Are pandemic effects on birth rates already detectable?

As birth data approaches, maybe we can get beyond analyses like Google searches for pregnancy-related terms to see what’s happening with birth rates.

At this writing we are a few days shy of 35 weeks from February 1st. If I read this right, 10% of US births occur at 36 weeks of gestation or less. But the most recent complete data I see is from August, so it’s early. However, most fertilized human eggs do not come to term, being lost either before (30%) or after (30-40%) implantation. That’s from a paper by Jenna Nobles and Amar Hamoudi, who write:

Evidence suggests that multiple mechanisms may be involved in pregnancy survival, including those that affect placental development and function, fetal oxidative stress, fetal neurological development, and likely many others. These, in turn, are shaped by more distal processes that affect maternal nutrition, maternal exposure to biological and psychosocial stress, maternal exposure to infection, and management of chronic conditions. Pregnancy survival varies with women’s body mass index, consumption of folic acid, and in some studies, reports of stressful life events (citations removed).

The pandemic might reasonably have contributed to a higher rate of pregnancy loss from these factors. And then there are abortions, which people have probably needed more even though they had less access to them (see this report from Guttmacher). So the net effect is unclear.

Setting aside how the pandemic might have affected fertility intentions and planning (I assume this is negative, as reported by Guttmacher), there might already be fewer births, from loss and abortion.

I haven’t looked at every state, but Florida and California report births by month. In Florida, there were 9.5% fewer babies born in August 2020 than in the previous year (they revise these as they go, but the August number has been stable for a little while, so probably won’t increase much). In California there were 9.6% fewer births in August of this year compared with last year. Here are the monthly trends, including the last three years (I included Florida’s September number as of today, but that will certainly rise):

This is going to be tricky because birth rates were already falling in many places. But the average decline in the last three years was 2.9% in California and 0.7% in Florida, so these numbers clearly outpace that naïve expectation. Also, what about spring? Maybe the pandemic was already causing a decline in live births in California in March (from immigrants not coming or staying in Mexico or other countries?), but if the decline in March was unrelated, then it’s not clear how to interpret the drop in August. So it will be complicated. But this is a bona fide blip in the expected direction, so I’m posting it with a question mark.

I assume other people will be way ahead of me on this, though I haven’t seen anything. Feel free to post other analyses in the comments.

Early pandemic demographic indicators

A couple new ones and a couple updates.

Pregnancy

The pandemic could be affecting the number of abortions, miscarriages, or infant deaths, but unless those effects are large it should be too early to see effects on the total birth rate, given that we’re only about 7 months into it here. So for possible birth indicators I did a little Google search analysis using the public Google Trends data.

I found three searches that were pretty well correlated in the weekly series: “am I pregnant”, “pregnancy test,” and “morning sickness”, which all should have something to do with the frequency of new pregnancies. I ran Google Trends back five years, created an index from these searches (alpha = .68) , smoothed it a little, and this is what I got:

There was already a big drop in 2019 from the previous three years (reasonable, based on recent trends), and then 2020 started out with a further drop. But then it spiked downward in March before rebounding back to its lower level. So, maybe that implies birth rates will keep falling but not off the charts compared with recent trends.

I also checked “missed period,” which was not well correlated with the others, and got this:

Again, 2019 was already showing some decline, and 2020 started out lower than that, and now searches for “missed period” are running lower than last year, but not more in the middle of the year than they were in the beginning. So, inconclusive for pandemic effect.

Weddings

Here’s a new take on the Google trends for weddings. I took the averages of searches for “wedding invitations”, “wedding shower”, “bridal shower”, “wedding shower”, and “wedding dresses” (alpha=.94). With a little smoothing, here is 2020 compared with the average of the four previous years (unlike pregnancy searches, this one didn’t show a marked decline in 2019 compared with previous years).

March and April showed catastrophic declines in searches for wedding topics, and the rebound so far has been weak. However, weddings aren’t the same as marriages. Maybe people who had to cancel their weddings still got married down at whatever the pandemic equivalent of the courthouse is. So here’s the same analysis just for the search term “marriage license.” This shows a steep but not as catastrophic drop-off in March and April, and a stronger rebound. So maybe the decline in drop in marriages won’t be as big as the drop in weddings.

Actual marriages

I previously showed the steep decline in recorded marriages in Florida. Here’s an update.

Florida lists recorded marriages by county and month, one month behind (see Table 17). They update as they go, so as of today August marriages are probably still not all recorded. The comparison with previous years shows a collapse in March and April, and then some rebounding. August is preliminary and will come up some.

Marriages in Florida normally peak between March and May. Of course it’s too early to say how many of these were just being postponed. The cumulative trend shows that through July Florida is down 24,000 marriages, or 27%, compared with last year.

Divorce ideation

When the going gets tough, the afflicted want to get divorced, but maybe they can’t. It’s expensive and time consuming and maybe people think it will upset the children even more. (I’ve written about divorce and recessions here and here). So my initial assumption going into the pandemic was that there would be a stall in divorces even though the intent to divorce would rise, followed by a rebound when people get a chance to act on their wishes.

Here I use Google search trends for four searches: “divorce lawyer”, “divorce attorney”, “get a divorce”, and “how to divorce”. The alpha for this index is .69 (when I just use the attorney and lawyer, the alpha is .86, but the result looks the same, so I’m showing the wider index). The results show a drop in divorce ideation in March into April, followed by a rebound to a level a little above the previous year average. Note this pandemic-spring drop is a lot less pronounced than the wedding and marriage collapses above.

Actual divorces

Divorces take time, of course. Like births, I wouldn’t expect to see definitive results right away. In fact, it’s hard to know how long divorces are in process before they show up as recorded. However, in my favorite real-time demography state, Florida, they have been recording divorces every month, and have a look at this:

It’s a giant plunge in recorded divorces, almost 60% in April, followed by a weaker rebound. Again, the records are not yet complete, especially for August, so we’ll see. But comparing these patterns, it might be that there was a short suspension in divorce ideation as people were distracted by the crisis, followed by a rebound which hasn’t yet translated into divorce filings. Googling about divorce seems cheap and easy (and faster) compared with pulling it off, but this might mean there is growing pent up demand for divorce, which is bad (and may imply greater risks of conflict and violence).

Young adults living “at home”

I previous wrote about young adults living with their parents and grandparents using the June and then July Current Population Survey data made available by IPUMS.org. Subsequently, the Pew Research Center did something very similar using the data through July (with additional breakdowns and historical context). Pew used living with parents, apparently including those in households where the parents are not the householders. I prefer my definition — young adults living in the home of parents (also, or grandparents) — which fits better with the popular concept of living “at home.” So if your parents come to live with you, that’s different.

Anyway, here’s the update through August, which shows the percentage of young adults living at home falling back some from the June peak. I will be very interested to follow this through the fall.

Stata code for the living at home analysis is available here: https://osf.io/2xrhc/.

The pandemic and its attendant economic crisis is having massive effects on many aspects of family life. These early indicators are just possible targets of future analysis. There is a lot of other related work going on, which I’ve not taken the time to link to here. Please feel free to recommend other work in the comments.

The continuation of babies

There is no guarantee that a happy, healthy, equal, and harmonious population wants to produce enough children to maintain or grow its total size.

Anna Louie Sussman wrote an essay in the New York Times, given the unfortunate title “The End of Babies” (about which more below). I like a lot of it, and I have substantial disagreements with the framing.

It’s about falling fertility and capitalism. This is a great summary, though I would replace “not necessarily a bad thing” with “usually a very good thing”:

Declining fertility typically accompanies the spread of economic development, and it is not necessarily a bad thing. At its best, it reflects better educational and career opportunities for women, increasing acceptance of the choice to be child-free, and rising standards of living.

At its worst, though, it reflects a profound failure: of employers and governments to make parenting and work compatible; of our collective ability to solve the climate crisis so that children seem a rational prospect; of our increasingly unequal global economy. In these instances, having fewer children is less a choice than the poignant consequence of a set of unsavory circumstances.

Sussman sees the “bigger picture” as this:

Our current version of global capitalism … has generated shocking wealth for some, and precarity for many more. These economic conditions generate social conditions inimical to starting families: Our workweeks are longer and our wages lower, leaving us less time and money to meet, court and fall in love. Our increasingly winner-take-all economies require that children get intensive parenting and costly educations, creating rising anxiety around what sort of life a would-be parent might provide. A lifetime of messaging directs us toward other pursuits instead: education, work, travel.

This paragraph uses a sort of 1% versus 99% framing with is exaggerated but not unreasonable. This, however, is just exaggerated:

It seems clear that what we have come to think of as “late capitalism” — that is, not just the economic system, but all its attendant inequalities, indignities, opportunities and absurdities — has become hostile to reproduction. Around the world, economic, social and environmental conditions function as a diffuse, barely perceptible contraceptive.

Lost in this, by now, is all the good parts about falling fertility mentioned previously. Remember, contraceptives are good, and most people use them deliberately to help control their lives, and they do it because social and environmental conditions have made it possible to have more control over one’s life than ever before, while offering unprecedented opportunities for women beyond child-rearing.

In short, I agree with Sussman’s description of how some people in rich societies would like to have more children than they do, I just don’t think it’s anything like a universal or even general experience in our era. And there is a puzzle confounding the premise: within rich countries, or at least the USA, privileged people, who presumably have more control over their lives and destinies, still have fewer children than those who are more powerless. I once wrote:

There is an argument that Americans are having fewer children than they want to because of our stone age work-family policies, especially poor family leave support and the high costs of good childcare. I’m sure that’s happening to some degree, but it’s still the case that more privileged people, who should be able to overcome those things more readily — people with college degrees and Whites — have lower fertility rates than people who are getting squeezed more.

Like a lot of work in this area, Sussman’s assessment that people want more children — which generates the image of the “reproductive malaise [that] has settled over,” in this case, Denmark — is based on surveys showing people’s “ideal” family size is larger than the average number of children actually born per family. But the interpretation of this gap is not so straightforward. Maybe people think three is the ideal number of children, but they also think a PhD is the ideal amount of education, and so they compromise, with some having one kid and a PhD, and some having three kids and a no college degree. This is an empirical question. What’s historically unprecedented and still so new that we don’t know what to make of it socially is the fact that this is a choice at all for so many people.

As I previously reported, the proportion of US women whose “ideal” number of children is higher than they number they had by age 40 has risen, from less than 15% among women born in the 1930s to almost a quarter for women born in the early 1970s. If you break that trend down by BA/no-BA education level, you can see that women with BA degrees are pushing it upward:

So maybe college graduate women are having fewer than their ideal number of children like I’m earning less than the ideal amount of money — I think I could be making more money, but then I wouldn’t be able to sit around in my pajamas blogging with my dog, so I compromise. Of course, like some of the people in Sussman’s piece, a lot of people are justifiably unhappy about this, feeling they can’t compromise between forces pulling them in opposite directions. And so the result is dissatisfaction, maybe even malaise. I just don’t think we know how many people feel that way, or even whether the feeling is much more prevalent than it used to be.

Denmark

Sussman uses Denmark as one case study. This is her summary:

If any country should be stocked with babies, it is Denmark. The country is one of the wealthiest in Europe. New parents enjoy 12 months’ paid family leave and highly subsidized day care. Women under 40 can get state-funded in vitro fertilization. But Denmark’s fertility rate, at 1.7 births per woman, is roughly on par with that of the United States. A reproductive malaise has settled over this otherwise happy land.

But where is the evidence for this malaise? Denmark’s fertility rate has been low and relatively stable, while it is the USA’s that has plummeted since 2007, which is why the countries are now at the same level. The malaise that is settling is here — Denmark’s has already settled.

To elaborate on Denmark: There was a rapid drop in fertility from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, followed by a rebound, and then relative stability for about 25 years. During that time, as the population continued to grow slowly, women were reaching age 40 with between 1.8 and 1.9 children on average. Rather than slipping into a chasm, it looks more like the affluent people of Denmark have settled into a moderately low-fertility regime.

“Replacement” fertility, of about 2.1 births per woman, doesn’t mean a society is healthy or happy. Maybe late capitalism with a decent welfare state is not “hostile to reproduction,” maybe it just doesn’t quite get to 2.1.

How bad is that? Like the USA (see my last projections), Denmark will have population decline if they keep on this path, discounting immigration. Because they have been at low fertility for a while, the country is close to seeing actual decline based on birth rates alone. Here is what would happen over the next hundred years if current trends persist and there are no immigrants: The population would eventually contract 31%.

A 31% population drop a century from now would make for a pretty different Denmark (as will another few feet of sea-level rise). But there is time to get there — the drop would only be 6% in the next three decades. And of course if they don’t want this, they could easily cushion the fall with immigration. In any event, there is nothing here that suggests the “end of babies” or the abandonment of reproduction — families would continue having an average of 1.8 children each, as they have for the last several decades.

A population below replacement fertility might seem diseased, but it might also just be the aggregation of a lot of people exercising their newfound freedoms in newly discovered ways, including having fewer or no children. I agree with Sussman when she writes:

The problem, to be clear, is not really one of “population” …. Hundreds of thousands of babies are born on this planet every day; people all over the world have shown they are willing to migrate to wealthier countries for jobs. Rather, the problem is the quiet human tragedies, born of preventable constraints — an employer’s indifference, a belated realization, a poisoned body — that make the wanted child impossible.

To the extent those tragedies occur, we should prevent or ameliorate them. And to the extent they are concentrated among people or groups who already experience marginalization, isolation, or exploitation, it’s a social problem that’s part of our burgeoning inequality suite. Healthcare, housing, education, and family leave all come to mind as helpful, even if they can’t solve the existential crisis of late capitalism. But two cautions. First, I’m not convinced such tragedies are more common than they used to be, just because people are having fewer children than they used to. Remember, we also have fewer people trapped into having large families they don’t want (forced-birther policies notwithstanding).

And second, crucially, even if we address these issues of self-determination, there is no guarantee that a happy, healthy, equal, and harmonious population wants to produce enough children to maintain or grow its total size. We may eventually have to learn to live with fewer people, locally and globally, even if we’re all happy with the number of children we have.

What comes around

In the meantime, I think it’s confusing and ultimately unhelpful to confound what are essentially orthogonal issues. We should care about the problems Sussman raises regardless of population trends.

And that brings me to an aside on New York Times coverage. It was just 11 years ago, in 2008, that a different New York Times story about the existential threat of falling fertility, this one in the Magazine and titled “No Babies?”, singled out Scandinavian countries — with total fertility rates of 1.8 — as positive examples, bucking the trend toward “lowest-low” fertility demonstrated by Southern European countries, due to their “vigorous social-welfare systems.” That’s the same social welfare system, and the same total fertility rate, that Sussman characterizes as a “reproductive malaise” in Denmark today.

And there are illustrations of children playing alone in both cases. Because “the end of babies” and a world with “no babies” is best illustrated with a picture of the last child on earth alone in a playground. Great illustrations — just not of our societies.

That said…

You can’t really pin sudden fertility swings on things like “late capitalism,” which are decades in the making. It was just February of 2009 that I was writing one of my first blog posts, “Why Are American Women Having More Children?” as U.S. total fertility rose to 2.1 for the first time since 1971. I think it was late capitalism, too, but the U.S. TFR was 13% higher than Denmark’s (they are now the same), and everyone was talking about American mothers “opting out” of the labor force to stay home with their four children. On the other hand is socialist Finland — a country with a lot of what I want from social policy, including low inequality and poverty, and lots of family leave — which has seen a fertility decline since 2010 that could reasonably be called a crash. The government estimates the TFR in 2019 is 1.32-1.34, down from 1.86 a decade ago!

Here are the trends in select countries:

Does this mean the people in Finland are suddenly much less happy  relative to those in Denmark, which has seen a recent uptick in fertility rates? I have no idea. I can make population projections if you tell me the fertility rate, but I can’t tell you what the fertility rate will be in the future (and neither can you). A tiny bit humbling, honestly.

AEI panel on ‘demographic decline’

I was on a panel at the American Enterprise Institute, titled, “Demographic decline: National crisis or moral panic?” The event featured Lyman Stone, who argued that “demographic decline” in the U.S. is a national crisis, and my reply. Nick Eberstadt from AEI also offered comments. The moderator was AEI’s Karlyn Bowman.

The video of the event (which was on CSPAN) is below.

In my presentation I used the projections and other material I described earlier, here (where you can also link to the data and package I used). The gist of my talk is that with immigration we don’t have an issue of declining population.

I also emphasized the political implications of catastrophic “demographic decline” talk, which are based on a combination of doomsday demographics and increasing race/ethnic diversity. For that part I included these two figures, which I worked up for the next edition of my textbook. The first shows Census Bureau projections of the U.S. population by race/ethnicity, which is the basis for the White supremacist panic. (Important caveat about this figure is the assumptions about the ethnic identity of the descendants of today’s Latinos, see Richard Alba.)

For the politics of immigration, which is a giant topic, I presented this very simple figure showing the rise of Latin American and Asian immigration since 1965.

Here is the video on YouTube. If you prefer the CSPAN production style (or don’t want to give AEI click), theirs is here. My talk is 15 minutes, starting at 13:40.

Happy to hear your responses, including on the dicey issue of whether to participate in an AEI event.

(In the YouTube comments, the first person calls me a “Jewish supremacist” and demands to know my view on Israeli immigration policy, and another says, “This guy is through and through an open borders globalist.” So that’s the dialogue, too.)

Fertility rate implications explained

(Sorry for the over-promising title; thanks for the clicks.)

First where we are, then projections, with figures.

For background: Caroline Hartnett has an essay putting the numbers in context. Leslie Root has a recent piece explaining how these numbers are deployed by white supremacists (key point: over-hyping the downside of lower fertility rates has terrible real-world implications).

Description

The National Center for Health Statistics released the 2018 fertility numbers yesterday, showing another drop in birth rates, and the lowest fertility since the Baby Boom. We are continuing a historical process of moving births from younger to older ages, which shows up as fewer births in the transition years. I illustrate this each year by updating this figure, showing the relative change in birth rates by age since 1989:

Historically, postponement was associated with reduction in lifetime births — which is what really matters for population trends. When people were having lots of children, any delay reduced the total number. With birth rates around two per woman, however, there is a lot more room for postponement — a lot of time to get to two. (At the societal level, both reduction and postponement are generally good for gender equality, if women have good health and healthcare.)

This means that drops in what we demographers call “period” fertility (births right now) are not the same as drops in “completed” fertility (births in a lifetime), or falling population in the long run. The period fertility measure most often used, the unfortunately named total fertility rate (TFR), is often misunderstood as an indicator of how many children women will have. It is actually how many births they are having right now, expressed in lifetime terms (I describe it in this video, with instructions).

Lawrence Wu and Nicholas Mark recently showed that despite several periods of below “replacement” fertility (in terms of TFR), no U.S. cohort of women has yet finished their childbearing years with fewer than two births per woman. Here is the completed fertility of U.S. women, by year of birth, as recorded by the General Social Survey. By this account, women born in the early 1970s (now in their late-forties by 2018) have had an average of 2.3 children.

Whether our streak of over-two completed fertility persists depends on what happens in in the next few years (and of course on immigration, which I’ll get to).

Last year at this time I summed up the fertility situation and concluded, “sell stock now,” because birth rates fell for women at all ages except over 40. That kind of postponement, I figured, based on history, reflected economic uncertainty and thus was an ill omen for the economy. The S&P 500 is up 5% since then, which isn’t bad as far as my advice goes. And I’m still bearish based on these birth trends (I bet I’ll be right before fertility increases).

Projection

It is very hard to have an intuitive sense of what demographic indicators mean, especially for the future. So I’ve made some projections to show the math of the situation, to get the various factors into scale. My point is to show what the current (or future) birth rates imply about future growth, and the relative role of immigration.

These projections run from 2016 to 2100. I made them using the Census Bureau’s Demographic Analysis and Population Projection System software, which lets me set the birth, death, and migration rates.* I started with the 2016 population because that’s the most recent set of life tables NCHS has released for mortality. Starting in 2018 I apply the current age-specific birth rates.

First, the most basic projection. This is what would happen if birth rates stayed the same as those in 2018 and we completely cut off all immigration (Projection A), or if we had net migration running at the current level of just under +1 million each year, using Census estimates for age and sex of the migrants (Projection B).

From the 2016 population of 323 million, if the birth rates by age in 2018 were locked in, the population would peak at 329 million in 2029 and then start to decline, reaching 235 million by 2100. However, if we maintain current immigration levels (by age and sex), the population would keep growing till 2066 before tapering only slightly. (Note this assumes, unrealistically, that the immigrants and their children have the same birth rates as the current population; they have generally been higher.) This the most important bottom line: there is no reason for the U.S. to experience population decline, with even moderate levels of immigration, and assuming no rebound in fertility rates. Immigration rates do not have to increase to maintain the current population indefinitely.

Note I also added the percentage of the population over age 65 on the figure. That number is about 16% now. If we cut off immigration and maintain current birth rates, it would rise to 25% by the end of the century, increasing the need for investment in old age stuff. If we allow current migration to continue, that growth is less and it only reaches 23%. This is going up no matter what.

To show the scale of other changes that we might expect — again, not predictions — I added a few other factors. Here are the same projections, but adding a transition to higher life expectancies by 2080 (using Japan’s current life tables; we can dream). In these scenarios, population decline is later and slower (and not just at older ages, since Japan also has lower child mortality).

Under these scenarios, with rising life expectancies, the old population rises more, to between 27% and 29%. Generally experts assume life expectancies will rise more than this, but that’s the assumed direction (now, unbelievably, in doubt).

Finally, I’ve been assuming birth rates will not fall further. If what we’re seeing now is fertility postponement, we wouldn’t expect much more decline. But what if fertility keeps falling? Here is what you get with the assumptions in Projection D, plus total fertility rates falling to 1.6, either by 2030 or 2050. As you can see, in the 1.6 to 1.8 range, the effects on population size aren’t great in this time scale.

Conclusion: We are on track for slowing population growth, followed by a plateau or modest decline, with population aging, by the end of the century, and immigration is a bigger question than fertility rates, for both population growth and aging.

Perspective

In a global context where more people want to come here than want to leave (to date), worrying about low birth rates tends to lend itself to myopic, religious, or racist perspectives which I don’t share. I don’t think American culture is superior, whites are in danger of extinction, or God wants us to have more children.

I do not agree with Dowell Myers, who was quoted yesterday as saying, “The birthrate is a barometer of despair.” That even as some people are having fewer children than they want, or delaying childbearing when they would rather not. In the most recent cohort to finish childbearing, 23% gave an “ideal number of children for a family to have” that was greater than the number they had, and that number has trended up, as you can see here:

Is this rising despair? As individuals, people don’t need to have children any more. Ideally, they have as many as they want, when they want, but they are expensive and time consuming and it’s not surprising people end up with fewer than they think “ideal.” Not to be crass about it, but I assume the average person also has fewer boats than they consider ideal.

And how do we know what is the right level of fertility for the population? As Marina Adshade said on Twitter, “Did women actually have a desire for more children in the past? Or did they simply lack the bargaining power and means to avoid births?”

However, to the extent that low birth rates reflect frustrated dreams, or fear and uncertainty, or insufficient support for families with children, of course those are real problems. But then let’s name those problems and address them, rather than trying to change fertility rates or grow the population, which is a policy agenda with a very bad track record.

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* I put the DAPPS file package I created on the Open Science Framework, here. If you install DAPPS you can open this and look at the projections output, with graphs and tables and population pyramids.

Appearance on Fox News Channel explained

Recently I was invited to be interviewed by Fox News Channel for “a series of stories about changing demographics and how they’re impacting politics, policy, and our culture.” Specifically, the producer said they wanted to interview me about “your recent research on millennials and marriage and divorce rates.”

This raised the recurring question faced by responsible academics: Should I appear on Fox News? For those of us who love attention, it’s hard to say no, but I did consider saying no. I figured the segment would be a right-slanted take, but also hoped that since it was for a news program, rather than an opinion program, it might be moored to reality, and I thought I might have a chance to interject something useful, or at least true. (This differs from my previous appearance, with Tucker Carlson.) Whether to differentiate at all between news and opinion on FNC is an interesting question in itself.

So I did it, and it aired yesterday. Since I lent it legitimacy I should also correct the errors they made. Comments below the video:

Here are some comments and corrections. First, the beginning is just a fear-of-change narrative:

“As we head into 2019 you may look back and think about how much has changed, not just in the past year, but in your life. And it’s not just you. America’s population, our culture, it is all changing.”

It’s setting viewers up for doom, where change is ominous out of control, the audience tearing down that precedes the build up of the authoritarian leader. Anyway, that’s to be expected, along with the boilerplate right-wing statements about marriage, women, welfare, and single mothers, which I won’t detail here.

They never did ask me about my research on marriage and divorce, but we did talk about fertility. So then he says:

“The US is facing a demographic crisis that JFK could not have imagined: A fertility rate of 1.8 percent. That means the US is not producing enough to sustain its population.”

Don’t ask what JFK has to do with this. But the fertility rate is not “1.8 percent,” it’s 1.8 projected births per woman, and it’s not a demographic crisis.

In the interview, I tried to focus on inequality and insecurity in every answer, figuring that was the angle they might let into the piece. This is what they ended up using:

“The reasons behind these demographic changes are complicated. [Philip Cohen:] One of the reasons people have fewer children is because they’re unsure about the future. They’re unsure about the costs of raising those children, especially the costs of education. And the student loan debt is a huge crisis that everybody knows about.”

I’m happy with this, a true statement, not distorted or taken out of context. The chyron they put below me is bad, however: “Lower U.S. Fertility Rates Creating Society Upheaval.” “Upheaval” is a strong word, but in any event the causality is reversed: social instability is driving lower U.S. fertility rates. Whatever effects falling fertility will have on society, they’re not here yet anyway.

Then immigration:

“The US is compensating for lower fertility rates with another demographic change: an increased reliance on immigration.”

The US doesn’t exactly have a policy of responding to falling fertility by welcoming immigrants. But it’s true that immigration is buttressing the US from the potential effects of slower population growth. In the last 25 years the immigrant share of the labor force has increased from 12 percent to 19 percent. That is pretty clearly the solution — if we need one — to falling population growth. But this quote from Victor Davis Hanson, Hoover Institution is ridiculous:

“In the case of the right, they want people to work more cheaply than native-born citizens. And on the left they want a further argument, or an agenda for big government.”

It’s true the right wants immigrants to help keep labor costs down. The idea that the left wants immigrants to bolster the argument for big government is just idiotic. This is creating a narrative where the system/swamp/Washington is destroying the culture.

Finally, the conclusion brings it back to fear of change:

“These demographic changes help to partly explain the resurgence of socialism in the United States. A Gallup poll from August found that young adult Americans are more positive about socialism – 51 percent – than they are about capitalism – 45 percent. That’s a 12-point swing in only two years.”

I have no idea how you connect “these demographic changes” to the (excellent) rise in positive perceptions about socialism. But the 12-point change in two years was only in young adults’ (age 18-29) attitudes toward capitalism. During that time their attitude toward socialism declined as well, so the gap went from -2 to +6, or an eight-point swing. Here’s the trend from Gallup:

In conclusion, I got to say something I wanted to say, and it added something to the piece they wouldn’t otherwise have included. Whether that makes it worth participating in this I can’t say.

The segment above was the first of three. I discuss the other two here.

Are middle children going extinct?

In The Cut, Adam Sternbergh has a piece called, “The Extinction of the Middle Child They’re becoming an American rarity, just when America could use them the most.”

This is good for me to read, because I’ve been asked to include more material about sibling relationships in the next edition of my textbook, The Family, and it’s not my expertise. Thinking about sibling relationships is good, but the demography here is off. Sternberg writes:

According to a study by the Pew Research Center in 1976, “the average mother at the end of her childbearing years had given birth to more than three children.” Read that again: In the ’70s, four kids (or more) was the most common family unit. Back then, 40 percent of mothers between 40 and 44 had four or more children. Twenty-five percent had three kids; 24 percent had two; and 11 percent had one. Today, those numbers have essentially reversed. Nearly two-thirds of women with children now have two or one — i.e., an oldest, a youngest, but no middle.

It is true there are a lot fewer U.S. families with more than two children today than there were in 1976. However, by my reckoning (see below), in the most recent data (2016), 38 percent of mothers age 40-44 who have had any children have had three or more. So, there’s a middle child in more than a third of families. And, crucially, that number hasn’t dropped in the last 25 years. I’ll explain.

The best regular national survey for this is the Current Population Survey’s June Fertility Supplement, which is administered to a national sample by the Census Bureau more or less every two years. They ask women, “Altogether how many children have you ever given birth to?” The traditional way to measure total number of children born for a cohort of women is to take the average of that number for women who are ages 40-44. (I would rather do it at ages 45-49, but they didn’t always ask it for women over 44.)

This is what you get for the surveys from 1976 to 2016 (remember these are the years the women reached the end of their childbearing years).

You can see how it’s a little tricky. First, the biggest changes were over by the 1990s, when the last of the Baby Boom parents reached their forties (their first kids were born 25 years earlier). The biggest changes after that were in the number of women having no children, which rose until 2006 but then fell, possibly as access to fertility treatments improved. (Note in all this we’re calling all the children one woman has a “family,” but really it’s a sibling set; some will be living with other people and some will have died, so it’s not a measure of family life in the household sense of family. And it’s all based on children women have, so if there are different fathers in these families we wouldn’t know it, and if these children have half-siblings with a different mother we wouldn’t know it, but that’s the way it goes.)

It’s hard to see what this means for the prevalence of middle children in the country, because the no-children women aren’t relevant. So if your question is, “what proportion of families with children have any middle children?” you would want to do it like this, which excludes the childfree women, and combines all those with three or more:

This shows the big drop in middle-child families that Sternbergh started with, but it puts it in perspective: the change was over by the 1990s, and since then it’s been basically flat at 35+ percent. So, things have changed a lot from the days of the Baby Boom, but the same article could have been written, demographically speaking, in 1992. (Note that the drop in total fertility rate since 2008 [see this] hasn’t yet shown up in completed fertility since it’s among younger women.)

It’s not clear whether the unit of analysis should be the family or the child, however. This says 38 percent of women produce middle-child families. But how many children have the experience of being a middle child (defined as a child with at least one older and one younger sibling)? That might make more sense if you’re interested, as Sternbergh is, in the effect of middle children on the culture. So just multiplying out the number of children per woman, and counting the number of middle children as the total minus two for all sibships of three or more (I think I did it right), you get this:

(Again, this assumes no one died before their mother turned 44, which did change over this period, especially as violent crime rates among young men fell. You could do something fancy to estimate that.)

So, it looks to me that, for the last 25 years, about 20-25 percent of children have been middle children.

On the other hand, looking in the longer run — much further back than Sternbergh’s starting point of 1976 — it’s clear that the proportion of children growing up as middle children has declined drastically. One quick and dirty way to show that is in children’s living arrangements. The final figure uses Census data (decennial till 2000, then American Community Survey) to show how many children are living as the only child, one of two, a middle child, or as the oldest/youngest in a three-plus family. This is messy because it’s just whoever is living together at the moment. So this is answering a question more like, “what proportion of children at any given time are living with an older and a younger sibling?” Here’s the trend:

(Note that, thanks to IPUMS.org coding, this does count people as having older siblings if the sibling is older than 18, as long as they’re living in the household. But I’m only including kids living in the household of at least one parent.)

Wow! In 1850 half of all U.S. children had an older and a younger sibling in the household with them. Now it’s below 20 percent. Still no drop since 1990, but the long-term change is impressive. So if all that personality stuff is true, then that’s a big difference between the olden days and nowadays. Definitely going to put this in the book.

That thing where you have a lot of little graphs (single-parent edition)

Yesterday I was on an author-meets-critics panel for The Triple Bind of Single-Parent Families: Resources, Employment, and Policies to Improve Well-Being, a new collection edited by Rense Nieuwenhuis and Laurie Moldonado. The book is excellent — and it’s available free under Creative Commons license.

Most of the chapters are comparative, with data from multiple countries. I like looking at the figures, especially the ones like this, which give a quick general sense and let you see anomalies and outliers. I made a couple, too, which I share below, with code.

Here’s an example, showing the proportion of new births to mothers who aren’t married, by education, for U.S. states.  For this I used the 2012-2016 combined American Community Survey file, which I got from IPUMS.org. I created an sample extract that included only women who reported having a child in the previous year, which gives me about 177,000 cases over the five years. The only other variables are state, education, and marital status. I put the raw data file on the Open Science Framework here. Code below.

My first attempt was bar graphs for each state. This is easiest because Stata lets you do graph means with the bar command (click to enlarge).

The code for this is very simple. I made a dummy variable for single, so the mean of that is the proportion single. Edcat is a four-category education variable.

gr bar (mean) single [weight=perwt], over(edcat) bar(1,color(green)) yti(“Proportion not married”) by(state)

The bar graph is easy, and good for scanning the data for weird cases or interesting stories. But maybe it isn’t ideal for presentation, because the bars run from one state to the next. Maybe little lines would be better. This takes another step, because it requires making the graph with twoway, which doesn’t want to calculate means on the fly. So I do a collapse to shrink the dataset down to just means of single by state and edcat.

collapse (mean) single psingle=single [fw=perwt], by(state edcat)

Then I use a scatter graph, with line connectors between the dots. I like this better:

You can see the overall levels (e.g., high in DC, low in Utah) as well as the different slopes (flatter in New York, steeper in South Dakota), and it’s still clear that the single-mother incidence is lowest in every state for women with BA degrees.

Here’s the code for that graph. Note the weights are now baked into the means so I don’t need them in the graph command. And to add the labels to the scatter plot you have to specify you want that. Still very simple:

gr twoway scatter single edcat , xlab(1 2 3 4, valuelabel) yti(“Proportion not married”) lcolor(green) msymbol(O) connect(l) by(state)

Sadly, I can’t figure out how to put one title and footnote on the graph, rather than a tiny title and footnote on every state graph, so I left titles out of the code and I then added them by hand in the graph editor. Boo.

Here’s the full code:

set more off

clear
quietly infix ///
 byte statefip 1-2 ///
 double perwt 3-12 ///
 byte marst 13-13 ///
 byte fertyr 14-14 ///
 byte educ 15-16 ///
 int educd 17-19 ///
 using "[PATHNAME]\usa_00366.dat"

/* the sample is all women who reported having a child in the previous year, FERTYR==2 */
 
replace perwt = perwt / 100

format perwt %10.2f

label var statefip "State (FIPS code)"
label var perwt "Person weight"
label var marst "Marital status"
label var educd "Educational attainment [detailed version]"

label define statefip_lbl 01 "Alabama"
label define statefip_lbl 02 "Alaska", add
label define statefip_lbl 04 "Arizona", add
label define statefip_lbl 05 "Arkansas", add
label define statefip_lbl 06 "California", add
label define statefip_lbl 08 "Colorado", add
label define statefip_lbl 09 "Connecticut", add
label define statefip_lbl 10 "Delaware", add
label define statefip_lbl 11 "District of Columbia", add
label define statefip_lbl 12 "Florida", add
label define statefip_lbl 13 "Georgia", add
label define statefip_lbl 15 "Hawaii", add
label define statefip_lbl 16 "Idaho", add
label define statefip_lbl 17 "Illinois", add
label define statefip_lbl 18 "Indiana", add
label define statefip_lbl 19 "Iowa", add
label define statefip_lbl 20 "Kansas", add
label define statefip_lbl 21 "Kentucky", add
label define statefip_lbl 22 "Louisiana", add
label define statefip_lbl 23 "Maine", add
label define statefip_lbl 24 "Maryland", add
label define statefip_lbl 25 "Massachusetts", add
label define statefip_lbl 26 "Michigan", add
label define statefip_lbl 27 "Minnesota", add
label define statefip_lbl 28 "Mississippi", add
label define statefip_lbl 29 "Missouri", add
label define statefip_lbl 30 "Montana", add
label define statefip_lbl 31 "Nebraska", add
label define statefip_lbl 32 "Nevada", add
label define statefip_lbl 33 "New Hampshire", add
label define statefip_lbl 34 "New Jersey", add
label define statefip_lbl 35 "New Mexico", add
label define statefip_lbl 36 "New York", add
label define statefip_lbl 37 "North Carolina", add
label define statefip_lbl 38 "North Dakota", add
label define statefip_lbl 39 "Ohio", add
label define statefip_lbl 40 "Oklahoma", add
label define statefip_lbl 41 "Oregon", add
label define statefip_lbl 42 "Pennsylvania", add
label define statefip_lbl 44 "Rhode Island", add
label define statefip_lbl 45 "South Carolina", add
label define statefip_lbl 46 "South Dakota", add
label define statefip_lbl 47 "Tennessee", add
label define statefip_lbl 48 "Texas", add
label define statefip_lbl 49 "Utah", add
label define statefip_lbl 50 "Vermont", add
label define statefip_lbl 51 "Virginia", add
label define statefip_lbl 53 "Washington", add
label define statefip_lbl 54 "West Virginia", add
label define statefip_lbl 55 "Wisconsin", add
label define statefip_lbl 56 "Wyoming", add
label define statefip_lbl 61 "Maine-New Hampshire-Vermont", add
label define statefip_lbl 62 "Massachusetts-Rhode Island", add
label define statefip_lbl 63 "Minnesota-Iowa-Missouri-Kansas-Nebraska-S.Dakota-N.Dakota", add
label define statefip_lbl 64 "Maryland-Delaware", add
label define statefip_lbl 65 "Montana-Idaho-Wyoming", add
label define statefip_lbl 66 "Utah-Nevada", add
label define statefip_lbl 67 "Arizona-New Mexico", add
label define statefip_lbl 68 "Alaska-Hawaii", add
label define statefip_lbl 72 "Puerto Rico", add
label define statefip_lbl 97 "Military/Mil. Reservation", add
label define statefip_lbl 99 "State not identified", add
label values statefip statefip_lbl

label define educd_lbl 000 "N/A or no schooling"
label define educd_lbl 001 "N/A", add
label define educd_lbl 002 "No schooling completed", add
label define educd_lbl 010 "Nursery school to grade 4", add
label define educd_lbl 011 "Nursery school, preschool", add
label define educd_lbl 012 "Kindergarten", add
label define educd_lbl 013 "Grade 1, 2, 3, or 4", add
label define educd_lbl 014 "Grade 1", add
label define educd_lbl 015 "Grade 2", add
label define educd_lbl 016 "Grade 3", add
label define educd_lbl 017 "Grade 4", add
label define educd_lbl 020 "Grade 5, 6, 7, or 8", add
label define educd_lbl 021 "Grade 5 or 6", add
label define educd_lbl 022 "Grade 5", add
label define educd_lbl 023 "Grade 6", add
label define educd_lbl 024 "Grade 7 or 8", add
label define educd_lbl 025 "Grade 7", add
label define educd_lbl 026 "Grade 8", add
label define educd_lbl 030 "Grade 9", add
label define educd_lbl 040 "Grade 10", add
label define educd_lbl 050 "Grade 11", add
label define educd_lbl 060 "Grade 12", add
label define educd_lbl 061 "12th grade, no diploma", add
label define educd_lbl 062 "High school graduate or GED", add
label define educd_lbl 063 "Regular high school diploma", add
label define educd_lbl 064 "GED or alternative credential", add
label define educd_lbl 065 "Some college, but less than 1 year", add
label define educd_lbl 070 "1 year of college", add
label define educd_lbl 071 "1 or more years of college credit, no degree", add
label define educd_lbl 080 "2 years of college", add
label define educd_lbl 081 "Associates degree, type not specified", add
label define educd_lbl 082 "Associates degree, occupational program", add
label define educd_lbl 083 "Associates degree, academic program", add
label define educd_lbl 090 "3 years of college", add
label define educd_lbl 100 "4 years of college", add
label define educd_lbl 101 "Bachelors degree", add
label define educd_lbl 110 "5+ years of college", add
label define educd_lbl 111 "6 years of college (6+ in 1960-1970)", add
label define educd_lbl 112 "7 years of college", add
label define educd_lbl 113 "8+ years of college", add
label define educd_lbl 114 "Masters degree", add
label define educd_lbl 115 "Professional degree beyond a bachelors degree", add
label define educd_lbl 116 "Doctoral degree", add
label define educd_lbl 999 "Missing", add
label values educd educd_lbl

recode educd (0/61=1) (62/64=2) (65/90=3) (101/116=4), gen(edcat)

label define edlbl 1 "<HS"
label define edlbl 2 "HS", add
label define edlbl 3 "SC", add
label define edlbl 4 "BA+", add
label values edcat edlbl

label define marst_lbl 1 "Married, spouse present"
label define marst_lbl 2 "Married, spouse absent", add
label define marst_lbl 3 "Separated", add
label define marst_lbl 4 "Divorced", add
label define marst_lbl 5 "Widowed", add
label define marst_lbl 6 "Never married/single", add
label values marst marst_lbl

gen married = marst==1 /* this is married spouse present */
gen single=marst>3 /* this is divorced, widowed, and never married */

gr bar (mean) single [weight=perwt], over(edcat) bar(1,color(green)) yti("Proportion not married") by(state)

collapse (mean) single psingle=single [fw=perwt], by(state edcat)

gr twoway scatter single edcat , xlab(1 2 3 4, valuelabel) yti("Proportion not married") lcolor(green) msymbol(O) connect(l) by(state)

 

 

Fertility trends explained, 2017 edition

Not really, but some thoughts and a bunch of figures on the 2017 fertility situation.

There was a big drop in the U.S. fertility rate in 2017. As measured by the total fertility rate (TFR), which is a projection of lifetime births for the average woman based on one year’s data, the drop was 3.1%, from 1.82 projected births per woman to 1.76. (See this measure explained, and learn how to calculate it yourself, in my blockbuster video, “Total Fertility Rate.”) To put that change in perspective, here is the trend in TFR back to 1940, followed by a plot of the annual changes since 1971:

That drop in 2017 is the biggest since the last recession started. In fact, we have seen no drop that big that’s not associated with a time of national economic distress, at least since the Baby Boom. In 2010, I noted that the drop in fertility at that time preceded the official start of the recession and the big unemployment spike. There is now some more systematic evidence (pointed out by Karen Benjamin Guzzo) that fertility falls before economic indicators turn down. Which makes this New York Times headline a little funny, “US Births Hit a 30-Year Low, Despite Good Economy.” This is a pretty solid warning sign, although not definitive, of an economic downturn coming in the next year or so. (On the other hand, maybe it’s a Trump effect, as people are just freaking out and not thinking positively about the future; something to think about.)

Whatever the role of immediate economic conditions, the long-term trend is toward later births, which is generally going to mean fewer births — both because people who want later births tend to want fewer births, and because some people run out of time if they start late. And that is not wholly separable from economic factors, of course. People (especially women) delay childbearing to improve their economic situation, as they improve their economic situation when they delay births (if they have the right suite of economic opportunities). To show this trend, I’ve been updating this figure for a few years (you’ll find it, and a description, in my book Enduring Bonds).

The real reason I made this figure was to highlight the interconnected nature of teen births. Birth rates for teens have fallen dramatically, but it’s been along with drops among younger women generally, and increases among older women — it’s about delaying births overall. Note, however, that 2017 is the first time since the depths of the last recession that birth rates fell for all age groups except women over age 40.

So, sell stock now. But it is hard to know for sure what’s a local temporal reaction and what’s just the way things are going nowadays. For that it’s useful to compare the U.S. to other countries. The next figure shows the U.S. and 15 other hand-picked countries, from World Bank data. Rising fertility in the decade before the last recession wasn’t so unusual. We are a little like Spain and France in this figure, who had rising fertility then and falling now. But Germany and Japan are still rising, at least through 2016. All this is at below-replacement levels (about 2.0), meaning eventually these rates lead to population decline, in the absence of immigration. The figure really shows the amazing fertility transformation of the last half century, especially in giant countries like China, India, and Brazil. Who would have thought we’d live to see Brazil have lower fertility rates than the U.S.? It’s been that way for more than a decade (click to enlarge).

Anyway, it’s my position that our below-replacement fertility levels are themselves nothing to worry about at present. There are still lots of people who want to move here (or, there were before Trump). And we can live with low fertility for a long time before the population starts to decline in a meaningful way. Eventually it will be a good idea to stop perpetual population growth anyway, so we may as well start working on it. This is better than trying to shape domestic policy to increase birth rates.

That said, there is an argument that Americans are having fewer children than they want to because of our stone age work-family policies, especially poor family leave support and the high costs of good childcare. I’m sure that’s happening to some degree, but it’s still the case that more privileged people, who should be able to overcome those things more readily — people with college degrees and Whites — have lower fertility rates than people who are getting squeezed more. People who assume their kids are going to college are naturally concerned with rising higher education costs, both their own loan payments and their kids’ future payments. So it’s a mixed bag story. Here are the predictors of childbearing for women ages 15-44 in the 2016 American Community Survey. These are the probabilities of having had a birth in the previous 12 months, estimated (with logistic regression) at the mean of all the variables shown.*

Interesting that there’s only a small foreign-born fertility edge in this multivariate model. In the unadjusted data, 7.4% of foreign-born versus 6.0% of U.S.-born women had a baby, but that’s mostly accounted for by their age, education, and race/ethnicity.

To summarize: 2017 was a big year for fertility decline (at all but the highest ages), the economy is probably about to tank, and the U.S. fertility rate is still relatively high for our income level, especially for racial-ethnic minorities.

Happy to have your thoughts in the comments. For more, check the fertility tag.

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* Here’s the Stata code for the regression analysis. It’s just some simple recodes of the ACS data from IPUMS.org. Start with a file of women ages 15-44, with the variables you see here, and then do this to it:

recode educd (0/61=1) (62/64=2) (65/90=3) (101/116=4), gen(edcat)

label define edlbl 1 "Less than high school"

label define edlbl 2 "High school graduate", add

label define edlbl 3 "Some college", add

label define edlbl 4 "BA or higher", add

label values edcat edlbl

gen raceth=race

replace raceth=4 if race==5 | race==6 /* now 4 is all API */

replace raceth=5 if hispan>0

drop if race>5

label define raceth_lbl 1 "White"

label define raceth_lbl 2 "Black", add

label define raceth_lbl 3 "AIAN", add

label define raceth_lbl 4 "API", add

label define raceth_lbl 5 "Hispanic", add

label values raceth raceth_lbl

egen agecat=cut(age), at(15(5)50)

gen forborn=citizen!=0

gen birth=fertyr==2

logit birth i.agecat i.raceth i.forborn i.edcat i.marst [weight=perwt]

margins i.agecat i.raceth i.forborn i.edcat i.marst

A step toward civilization (and have more children), Shanghai edition

Over the course of two weeks in China, I saw several versions of signs like this:

“A small step forward, a big step for civilization” (向前一小步, 文明一大步).

This one is posted in the old-town section of Nanxun (now a tourist attraction), naturally, above a urinal.* Invoking civilization may be overblown for the problem of men standing too far away (which didn’t seem to be especially extreme, compared to U.S. urinals), but China has a long tradition of using dramatic slogans to call citizens to higher common purpose. Here was one that struck me, in downtown Shanghai:

Every family striving to become a civilized family; everyone involved in its creation (家家争做文明家庭; 人人叁与创建活动).

This is from the Shanghai public health authorities. (No, I don’t know Chinese, but I love trying to use a dictionary, and I ask people.) The fascinating thing about that is the composition of the civilized family pictured: father, mother, two grandparents, and two children. 

Fertility rates in China are well below replacement level, as they are in other East Asian countries, meaning the average woman will have fewer than two children in her lifetime and the population will eventually shrink (barring immigration). China’s total fertility rate nationally is probably at about 1.5. In Shanghai, a metro area with some 20 million people, the norm was already one child per family before the one-child policy was implemented in 1980, and fertility has continued to fall; it most recently clocked in at a shockingly low .88 per woman as of 2008.

Reasons for ultra-low fertility are varied and contested, but likely culprits include expensive housing and education costs for children. It was reported to me informally that about half of children can go to college-track high schools instead of vocational schools, and that is determined by a standardized test administered at the end of middle school. That puts tremendous pressure on parents with middle-class aspirations. Which helps explain the extensive system of expensive supplemental private education, as promoted by this ad I saw in an upscale mall:

School advertisement, Shanghai

The website for this company promises, “Super IQ, Wealth of Creativity, Instant Memory Capacity.” How many kids are you going to send to this private program?

One of the five perfect, super-involved parents at the parent-child class is a man, which may or may not seem like a lot. Of the many people taking their kids to school on scooters, I didn’t see a lot with more than one child, and the only picture I got was of one piloted by the apparent dad (note also something you don’t see here much: schoolboy in pink shirt):

Man taking children to school, Shanghai

This recalls another probable cause of low-low fertility, the gender-stuck family and employment practices that keep women responsible for children and other care work (scooter dads notwithstanding). In conjunction with women outperforming men in college graduation rates these days (as in the U.S.), this indirectly reduces fertility by leading to delayed marriage, and directly reduces fertility by causing parents to decide against a second child.

Grandparent, parent, child, in Hangzhou

The weak system of care hurts on both ends, with people having fewer children because raising them is expensive, and people needing children to take care of old people because public support is lacking. This may be one reason why grandparents can have a positive effect on parents’ motivation to have children, as reported by Yingchun Ji and colleagues (including Feinian Chen, who hosted my visit). The fact that it is common for grandparents to provide extensive care for their grandchildren, as Feinian Chen has described (paywall), presumably helps strengthen their pronatal case.

Lots of pictures of grandparents taking care of a single grandchild to choose from. Here’s one, from the (awesome) Shanghai Museum:

Grandparent and child, Shanghai

The one-child policy ended in 2016, and couples no longer have to get permission to have a first or second child (but they do for a third or more). This change alone, although a better-late-than-never thing, may not do much to increase birth rates. That is the conclusion from studies of families for whom the policy was relaxed earlier. Sadly, although birth rates were already falling dramatically in the 1970s and the one-child policy was not responsible for the trend, the policy still (in addition to large scale human rights abuses) created many millions of one-child families that will struggle to meet intergenerational care obligations in the absence of adequate public support. (Here’s a good brief summary from Wang Feng, Baochang Gu, and Yong Cai.)

This is a challenge for civilization.

The pictures here, and a few hundred more, are on my Flickr site under creative commons license.

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* Americans who love the funny translations of signs in China may be in for some disappointment, as the Standardization Administration has announced plans to implement thousands of stock translations in the service sector nationwide.