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The US Birth Rate Is Bouncing Back From the Pandemic (marketwatch.com) 145

Posted by BeauHD from the speedy-recovery dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MarketWatch: When the pandemic hit, the stay-at-home orders didn't give American families more babies, instead, it generated a "baby bust." Now, economists found that the so-called bust recovered just as quickly as the economy picked up. Recessions and a decline in birth rates go hand-in-hand in history -- as seen with the 2008 financial crisis and the 1918 influenza, when the pandemic started in early 2020. Similarly, economists predicted that a sharp decrease in jobs and household spending would result in a fall in conception rates.

Job cuts and business shutdowns resulted in 62,000 "missing births" in the U.S. from January 2020 to May 2020, the paper found. The lowest dip in approximate conception numbers happened in April, when the country saw the highest COVID-era unemployment rate at 14.7%. But the "baby bust" was short-lived due to a rebound of 51,000 conceptions later in 2020, driven by fast growth in the labor market and the arrival of government relief programs to individuals and households. The paper, which was distributed this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, used five years of monthly birth data from October 2016 through September 2021, the most recent month available when the researchers conducted their analysis.

The immediate drop in conception rate in the U.S. at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak was part of a bigger global trend for countries with higher incomes. Arnstein Aassve, professor of social and political science at Bocconi University, has found that seven out of 22 countries with higher incomes experienced a sharp decline in birth rates at the beginning of the pandemic. He attributed the explanation to a sense of uncertainty. "You may not forego childbearing totally, but at least you might postpone it until you see that times are a bit better," Aassve told Scientific American. He also attributed the sentiment to people's unfamiliarity with a new disease at the time. Kearney said the NBER findings confirm this pattern. By comparing data from different states, she pointed out that although the number of COVID-19 cases in the region also contributed to the reduction of birth rates early in the pandemic, people started having more babies later in the year regardless of the number of new COVID-19 cases. However, Levine said that the changes in 2020 are "far less significant" compared to the general U.S. trend in the last 15 years, which results in a roughly 20% drop in births. The decline in birth rates indicates a challenge ahead for labor supply.
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The US Birth Rate Is Bouncing Back From the Pandemic More

The US Birth Rate Is Bouncing Back From the Pandemic

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  • Anti-children establishment. (Score:4, Informative)

    by psergiu ( 67614 ) on Wednesday May 04, 2022 @11:34PM (#62504908)

    The US would have better birth rates if the private medical insurance companies were not so anti-children.
    If you have private medical insurance, try to find their very well hidden public plan documents listing the stuff that their plans do not cover and you will be charged 100%: Anything related to trying to safely conceive a child.
    Are you no longer a young healthy teenager and think you have saved enough money to raise a child ? Not so fast - If there's any medical issue preventing a healthy pregnancy, you are looking at $100K+ out of pocket with the most expensive PPO plans.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ghoul ( 157158 )
      You dont have to be a teenager to hae problem free pregnancies. Anything below 30 is fine. My grandmother got married at 18 and died at 31. She was born 1916 and died 1947. She had 9 kids out of which one died in infancy. This was pre vaccination and pre antibiotics. Child birth is really not that hard.
      • That story would seem more effective if she wasn't dead at 31. If she just got hit by a streetcar, you should include it in the story. Otherwise it gives the impression maybe she was run-down by constant pregnancy and susceptible to infection or something.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ghoul ( 157158 )
          Nah she caught TB from my grandpa who caught it while studying in London. London was a real cesspool pre WW2. It got rebuilt much better after the blitz

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        Well, golly, given your grandmother, child birth is certainly not hard.

        You: I can prove all men are bald.

        Me: Ok.

        You: A man with one hair is still bald. If a man with n hairs is bald, then a man with n + 1 hairs is still bald. Hence all men are bald.

        Me: Ok Einstein.

        • Also, you know, his grandmother died at 31 after popping out 9 kids because that is basically hell on your body especially without medical care. So it's more like:

          You: I can prove all men are bald.

          Me: Ok.

          You: A man with one hair is still bald. Also if you have a bunch of hair, you're probably bald. You might lose it anyway so even if you have hair you're bald. Also babies, they're bald.

          Me: Ok Einstein.

    • The problems start long before anyone even thinks about the finances. Fewer people are getting married. Fewer young people are entering into relationships. Fewer people are having sex. All of these things may have been exacerbated by the pandemic, but the trends were there well before then. These trends may be temporary, but I haven't seen any indications so far that trends are slowing down, let alone reversing.

      • Finances is exactly the reason fewer people get married and have kids. Since it's pretty much mandatory for everyone to work (stay at home mom? What is this, the 1950s? Where can the average Joe get a job that feeds a whole family these days?), there is no such thing as "ok, I'll stay home for at least a few months to have a baby" for most couples even.

        We're at the point where kids have become a luxury most wannabe parents can't really afford.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by trparky ( 846769 )

        That and how many men are just choosing not to do get married or for that matter, have no girlfriend at all. In this day and age, it's too dangerous to just blindly approach a woman, the chances of being charged for harassment are too high.

        I have no answer to that last one other than possibly telling women that if you want that guy, you're going to have to do the hard work instead because as men, we ain't going to do it anymore. The price is too high these days.

        • I think there are even more factors than the "relationships are a legal minefield for men" factor (though that certainly is one). For example, women are turning their noses up at prospects as well, due to a widespread lack of financial attractiveness [nypost.com] in the available men. I have read many interpretations of this, ranging from "women make more money now so the supply of matched candidates has shrunk" to "men are all broke losers now," but the end result is the same: women are also opting-out, rather than s

    • It's a tragedy of the commons situation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by monkeyxpress ( 4016725 ) on Thursday May 05, 2022 @05:38AM (#62505340)

      The reasons this has happened is that child raising is suffering from a tragedy of the commons scenario. Because we are moving away from the community paying for children towards individual parents being responsible, those who don't have children get to save more money over their working life than those who do have children. At retirement, the folks who didn't have children have more wealth with which to buy the labour output of the children who have now grown up and are the future workers. But they didn't have to pay to bring them up! This is a huge financial win for them, and a huge financial loss for those who had the children.

      Hence it makes sense at an individual level to not have children. But at a societal level, if almost nobody has children, then when all those childless people retire they will find that there are not enough doctors, amazon delivery drivers, chefs around, so everyone in society will actually be poorer. However at a relative level they will still be better off than those who had children. It's really quite stupid really. It's like being arrogant about how you 'earned' your business class seat while the airplane is hurtling to the ground because nobody spent any money on maintenance.

    • so ... how do you explain the rest of the world?
      You mean to tell me every country has an independent and unrelated low birth rate?
      https://www.weforum.org/agenda... [weforum.org]

    • BETTER birth rates? The world is overcrowded, suffering ecological devastation from this, and birth rates are STILL rising globally! Why in the world would even higher birth rates be better???

  • It's still below sustainability (Score:4)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday May 05, 2022 @12:18AM (#62504954)
    Also we were supposed to have a baby boom from people being locked up with nothing to do but fuck. Young people aren't having kids. They're also having a lot less sex. Working too many hours for too little pay. And the professionals don't want to have more than one or two.

    And every single country on the planet is going the same way as soon as they modernize. Even China and India's birth rates have hit sustainability or below. So we're not going to be able to just bring in immigrants to fix our aging population even if that was politically viable. Other countries aren't going to want to let us have their young people. They'll either incentivize them to stay or force them to at the barrel of a gun.

    We're kind of at a crossroads. We're either going to become a dystopia or Utopia. I'm not sure which yet though.

    And for anyone saying we'll just force people to have children there are plenty of countries that have tried that and it doesn't work. Women still get abortions and both men and women still get access to condoms and birth control pills. The only difference is every now and then those countries throw someone in prison for life or execute them.
    • I'm not worried about this for decades and decades. The world population in 1800 was 1 billion. That seems like plenty to not die out. A lot can and will happen socially and scientifically between now and the time the population gets back down to a billion. (Including me dying from old age but that's beside the point).
      • It's how many young people you have. Old people can't drive an economy forward. At least not in economy structured like ours. Even if automation and process improvement reduces the need for labor we're not set up for an economy with so few people able to work at high levels of productivity. And like it or not past the age of about 45 you start to slow down and pass the age of about 55 to start to stop. Yes there are exceptions and I'm sure you're one of them because every single person I talk to is an excep
        • I agree it will be best if the population decreases fairly slowly, and also that there will be less economic activity than if the population pyramid game somehow continued unabated forever. But it cannot. Some labor-intensive services like fast food won't be the same, and economic growth won't be like it was in the second half of the 20th century. But technology/productivity will continue to increase, so there can still be growth in the quality of life.

      • I'm not worried about this for decades and decades. The world population in 1800 was 1 billion.

        The population is going to peak in 30 years or less, then begin to decline, and when it does our current social safety nets are going to be screwed. That's going to happen even earlier in rich countries, and some countries in Europe are already starting to get seriously concerned about it. Maybe automation will make that a non-problem, but if not, it's going to be a big problem within our lifetimes.

    • It not sustainable but the other way around.

      I recommend to see the lesson "The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race Is Man’s Inability To Understand the Exponential Function." from Albert A. Bartlett.

      Western countries like the USA may have a dwindling birth rate which compromise the eternal growth myth without immigration. But as a whole the world population is growing exponentially. This isn't sustainable at all. It's a bet when the boat is full (technological inventions may shift this line), but o

      • Because every other country is going the same way. It appears that declining birth rates aren't cultural but rather they're tied to modernization and all the countries are modernizing. And there's nothing cultural that prevents a country from modernizing. It's purely economics and time. And also helps if the major Nations don't constantly overthrow their governments but there's less of that too.

        What this means is that those countries have declining birth rates too. Even India and China have hit sustaina

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by RobinH ( 124750 )
        The world population is not growing exponentially. Birth rates are expected to fall below replacement rate (2.1 babies per woman) by 2070 and total population will level off by 2100. source [pewresearch.org]

        • Thank you for the good news. I hope these projections are grounded in reality and actually pan out. Overpopulation is a quick route to extinction. Curtailing our population growth is the long game. As with any long game, there are some short term hardships to endure. But even then, they are preferable to the hardships associated with overpopulation.

        • Well when you look at the growth rate until now it has all the attributes of an exponential curve. It's nice if your prediction of 2.1 babies per woman by 2070 comes true, but it's still a prediction very far away. In a chaotic, nondeterministic environment.

      • What social security do kids provide that you had no money for to give them a sensible education, who will be struggling themselves to make ends meet and who will at best hope for you to die soon so they can sell your wheelchair for the 20 bucks they are short this month for the rent?

    • Also we were supposed to have a baby boom from people being locked up with nothing to do but fuck.

      No, a few people who ignore externalities came up with that theory. In reality when people were locked up, out of work, struggling to make ends meet, etc, depression is a real downer on sex life.
      Also when you're in financial shit you may think twice before skipping that condom even when you do fuck like rabbits.

    • We're kind of at a crossroads. We're either going to become a dystopia or Utopia. I'm not sure which yet though.

      As long as corporatism is involved the only likely outcome is fascism.

      We don't need to increase our birth rate. Just let in more of these refugees we've helped to create.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by RobinH ( 124750 )

      Other developed countries are already grappling with this. Canada's got both a very huge boomer generation and a very low birth rate, but has decided to double down on immigration as the solution. It's now the easiest place to immigrate to. Related... Canada quickly opened its borders to any Ukrainians displaced by the war who want to immigrate to Canada, with no limits.

      In terms of encouraging people to have more children, Scandinavian countries have had some luck by implementing policies that make it ea

    • Yes, most developed or even developing countries have low birthrates but, due to the very high birthrates in the poorest countries (mainly in Africa) population is still growing pretty fast. You seem to believe that population aging seems to be one of the main concerns of low birthrates but the global population can not obviously keep growing forever. So one way or another, at some point we're gonna have to deal with a population with a majority of old people.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It will be difficult for the US because the only way to address this is to make having children easier, i.e. more affordable and with jobs fit around childcare needs without penalty.

      That's way too socialist for many.

    • Young people aren't having kids. They're also having a lot less sex. Working too many hours for too little pay.

      Teenagers are also having a lot less sex, and that clearly has nothing to do with either work or pay. I think the most likely culprit is the wide and easy availability of porn, which make masturbation a much easier outlet for sexual desire.

  • Opposite-land (Score:2, Informative)

    by legumes ( 1416471 )
    In Norway there was an increase in births for 2021 - the first time in 13 years. There's been a steady but slow decline throughout the latest decade, but this sudden increase was a substantial 10% as well. It should be noted that although the pandemic lockdown hit hard, with substantial economic losses for certain groups, for the most part people have been able to continue as "normal" (Link: https://www-fhi-no.translate.g... [translate.goog] )

    • That's maybe because people in Norway can actually afford having a family and took the opportunity to sit down and plan their future together.

  • It is normal for wealthy, well educated nation to have a birth rate dip below the legal immigration rate [breitbart.com]. Consider it a good sign that women have education and economic opportunities here that aren't available in poor countries due to circumstance or backwards countries due to theocracy. Of course the consequence (or benefit) of women being able to live their own lives, pay their own bills, and make their own choices is that the birth rate goes down. Consider the drop in birth rate to be an indicator of an

  • Flash! US declining birth rate to be addressed by forthcoming Supreme Court ruling.

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