When the world locked down in March 2020, plenty of commentators slyly suggested we’d see a baby boom nine months later. Not only did that prediction fizzle (turns out a global pandemic isn’t quite as romantic as a blizzard!) but recently released data from the Centers for Disease Control confirm that the U.S. birth rate is on an unyielding decline. The lack of births poses enormous, foundational threats to the nation–but it also opens a door to a new, transpartisan coalition centered on family flourishing.
While those on the right have been sounding the alarm for quite a while now–former Weekly Standard columnist Jonathan Last wrote What To Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster back in 2013–it’s fairly easy for those on the left (full disclosure: that’s me!) to dismiss falling fertility as no big deal. After all, this line of thinking goes, the Earth is overheating as it is, people consume carbon, and so wouldn’t fewer people help combat climate change–to say nothing of the fact we do a terrible job caring for the people who are already here?
Yet this is ultimately iceberg thinking: what you perceive on the surface changes mightily when you look deeper. As the New York Times recently put it, “The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation.” This is truly not a partisan nor uniquely American problem: Joe Waters of Capita has noted that drastic population changes were prominent in the Global Trends Report from the United States’ National Intelligence Council. The U.S. will, however, have to reckon with what is coming.
“Birth rate declines are happening across the world, including in the most family-friendly of nations like Finland and Norway. The broader explanation seems to derive from a constellation of interrelated factors.”
A society forced to orient around elder care is ill-positioned to make transformative changes to combat climate change or ensure that young families have the support they need. On a level of raw politics, low birth rates lead to a “gerontocracy”; already, the elderly vote at far higher rates than youth, and their policy preferences are far different. For instance, those who are Baby Boomers or older are much less likely to be concerned about climate change or want to do something aggressive about it. This is even true within parties: a 2020 Pew survey found that just 16% of elderly Republicans believe human activity contributes “a great deal” to climate change (vs. nearly a third of Republicans who are Millennial or younger), and only 55% said the U.S. should prioritize developing alternative energy sources (vs. 79% of younger Republicans). No offense to the Boomers, but do we really want to give them more relative power?
(More immigration, for what it’s worth, can certainly be a salve for a graying population but is no longer a long-term solution, as the fertility declines are global.)
Sit for a moment with that graph and its implications. Cast your mind through 20 more years of a steady decline followed by an endless plateau; unlike the 1970s dip, which followed an economic recession and adjustment to widespread contraceptives, the structural forces currently at play are far more entrenched.
Many explain the falling birth rate with a version of, Well, you made having a child ridiculously expensive, gave us no paid leave, and saddled us with crushing debt–what exactly did you think was going to happen? This is entirely fair! Yet the story is more complicated.
Birth rate declines are happening across the world, including in the most family-friendly of nations like Finland and Norway. The broader explanation seems to derive from a constellation of interrelated factors, primary among them being women delaying childbirth (the choice of which is absolutely good), the cult of “workism” taking up an outsized amount of our time and energy, and, certainly, wariness about both the costs of child-rearing and the ethics of bringing additional children into an unstable and warming planet.
That interrelation is where America’s awful family policies come in. One can envision these great economic and cultural forces as a mudslide, and national birth rates as the houses on a hill. All the houses are slipping, but if I may borrow a biblical reference, nations with strong family policies are at least built on rock; they are more resilient and will be better able to withstand the lurch.
America, meanwhile, built its familial house on sand, and if we are not careful, we’ll be swept clear out to sea. As Anne Helen Petersen wrote in a recent newsletter (after noting that she dislikes the Scandanavia comparisons because they’re apples-to-oranges and can be used to wave away the need for better U.S. family policies, a critique I take seriously): “There’s no one, fixable issue undergirding the U.S.’s birth rate decline. It’s our work structure — and our lack of childcare infrastructure, and our student debt, and our general lack of safety nets, and our decline in collectivism, and our hostility towards women, and our ever growing consumer debt loads, and declining religious affiliation, and birth control, and climate despair. All of these factors overlaps and compound and it’s straight up bad analysis to suggest otherwise.”
Thus, the faltering birth rate creates an odd but real political opening. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has pointed out, it is often a common challenge–the asteroid hurtling towards Earth in a disaster movie–that causes foes to finally lay down arms and at least temporarily band together. Yet, as Haidt said in one talk, “our problem–and our tragedy–is that in these hyperpartisan times, the mere fact that one side says, ‘Hey look! There’s an asteroid,’ means that the other side says ‘Huh? What? I’m not even going to look up.’”
The birth decline is an asteroid that both liberals and conservatives should be able to see, but from distinct angles, like looking up from different hemispheres. To paint with broad brushes, where a liberal may be most concerned with the underlying family-hostile policies, a graying electorate, or the inherent inequity of families not reaching the number of children they want, conservatives may see weaker global competitiveness, economic torpor, or an inherent tragedy in fewer babies, who they see as children of God being born.
Not unlike climate change, there are likely two prongs any such transpartisan coalition would organize around: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation would be steps to stabilize the birth rate and try to nudge it back up towards the “replacement rate” of 2.1. In the U.S., this surely involves a suite of family-supportive policies including generous paid family leave, low-cost child care, and a child allowance. Beyond those, birth rate mitigation also becomes an animating factor in the struggle to take the boulder off parents’ and would-be parents’ backs through affordable health care, adequate housing, and canceling student loan debt.
“Not unlike climate change, there are likely two prongs any such transpartisan coalition would organize around: mitigation and adaptation.”
Similarly, we aren’t solving the cult of workism when tens of millions of Americans are employed in harsh jobs with few protections and low wages that lead to long hours; walking 15 miles a day in a 10-hour Amazon warehouse shift is, to be blunt, not conducive to desiring babies. The economy–the very way we work–must change.
There are also cultural questions around how we organize ourselves socially, how we reckon with the decline in religious membership, where we find space to think about the ‘good life.’ Having children is often, as Jennifer Senior titled her brilliant book, “all joy, no fun”–and in modern America we don’t have a particularly sophisticated way to talk about values and tensions like joy versus fun.
Adaptation, on the other hand, means beginning to plan now for a grayer future; given how difficult nations have found it to significantly raise the birth rate even with extreme effort, it’s fair to say that stabilization and modest increases are the most realistic goals. Accepting that reality demands we start to rethink things like safety net programs which rely on younger workers. It’s worth putting everything on the table: to counteract the coming gerontocracy, perhaps the voting age should be lowered to 17 or 16, or other reforms instituted to increase the turnout of younger generations. There are even opportunities to be seized; for instance, education reformer Michael Petrilli has pointed out that our elementary schools are going to soon be heavily under capacity, perhaps allowing easier integration of early childhood education programs.
The low-birth-rate asteroid is headed our way. It cannot, and should not, be ignored–while it may not seem so calamitous at first glance, the impact will reverberate through all of society. That threat is already visible to many on the right, and in my experience, when those on the left absorb the consequences, they see it too. This is new connective tissue around family flourishing that has the potential to generate that rarest of political phenomena: common cause. It’s time to look up, and then it’s time to act.
Elliot Haspel is a nationally-recognized early childhood and K-12 education policy expert who writes about child and family issues. A former elementary school teacher, he holds an M.Ed. in Education Policy from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Elliot’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, among other mediums. He resides in Richmond, VA with his wife and two young daughters. Elliot’s book, “Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It,” was published in November 2019.
This essay was published on May 26, 2021 and edited by Nancy Vorsanger.