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What to Expect When No One's Expecting
America's Coming Demographic Disaster
Jonathan V. Last
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What to Expect When No One's Expecting
America's Coming Demographic Disaster
Jonathan V. Last
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About This Book
Look around you and think for a minute: Is America too crowded?For years, we have been warned about the looming danger of overpopulation: people jostling for space on a planet that’s busting at the seams and running out of oil and food and land and everything else.It’s all bunk. The “population bomb” never exploded. Instead, statistics from around the world make clear that since the 1970s, we’ve been facing exactly the opposite problem: people are having too few babies. Population growth has been slowing for two generations. The world’s population will peak, and then begin shrinking, within the next fifty years. In some countries, it’s already started. Japan, for instance, will be half its current size by the end of the century. In Italy, there are already more deaths than births every year. China’s One-Child Policy has left that country without enough women to marry its men, not enough young people to support the country’s elderly, and an impending population contraction that has the ruling class terrified.And all of this is coming to America, too. In fact, it’s already here. Middle-class Americans have their own, informal one-child policy these days. And an alarming number of upscale professionals don’t even go that far—they have dogs, not kids. In fact, if it weren’t for the wave of immigration we experienced over the last thirty years, the United States would be on the verge of shrinking, too.What happened? Everything about modern life—from Bugaboo strollers to insane college tuition to government regulations—has pushed Americans in a single direction, making it harder to have children. And making the people who do still want to have children feel like second-class citizens. What to Expect When No One’s Expecting explains why the population implosion happened and how it is remaking culture, the economy, and politics both at home and around the world.Because if America wants to continue to lead the world, we need to have more babies.
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CHAPTER ONE
Americaâs Falling Fertility
Right-thinking Westerners have lauded Chinaâs One-Child Policy for over three decades. So much so that you might think that having Americans hew to a rough equivalent isnât such a bad thing after all. China sure looks like the future. If you tuned in to any of the 2008 Beijing Olympics you saw a country full of shiny, modernist buildings. The nationâs industrial sector makes everything from spools of thread to iPhones. Futuristic maglev trains crisscross the landscape. Chinaâs public works projects are so massive that theyâre difficult to comprehend in the abstract. (The Three Gorges Dam, for instance, is six times as long as the Hoover Dam. The Hoover Dam has a spillway capacity of 400,000 cubic feet per second. The Three Gorges Damâs spillway capacity is 4.1 million cubic feet per second.) Our wise men frequently lecture us about how we will eventually submit to our new Chinese overlords and the One-Child Policy is often given credit for their coming supremacy. In his 2008 book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, for instance, Tom Friedman lauded One-Child for saving China from âa population calamity.â1
But Friedman and other Sinophiles misunderstand Chinaâs One-Child Policy. Rather than saving China from calamity, it has created a slow-rolling demographic catastrophe that should scare the living bejesus out of anyone paying attention to more than the buildings, factories, trains, and dams.
The Original One-Child Policy
Between 1950 and 1970, the average Chinese woman had roughly six children during her lifetime. Beginning in 1970, the Chinese government began urging a course of âlate, long, fewââinstructing women to wait until later in life to have babies, put longer periods of time between births, and have fewer children overall. In a decade, the countryâs fertility rate dropped from 5.5 to 2.7.2 That wasnât enough for the government, so in 1979 it formulated the One-Child Policy.
The policy is more complicated than its name suggests. Under One-Child, couples wanting a baby were originally required to obtain permission from local officials first. (In 2002, the government relaxed this provision; couples can now have one child without government clearance.) After having one child, urban residents and government employees were forbidden from having another, with very few exceptions. In rural areas, couples were often allowed to have a second baby five years after the first. Any more than two, however, and the government instituted penalties. Sanctions ranged from heavy fines to confiscation of belongings to dismissal from work. In addition, that is, to the occasional forced abortion and sterilization.3 The overall result is a Chinese fertility rate that now sits somewhere between 1.9 and 1.3, depending on whoâs doing the tabulating. Demographer Nicholas Eberstadt notes that, âIn some major population centersâBeijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin among themâit appears that the average number of births per woman is amazingly low: below one baby per lifetime.â4
By 2050 the age structure in China will be such that there are only two workers to support each retiree.5 Because the extended family has been dismantled and there is no pension system, the government will be forced to either: (1) substantially cut spending in such areas as defense and public works in order to shift resources to care for the elderly; or (2) impose radically higher tax burdens on younger workers. The first option risks Chinaâs international and military ambitions; the second risks revolution.
Of course, there is a third option: The Chinese government could simply send its old people to the countryside to die. It seems unthinkable, but remember that this is a regime that, within living memory, intentionally starved to death between 20 million and 40 million of its own people.6 A proposal that sounds monstrous to our ears may be a legitimate policy option for the Chinese Communist Party. To avoid these unpleasant scenarios, all China has to do is convince its citizens to have more babies, starting now. This, it turns out, is harderâmuch harderâthan it sounds.
American (Fertility) History 101
American fertility has been headed south almost since the Founding. When the Constitution was first ratified it called for a national census, which our newly formed government first conducted in 1790.7 A few years ago, economist Michael Haines combined data from that first census with other data sets to determine that in 1800, the fertility rate for white Americans was 7.04.8 The earliest reliable estimate of the fertility rate for black Americans, from the 1850s, puts it at 7.90.9 By 1890, the fertility rate for whites had fallen to 3.87, while staying relatively high for blacks, at 6.56. (All early population numbers were kept separately by race.)
Over the next half-century, however, the black fertility rate went into free-fall, reaching 2.87 in 1940âa drop of 56 percent in less than three generations. Meanwhile, the white fertility rate exhibited a more gradual decline, settling at 2.22 in 1940.10 At the end of the Second World War, America experienced the Baby Boom, about which you probably know quite a lot. For 20 years, the fertility rate spiked, reaching a height in 1960 of 3.53 for whites and 4.52 for blacks.11 What made the Baby Boom so exceptional wasnât just its magnitude, but its longevityâit lasted an entire generation, creating a population bulge that still bloats our demographic profile.
Yet despite its size, the Baby Boom proved temporary. In the cultural moment that followed during the 1960s and 1970s, the fertility rate in Americaâand the rest of the worldâwent bust. In Canada, the United States, Japan, and Western Europeâin every single industrialized nationâthe fertility rate plummeted. In the Netherlands, for instance, the fertility rate went from 3.1 in 1960 to 1.6 in 1980; in Canada it slipped from 3.8 to 1.8; in West Germany it fell from 2.3 to 1.5.12
America followed suit. From a combined TFR of 3.7 in 1960 (the end of the Baby Boom), the fertility rate in the United States dropped to 1.8 in 1980, a 50 percent decline in a single generation. Since that low point, weâve rebounded slightly. Our TFR went as high as 2.12 in 2007 before slumping back to 2.01 in 2009.13 But again, that rebound was largely driven by the high fertility of immigrants, whose numbers surged from the 1980s through the early part of the 2000s. Letâs have a look.
In 1990, Americaâs fertility rate was 2.08, which seemed ideal. But that number belied two very different realities. Non-Hispanic whites had a TFR of 2.00 that year, while the Hispanic fertility rate was 2.96.14 By 2000 the overall fertility rate had dipped to 2.06, even though fertility for non-Hispanic whites actually ticked upward to 2.05.15 The reason: The Hispanic rate dropped, to 2.73âwhere it stayed through 2009.16 (This 9 percent drop between 2007 and 2009 was the largest decline among the racial cohorts.17) In 2010, it plummeted to 2.35. Which suggests, as I mentioned earlier, that the trouble with Hispanic fertility in America is that itâs sliding toward the national average. Weâll talk about this in more detail later.
To get a sense of what these differing fertility rates mean in the real world, here are some numbers from the 2010 census: In 1990, there were 22.35 million people of Hispanic origin in America, making up 9 percent of our total population.18 By 2000, that number rose to 35.3 million, or 12.5 percent.19 In 2010, 50.5 million Americansâ16.3 percent of the populationâwere Hispanic. Thatâs more than a doubling of the Hispanic population in just 20 years. To put it even more starkly: Between 2000 and 2010, the total population of the United States increased by 27.3 million, yet more than half of the entire increase came just from Hispanics.
Most of that increase was due to fertility. Between 2000 and 2010, a net of 7.02 million people immigrated to the United States from south of the border.20 Which means that, over the last decade, 30 percent of Americaâs total population growth was the result of the labors of a group that makes up only 16 percent of the country.
This should scare you quite a lot, though not for the reasons you might think. The problem isnât that America is about to be overrun with Hispanic immigrants and their children. The problem is that our population profile is so dependent on Hispanic fertility that if this group continues falling toward the national averageâand everything about American history suggests that it willâthen our 1.93 fertility rate will take a nosedive.
One Child for All
So the decline in American fertility is a real and longstanding trend. The question is: Why? I would argue that itâs the result of a complex constellation of factors, operating independently, with both foreseeable and unintended consequences. From big thingsâlike the decline in church attendance and the increase of women in the workforceâto little thingsâlike a law mandating car seats in Tennessee or the reform of divorce statutes in Californiaâour modern world has evolved in such a way as to subtly discourage childbearing. Itâs not a conspiracy. None of these changes was intended to drive down fertility. But the fact that thereâs no conspiracy makes it even more worrisome, because every country across the globe is witnessing the same phenomenonâeven though their individual circumstances could not be more different. Which means that there is something about modernity itself that tends toward fewer children.
But that kind of talk is gauzy, so letâs start with something concrete. Stripped down to its most basic cause, our declining fertility is first and foremost about the decline of infant mortality. In 1850, 2 out of every 10 white babies and 3.4 out of every 10 black babies died during infancy.21 Steady improvements in medicine, sanitation, and nutrition vastly reduced infant mortalityâto just 5.98 deaths for every 1,000 live births today.22 This very happy development is such an enormous driver of current fertility that its contribution isâagain, happilyâbeyond measure.
Another quantitative factor has been the decline of âdesired fertility.â The Gallup organization has been asking Americans about their âideal family sizeâ since 1936. When Gallup first asked the question, 64 percent of Americans said that three or more children were ideal; 34 percent said that zero, one, or two children were ideal. Those percentages remained reasonably stable until the late 1960s. In 1967, a sudden decline in desired family size began. By 1973, 48 percent of Americans wanted zero, one, or two children and only 43 percent wanted three or more. The percentage wanting smaller families grew until the 1990s, when roughly 60 percent of Americans thought a smaller family (or no family at all) was ideal. Today only 33 percent of Americans think that a family with three or more children is ideal.23
It is important to remember that with easy access to birth control and abortion, increased educational demands, and the rising cost of raising children, the âdesired fertilityâ metric is an upward limit on âactual fertility.â In practice, actual fertility is often much lower than desired. In 2011, 58 percent of women said that an ideal family would have zero, one, or two children. But in reality, 20.4 percent of women completed their childbearing years with no children; 16.9 percent had only one child; and 34.4 percent had two children.24 All told, 71.7 percent of women wound up with small, or no, families. So when Gallup reports that 2.5 children is the ideal family size for Americans, it means that even in a perfect world, 2.5 is the upper...