Followup on factors driving declining birth rates

Dean Spears, an economist at the University of Texas, has just published a book, co-authored with Michael Geruso, on declining birth rates, which happens to be in the back seat of my car at the moment, as my office has been rendered unusable by a thirteen trillion dollar renovation at the law school’s practically new building (long infuriating story).

Here’s the beginning of After the Spike:

Humanity is on a path to depopulation. You, your parents, their parents— any ancestors whose names you know— have been part of a growing population. And now a reversal is on the horizon. Birth rates have been falling everywhere around the world. Soon, the global population will begin to shrink. When it does, it will not spontaneously halt at some smaller, stable size. It will not fall to 6 billion or 4 billion or 2 billion and hold there. Unless birth rates then rise and permanently remain higher, each generation will be smaller than the last. That is depopulation.

This book explains why depopulation is likely, how we can know,and what the consequences would be. The story in this book is not the story of any one country or culture. It is not the story of how demographics will shape international competition and conflict and trade.

That will happen, but the stakes of global depopulation are bigger. Depopulation will matter for everyone, everywhere. If the narrow perspectives of one country, one culture, or one generation are all we can muster, then we will miss the biggest story now unfolding. This book is about humanity as a whole.

Coincidentally Spears sent me an email about my post this morning, which notes that India, which is the very definition of a major datapoint, doesn’t fit the model found in many other places of a strong correlation between low marriage rates, increasing smart phone and social media use, and declining TFR:

One thought on the suggestion that it’s about cell phones and delayed relationship formation is that India (which happens to be the place I study) is a pretty big and important counterexample. India is also below an average of two, but marriage remains pretty universal and early: People just have a small number of children and then stop. And in India’s newest Demographic and Health Survey, one sees young women who don’t have phones and haven’t used the internet also saying they want a low number of children. Of course, that doesn’t mean this story isn’t important elsewhere, but India is a big datapoint, and I think what’s probably true is that this is a convergent outcome from related but varied causes.

My post this morning should have been phrased more clearly, in that what scholars like Alice Evans and Dean Spears have been particularly interested in is not just the general trend in declining birth rates all across the world over the past couple of centuries as societies transitioned from agricultural to industrial and postindustrial economies, but the specific recent sharp decline in the total fertility rate in so many otherwise very different countries all across the world — a decline than in many cases has been well below the lowest edge of the range of estimates that demographers have been using to project world population growth, and eventual decline, over the course of the rest of the century.

Even so, I found many of the comments to that post to be below LGM’s normally high intellectual standard (I’m not being snarky or sarcastic about this — the comments are one of the best things about this blog). So many comments seemed to proceed from the implicit assumption that people like Evans and Spears, i.e., scholars who have dedicated their careers to this incredibly complex and important topic, don’t see that the answer to why birth rates have been falling is simple. It’s because of economic development, or increasing educational and economic opportunities for women, or widely available birth control, or because kids are crazy expensive and also a huge pain in the ass and parents have to internalize almost all the costs of supporting and educating the lovable little scamps, or despair about climate change, or the financialization of the world economy, or Facebook, etc. etc. etc.

Again, this was partially my fault because I didn’t make it clear enough that Evans et al are talking about the unanticipated recent sharp decline in TFR in particular, but come on people.

The triumph of the authentic Trumpian stupidity is reflected in the extent to which it has made one particular belief absolutely central to all political discourse in the Republican party, and on the American right wing generally.

That particular belief is the key concept at the core of the stupid person’s world view, and it is this: All of these apparently complicated problems that trouble our society, and that interfere with our impending return to greatness, are actually very simple.  For every social problem there is always a simple solution – one weird trick – that solves the problem perfectly.  All you need is common sense, and an unwillingness to be fooled by the so-called experts.  This is the stupid person’s Nicene Creed.

Moreover, stupid people love simple answers to complex questions, because such answers validate their entire world view.   This is one reason why Trump has made attacking the entire American university system, and in particular the nation’s elite universities, so central to his political project.  The system of American higher education is bad as an axiomatic matter, because universities exist on the basis of the assumption that common sense is often wrong.   Trump in this respect merely reflects the core right wing belief that serious intellectual inquiry is at best superfluous and more often corrosive of a genuine appreciation of the truth, which again is always a simple matter of common sense.

From The Triumph of Stupidity (forthcoming)