Americans Hit Pause on Baby-Making and It’s Going to Hurt the Economy

[Purveyor]

A post-recession reluctance to have more kids combined with our changing culture may put a years-long dent in the economy

Claire Howorth @clairehoworth 3:57 PM ET

Baby boom? Try baby bust. And the one that the U.S. experienced following the 2008 recession is going to have a “ripple effect” across the economy in the coming years, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday. Though the birth rate will likely be slightly up for 2015, from 3.99 million to 4 million, it’s not rebounding quickly from its pre-recession highs that had been the norm since the 1980s. (The projections come from a forecasting firm called Demographic Intelligence, but we’ll know for sure in June.)

The lower rates since then translate to about 3.4 million fewer births between 2008 and 2015, according to Kenneth Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire.

Fewer babies are born, so hospitals feel the pinch. Fewer baby clothes and toys are purchased, so retail takes a hit. Fewer kids need fewer bunk beds in the smaller houses that their parents are buying for their smaller families. And so on.

What’s more, though, is that the birth trend says a lot about women and progress. See what the Journal wrote, emphasis ours:

A swirl of social and economic factors is damping births in the U.S. Millennial women are delaying marriage as well as childbearing. A flow of Latino immigrants who helped lift the U.S. birth rate has tapered off. Women are now outpacing men in earning college degrees, a milestone that weighs on birth rates as it heightens the cost of women pulling back from their careers to have children. And young adults are less attached to organized religion than older generations were at their age, research shows, which is thinning the ranks of a group that tends to have more babies.

more...

http://time.com/4325072/low-birth-rate-hurts-economy/?xid=gonewsedit&google_editors_picks=true

[tonyt53]

1. Many European countries are in a negative population scenario.

The US, without immigrants, will cross that barrier within 15 years.

[Baobab]

10. Someone would have to be wealthy or crazy to have children in the US today.

In terms of opportunity, it seems the US and parts of the EU have reversed places in just 30 years, now the EU is a much better place to move up economically, and the US has become economically stratified - we've moved from American Exceptionalism to American Deceptionalism.

Its amazing what a safety net can do.

We will have to figure out a better way to do things soon because technology is solving so many problems so quickly that people are needed less and less in workplaces.

Europe has a better idea in their trying to work smarter. the US should do what they are doing and adequately fund public education instead of trying to drag them down to our level.

We all need to increase the level of education to meet the rising skills bar to employment.

[arcane1]

2. Too bad. Infinite growth will kill us before a baby bust ever will n/t

[BlancheSplanchnik]

7. ^

Hand wringing over economic downturns due to lack of population increase is a short term worry. Not a catastrophic systems failure.

[Baobab]

12. They want growth because they have created a Ponzi economy.

Control fraud. A new term to look up.

[SheilaT]

3. Back during the Great Depression, birth rates got so low

in this country that it was at a slightly negative growth rate. For a decade or so demographers thought we were looking at true contraction. Then the post-war baby boom happened, and the mere concept of negative growth disappeared.

These days, with many Millennials only able to support themselves, very few are having more than one or two children.

This planet contain sustain permanent population growth. It's my personal opinion that the carrying capacity is probably not more than one billion, and the world population is nearly 7.4 billion. We are already facing huge problems of environmental degradation, and an eventual running out of resources. The end won't be pretty.

[Baobab]

11. its not that bad. Also, technology is improving so quickly people wont need to work in just 20 or 30

years. As countries become better educated, birth rates stop increasing and start falling.

Even people who have family wealth and dont have to work usually dont have large numbers of children. (more than 2)

I think the human population will stabilize within 20 years.

We could feed the entire planet now simply by giving the poor what we currently throw away. Some huge amount of food is literally thrown away.

[SheilaT]

13. There is no way the human population will stabilize within 20 years,

unless you're forecasting something catastrophic that kills off a lot of people.

The U.N. has put out a chart showing population growth since 1800, projected to the year 2100. Even their low prediction doesn't show a levelling off until 2050, which is decidedly more than 20 years in the future. But more realistic guesses have world population stabilizing in 2070, more than half a century from now. It's also possible that people will continue making babies far too enthusiastically, and population growth will continue unchecked until we destroy ourselves or the planet.

In this country not many people have more than two or sometimes three children. The Duggars are an outlier. But in other parts of the world, larger families continue to be the norm. And those parts of the world

And yes, in theory the entire planet could be fed on the food currently thrown away, but getting that food to those who need it in a timely manner is very difficult. I've seen a little of this through volunteer work at a food bank. They get donations of outdated or almost outdated food from various sources, and try very hard to get that food to needy individuals, kitchens that feed the homeless, and the like. And this is simply within one part of the state I currently live in. The logistics of getting what would otherwise be wasted to people thousands of miles away are such that there's still going to be a lot of food that doesn't get eaten.

I wish I could share your optimism about population stabilization and a shorter work-life, but I don't.

[Baobab]

14. Fertility is interrupted by really severe starvation.

nt

[SheilaT]

15. Are you projecting world-wide famine?

[Baobab]

16. I have no idea, nobody does. All we know is that work that most people do will be done by machines

Visualize an endless supply of workers who can work for almost nothing, 24/7, forever, never forgetting a thing, nor requiring any bathroom or vacation breaks, who get twice as fast every eighteen to twenty four months.

At the same time, the sum total of human knowledge is also increasing exponentially. Faster and faster.

[SheilaT]

18. You are channelling the fears that existed some sixty years

ago about automation. I recall quite clearly, in the mid-1950's, the widespread terror that automation would do away with almost all jobs. There were two different scenarios projected: one that most people would be out of work, earning no money, maybe subsisting on welfare. The other was that the automation would magically bring about prosperity to all.

Neither scenario came true.

While it's true that more and more jobs are being taken over by machines or computers, I'm completely befuddled by your connecting that to world population levelling off in twenty years. Again, for that to happen you need to be hypothesizing world-wide famine, population-decimating disease, or some other catastrophe that wipes out vast numbers of people. Clearly any of those things could happen, but you aren't being very specific here.

[Katashi_itto]

19. The Speed of change is exponential.

The amount of technological advancement that occurred in the year 2000 occurs every 1 hour and 6 minutes in 2013, and will occur every 30 seconds in 2020.

The way we think, is defined by our traditional, inherent survival instincts. For the need of survival, we have only ever needed to think of growth as being linear. For example, if we build 1 house per day, then in 30 days we will have 30 houses; we eat 1 chicken per day, then we need 30 for a months supply.

So, when it comes to thinking about how our technology will advance, we inherently think linearly. We think that, (hypothetically) if a computer held 1GB of memory in the year 2001, and in 2010 it held 512GB, then in 2020 it will hold about 1,000GB. That is incorrect. By the year 2020, with memory capacity having grown exponentially, a computer would hold 524,288GB of memory. And when we reach the year 2030, memory capacity would be over a billion GB – 1,073,741,824GB.

[Hoyt]

4. I think that might have been true some time ago, but I'm no longer sure. Especially, when we are

going to have to figure out how to take care of the populace with less jobs, etc. But, it's one of those complicated issues where one's opinion is likely to change often.

[20score]

5. Certainly a good first step. Now to make this happen

world-wide and slow down the sixth great extinction. Overpopulation is our biggest problem. Everything else is a minor inconvenience in comparison.

[bemildred]

6. Min wage jobs don't really encourage you to think about parenting. nt

[catrose]

8. Contract jobs don't either

When you don't know from month to month if you'll have a job or how long it will take to find another, you don't make long term plans.

[bemildred]

9. +1 nt

[Baobab]

17. Those jobs wont be around for much longer.

One reason is something very simple, improvements in network bandwidth and latency, combined with falling costs. Can you see why that might be extremely disruptive to the current economic order, even without AI of any kind? Telepresence. Companies can locate anywhere and draw upon workforces anywhere else.

For reasons like this, economic unpredictability is increasing very rapidly and wages converging to some point somewhere in the middle, but more likely downward because of supply and demand. I don't think wages will approach zero. But many people seem to be pretending they want them to.

Thats perhaps the main difference between Sanders and Clinton, also, can you guess why?

Hint, one of them is lying about what they want really shamelessly.