NC Family Staff | July 13, 2024 | SHARE: 
Fertility rates across the world are falling, and even media outlets like The New York Times are starting to express concern. The impacts of a shrinking population are immense, and will be felt for years to come unless steps are taken to reverse the trend.
This week on Family Policy Matters, host Traci DeVette Griggs welcomes Lyman Stone, Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, to discuss America’s falling fertility rate what we can do to fix it.
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TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. Many of us remember the doomsday headlines warning us about an overpopulation crisis facing the planet. Well, today, though, it’s become clear that we are actually facing the opposite problem, a fertility crisis. As governments around the world now find themselves grasping for urgent solutions to rapidly declining fertility. The Institute for Family Studies is launching a pro-natalism initiative to pioneer new research to create policy suggestions to counteract global fertility decline. Demographer Lyman Stone, a research fellow with the Institute for Family Studies has been tasked with establishing this effort. Lyman Stone is with us today. Welcome to Family Policy Matters.
LYMAN STONE: Good to be with you.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: All right. So define the problem for us. How does the United States current fertility rate compare historically and to other countries?
LYMAN STONE: In historic comparison, birth rates in the US are very low right now. They’re at their lowest level ever, just a bit above 1.6 children per woman. In international comparison, this is still higher than many other high-income countries, but of course, it’s lower than lots of countries around the world, and so generally, I mean, I think it’s reasonable to think of this as a pretty low fertility rate. The average woman in America says she wants to have about 2.2 or 2.3 children. So, if the current rate is, say, 1.6 and people want 2.2, 2.3 that means that the average person is missing half a child. Or you could say another way is every other family in America is missing a child they would like to have but did not have.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: That’s interesting. So, you’re not saying that the problem is people don’t want more children, but they’re not having the children they want. Why is that?
LYMAN STONE: This is a common misunderstanding. Is a lot of people have this idea that the reason fertility has fallen is because we now live in a society where, just like, people don’t want kids. And that’s not true. We actually have lots of research on people’s family preferences, and while certainly there’s not the same almost social requirement or strong social norm to have children, the truth is most people still want kids. Fertility desires have not fallen by a very great deal, and yet people aren’t having those kits. And the main reason is that most people, when they think about having children, they don’t just want children, right? You don’t just say, I want any child I can get. No, you want a child that you can raise in a certain way with a partner who have a certain level of support and investment in that. Usually, a married partner is what most people want, whether they actually get that is another question, but that’s what most people want. And as a result, having children is actually kind of a later step of a process that begins with economic stability, partnership status, marriage, these kinds of things. And as those earlier steps are kind of faltering and failing, people are not succeeding in getting the life course they want. Fertility ends up falling as a result, falling as a downstream effect. What’s happening here that’s causing people to not fulfill these dreams that they have of having kids? So, there’s a lot of different causes, far too many need to get into in the length of interview have, but the really short answer is basically that economic success is coming later in life. Whereas in the past, a 22-year-old with a high school degree might be able to get a job that wasn’t too much worse than what an older and better educated worker might get, today that’s not the case. Virtually 100% of economic growth over the last 30 years has gone to people over the age of 30. That is older people, not people in that earliest stage, who are making their early life decisions, and as a result, the relative economic position of young people has declined a lot. Now they make up for it later in life. But the problem is that fertility is uncompromising. You can’t just make up for it later on. Yeah, you can make up for it a bit. There’s some reproductive technology, okay, but, but at the end of the day, you can’t fully make up for lost time when it comes to fertility, and so these life course delays create long term effects that people just have a very difficult time coming back from.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Some of these policies, I guess that you’re leaning toward, because you have to do a lot of research before you’re going to probably put forth some very specific policies. But what are you leaning toward? Where’s the issue? Where’s the emphasis need to be?
LYMAN STONE: There are kind of three, three big elements of pro-natal policy we can think about. And we can think of them as basically fixing what’s broken, changing the rules of the game, and changing the support that parents get. So first of all, fixing what’s broken. Our tax code, our welfare code, these things currently severely penalized marriage for working class people. If you’re relatively high income, marriage is subsidized in our tax code. But if you’re working class, marriage is penalized that if you have two people who are getting the earned income tax credit and they get married, their benefits fall dramatically. So, we punish marriage for younger, working class, lower earning people. So, we should fix that. We should get rid of marriage penalties. The next is changing the rules of the game. So, the big one here is housing, although occupational licensing is also a factor here. Like we have all these jobs that it used to be you could just do that job, but now you have to have, like, a special license or paper that says you can do that job. So, we need to get rid of a lot of those. But also zoning. We have all these rules that say, even though you own that land, you can’t, you can’t use it the way you want to use it, because of zoning or all these other housing rules. And the result of this is that housing is far too expensive, particularly for young people. It’s very difficult to build starter homes in America today on affordable lots, and the result is that young people have really low homeownership rates compared to the past. Homeownership rates for young people have just absolutely cratered, and so they all end up renters in big apartment buildings where they never put down roots and never form these families. And then the final thing is supporting families more, and that means things like expanded child tax credit or a child allowance or a baby bonus. Large direct cash transfers to families to compensate them for the difficult and socially important work of raising children.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, it is true then that when we hear young people, especially those in their 20s, talking about how much more difficult it is for them than, say, their parents or grandparents. This is true. I mean, they’re not just whining.
LYMAN STONE: No, they’re not just a bunch of whiners. Now, look, I’m not going to say that nobody in my generation does any whining, but yeah, as a basic fact, it is true. I’ll say particularly for men, for younger women, there’s been some increase in earnings associated with basically just women gradually entering the workforce more and more, but particularly for younger men, their real incomes, their inflation adjusted incomes, are genuinely a lot lower than they used to be 20 years ago, 30 years ago. It’s not just that they haven’t seen economic growth. They’ve actually seen economic decline in terms of real purchasing power. So, I think that we need to listen to that and take that into account and say, okay, so maybe, maybe we do need to do something to support young family formation.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, let’s talk about this declining fertility rate. If people who are listening don’t understand why this is so important, could you lay it out there for us in very simple terms?
LYMAN STONE: You know, there’s a lot of reasons people are concerned about this. Lower fertility rates are harbingers of lower economic growth, less innovation, less entrepreneurship, a weakened global position, any number of factors, you know, difficulty financing Social Security and Medicare. There’s all sorts of problems. But for me, the thing I worry about most is just disappointment. That is a society where most people grow old alone with little family around them, even though they wanted a family, and so they carry that disappointment over the course of their life. What does that do? Well, it creates a society of more loneliness, of embitteredness, and of weaker ties between generations, which fundamentally ties across generations are the glue that holds the social fabric together. So, if we are entering a period where large shares of older people have no descendants that they relate to, I think we’re going to be entering into a period of serious difficulties for our political and our social and our cultural systems.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, are there some solutions that aren’t just having kids? I mean, I know that’s what we desire. It sounds like statistically we desire that. But what about some of the other solutions that we hear bantered about for the falling population rate, for example, I guess adoption might be one of them. But what about immigration? We hear people go, we need to let more people in, because we need more workers. What do you think about some of those ideas?
LYMAN STONE: Yes, there’s four ways to respond to falling fertility. One is, have more babies, and I think that’s a great option. The other you mentioned is adoption. The problem with adoption is somebody still had to have that baby, so it doesn’t quite solve it. The third is productivity increases. Like, okay, we’re going to replace workers with robots, and that’s going to be okay. The problem with that is we actually know economically that as population growth rates decline, the pace of technological innovation and adoption of new technologies also declines. So, it’s not likely that we will actually get a scenario where population is crashing and we’re just getting more and more technologically advanced. In fact, it’s likely the opposite. So that really leaves immigration. And you know, in general, I think higher levels of legal, regulated immigration, particularly high skilled immigration, is a fine thing to do and is a reasonable stopgap. But at the end of the day, fertility is falling in almost every country around the world, which means immigration may work for us because we are falling before some of the other countries, but it won’t work for countries of the future, and because it won’t work for them, it’s a bit unfair, frankly, for us to say, well, we’re going to deal with our problem by taking people from your country instead of solving it ourselves. So, I think immigration might be an okay stopgap. There might be a range of arguments for it, but at the end of the day, countries need to solve their population problems using the people that are within their own borders. And the reason they need to do that is because depending on other countries, and usually poorer countries, to solve your problems for you, it’s just fundamentally an unreasonable and an unfair request to make of the poorer countries of the world.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: We’ve been talking about the United States and some of the policies that have caused the declining birth rate here, but now you’re mentioning that this is happening all over the world, and we know China has been trying to get their birth rate back up, and not with much success. So, what’s going on? I mean, is this all policy driven, or what’s happening around the world that’s causing this to happen for all of us?
LYMAN STONE: It’s not all policy driven, no. I mean, the reality is that these changes I talked about with economic growth mostly going to older people. These are happening all over the world, and the reason is that the economy is becoming more complicated, requiring more education, more skills, more experience, and those things just tend to accrue to older people. So, we’re seeing a lot of the same trends around the world of just young people hitting life milestones later and later, and as a result, fertility falls.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Talk about your methods for getting to these policies. I know you’re going to have to do some research. I’m sure you already have. But what’s going to happen? What kind of timeline do we have for really being able to push forth some policies on the federal level, I’m assuming, but also state and local.
LYMAN STONE: There is a lot of good research already out there that points to things that we can do to make life easier for families. So, we don’t need to wait. There’s work to be done. Now we can fix marriage penalties in the EITC right now. We can allow childcare centers to operate outside of zoned areas right now, we can increase allowable ratios of students to teachers in child care centers right now. These are things we can do right now that help families and are beneficial. But there are also areas where we do need more research, where we need to understand better. So, one of the things that we’re working on at the pronatalism initiative is we’re doing a lot of research on housing and basically, what kind of housing is best for families, what kind of housing is most suitable for them, and what kind of housing is most likely to lead families to have more kids. So that’s an area that we’re looking at right now, because housing is just so important to every part of the life course.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: How interesting. Thank you for expanding what we think of as family policy into housing. I don’t know that people think of it that way very often. I think we’re just about out of time. I’d love to keep talking, but we are bumping up against the end of our show before we go, Lyman Stone, where can our listeners go if they want to learn more about this and get more information about your pronatalism initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.
LYMAN STONE: So, the Institute for Family Studies website is a great source for any kind of question you may have on family policy. We do research in a wide range of areas that are going to be of interest for family policy. It’s kind of a one stop shop for anything family policy related.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Great. Lyman Stone with the Institute for Family Studies. Thanks so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.
LYMAN STONE: My pleasure.
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