connection between the fertility rate and the doubling rare. If you want to know the halving rate of 1.5 fertility, you have to run the numbers for yourself.
ReplyDelete