A Tale of Two Nations
A recent article claimed that the COVID pandemic has exacerbated a decrease in US birth rates, showing a 7% drop in December 2020 births (9 months after the lockdown began). In fact, US births have been decreasing for some time, as the nation already sits below the replacement birth rate. The article posits that increased housing costs and student debt are to blame, resulting in an entire generation of people postponing (or outright eschewing) having children.
Perhaps the most pervasive attempt to directly manipulate births was China’s one child policy enacted in 1980. One Child Nation revealed the heartbreaking consequences over the last 35 years, labeling China’s policy a “population war.” Indeed, multiple generations of the Chinese population are now reckoning with the prolonged social and ethical effects of such a drastic nationwide mandate.
I was born in 1988 in China, which makes me - and my parents - direct statistics of the one-child policy. We moved out of the country when I was still very young; so in a sense, we didn’t feel the impact of the policy first-hand, but have seen its reverberations in my extended family over the years. Coincidently or not, I am also an only child. Whether that was by my parents’ conscious choice, I am not sure. But I can’t imagine China’s widespread propaganda not impacting my parents’ mindset in some subconscious way.
Already, preliminary data shows that birth rates in China dropped 15% in 2020, hitting a new record low, and marriage rates hit a 14-year low. Some regions in China expect to see birth rates decrease more than 25% due to the pandemic. Rising costs were cited as reasons, but more interestingly, a different cultural movement was cited: women’s attitudes towards marriage and parenthood. Lijia Zhang, an author and commentator, posits that:
It is about choice. Better education, higher income and more career options grant these women the freedom to choose a lifestyle they desire. They are assertive enough to resist the pressure from their parents to produce children. And the society is more tolerant than before.
Moreover, allegedly 40% of Chinese working women who don’t have children do not want children; and 63% believe having children would negatively affect their career development.
In the US, these conjectures are mostly factual. Female college graduates have virtually closed the wage and opportunity gap with men, but begin significantly deviating after 35:
Similarly, the ratio of female to male absolute earnings drops significantly after 35:
This is not a coincidence. Family formations have gradually extended to later ages; and for those who form families, mothers typically have a child around 30. Pay equality has progressed significantly; but when it comes to women in their 30s who likely have children to care for, there is still an absolute and formidable pay gap. The calculus for motherhood has effectively become: Am I willing to sacrifice 25% of my earning potential to raise a child?
The Near Future
Near the end of One Child Nation, writer-director Nanfu Wang notes that she left China - a nation which forced sterilizations and abortions on women - to move to the US - a nation fighting to make abortions illegal. Although these approaches to childbirth seem contradictory, she notes that indeed, both nations are fighting for the same thing: control over women.
The Handmaid’s Tale tells the story of a dystopian patriarchal society in which childbirths have plummeted. To repopulate America, men force fertile women into captivity to bear children, enslaving them and trading them along the way. At first glance, this premise seemed more science fiction than reality, a conceit too farfetched to be probable. Now I’m not so sure.
Giant Steps
The most commonly proposed reason for the lowering birth rate in the US is the increase in living costs for millennials. Student debt has increased more than 102% in the last decade, exceeding $1.7 trillion in 2020 for the first time in history. This is the definition of up and to the right, but in a bad way:
However, the largest cost most people incur is housing, which happens to also be the cost that most directly impacts people’s ability to start a family. Using data for US birth rates and US median house selling price, here is what those trends look like since 1963:
If ever there was one correlation that explains the dropping birth rate in the US, this is it. Housing prices have skyrocketed more than 1,700% in 50 years; in comparison, the federal minimum wage, which hasn’t increased a single cent in over 10 years, has only grown 480%. In other words, housing costs have grown 3.5x more than the national earning power. What could go wrong?
Millennials, myself included, like to claim we have it pretty hard nowadays. But statistically, this statement may be more true than not. Everything is getting more expensive, most people are earning less, so family construction is delayed or often, completely sacrificed. This results in younger populations supporting an increasingly disproportionate aging population, carrying the burdens of the past into the present.
In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, physiological and safety needs make up the bottom, most pressing, layer - food, shelter, warmth - before satisfying other layers such as love and belonging. We are now seeing the hierarchy demonstrated en masse. Maybe that Maslow guy was really onto something.
Under his eye,
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