Jonathan V. Last
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十多年来，中国的女性一直受到自己国家独生子女政策的粗暴对待。那些试图生一个孩子以上的女性遭到罚款并被强制堕胎，她们的房子被拆毁，她们的丈夫也被开除职位。因此，如今中国女性的生育率仅为1.54。在美国，作为中产阶级的典型代表，受过高等教育的白人女性的生育率为1.6。如此看来，美国也有它自己的独生子女政策，只不过这是我们自己选择的。
忘掉什么债务上限吧，忘掉财政悬崖，忘掉所谓的封存悬崖以及福利悬崖吧。这些都只是表象而已，美国真正面临的问题是人口悬崖──我们大多数问题的根源是我们的生育率在逐渐下降。
生育率指一个群体中平均每个女性在其一生当中所生育的子女数量，更替水平生育率为2.1。如果一个群体中平均每个女性生育孩子的数量超过了2.1，那么人口就会增长。如果所生育孩子的数量不及2.1，人口数量就会缩减。美国疾病控制与预防中心(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)的最新数据显示，美国当前的总和生育率为1.93；该数据自上世纪70年代初以来便始终未超过生育更替水平。
生育率的下降是目前我们面临的许多最艰难的问题的起因。一旦一个国家的生育率持续降至低于生育更替水平，其年龄状况就会开始转变，老年人的数量会超过年轻人。最终，随着数量庞大的老年人逐渐离世，人口数量开始缩减。这个双重问题──老年人所占比例过高以及人口总数缩减──具有巨大的经济、政治和文化影响。
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全球97%的人口所在的国家生育率都在下降。
生育率低的社会不会创新，因为他们的消费动机基本上倾向于医疗保健。他们不会大力投资，因为随着平均年龄偏高，资本流向维持和延长寿命，然后开始耗尽。这样的社会无法维持社会保障计划，因为他们没有足够的劳动力为退休者付退休金；他们也不能部署武力，因为他们缺乏国防资金和可在军队服役的青壮年兵力。
在近几年，关于曾被人视为高居山巅的耀眼国家的美国是否正在衰退的政治讨论有很多。但是，美国的衰落与是民主党还是共和党掌权无关，也与政治意识形态毫无关联。从根本上说，它与人力资本的可持续性有关。无论在上个月宣誓就职的是巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)还是米特•罗姆尼(Mitt Romney)，美国依然会在最重要的方面──人口问题──衰退。它是引发其他所有事情的原因所在。
如果我们国家的生育率更高些，比如说达到2.5，即便是2.2，我们的许多问题都可能要可控得多，可是我们的生育率不会很快上升。实际上，它很可能还会往下降，降到比现在低得多的水平。
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如今，整个美国的生育率为1.93，低于2.1的更替水平生育率。
生育率下降的原因有许许多多，比如说中产阶级的工资开始长时期地停滞。大学教育成为大多数美国人的普遍经历，这不仅使人们结婚更晚，也使养育孩子的成本更高。女性上大学的人数赶上男性，在后来还超过了男性。更重要的是，女性开始从事教师和护士以外的职业。此外，避孕药以及同居的增长共同打破了性、婚姻以及生儿育女这个铁三角。
这只是列出了部分原因，其中许多发展趋势显然是积极的。但是，即便是属于纯粹好处的社会发展也可能带来严重后果。
到1973年，美国的生育率已经低于生育更替水平，几乎其他每个西方国家也都是如此。自此之后，生育率大降的现象在全球范围蔓延开来，全球97%的人口如今都生活在生育率正在下降的国家中。
Corbis; Photo Illustration by Keith A. Webb/The Wall Street Journal
移民帮助弥补了美国不断下滑的出生率的影响。
日本的生育率在1960年开始降到低于更替率的水平，其中有大量复杂的原因（包括西方在战后推动降低日本的生育率、养育孩子的成本飙升以及结婚率总体下降等）。到了80年代，日本的人口数量最终将缩减的趋势已然显而易见。1984年，人口学家小川直宏(Naohiro Ogawa)曾警告称：“由于劳动力增长率的降低……日本经济可能将放缓。”他预计日本经济的年增长率在21世纪初的头两三年将降至1%甚至是0%。
从1950年到1973年，日本的全要素生产率──一个很好的衡量经济动力的指标──每年平均增长5.4%。从1990年到2006年，它每年只增长了0.63%。自1991年以来，日本的GDP增长率仅在四年中超过了2.5%，其年增长率平均为1.03%。
由于生育率低迷，日本的人口在2008年达到顶峰，自那以后其人口数量已经减少了100万。在去年，日本成人纸尿裤的购买量首次超过了婴儿纸尿裤的购买量，该国超过一半的土地被划归为“人口稀少的边际土地”。按照当前这个生育率发展下去，到2100年日本的人口数量将不到现在的一半。
我们能够阻止美国重蹈日本的覆辙吗？我们拥有一些日本所不具备的优势，首先是我们对移民持欢迎态度，宗教信仰也活跃，这两点都有助于提振生育率。但是，从长期来看，答案是大概不能够。
保守派会觉得只要我们能够提供适当的鼓励生育的税收激励政策，那么美国人或许会像40年前那样重新多生孩子。自由派会觉得只要我们能像法国那样提供国营托儿所及其他政策，那么女性就不必在工作和生育之间进行抉择──它能解决问题。但是，证据显示这两条路所带来的充其量只是微薄的效应。以法国为例，尽管它花费资金开办托儿所，其生育率也没能维持在生育更替水平。
这使我们将提高生育率的任务转向国外。我们从上世纪70年代末以来接收了一大批来自国境线以南的移民进入美国。移民人口阻止了美国向人口悬崖倾斜，如今美国大约有3800万人是在美国境外出生的。（其中三分之二的人为合法移民。）若要理解这一点，想想美国每年仅有400万婴儿出生这一事实吧。
假如把这些移民及其相对较高的生育率从我们的人口结构剥离的话，美国会突然看起来就像欧洲大陆那样糟糕的地方，后者的生育率即便还没有日本那么严重，也是只有区区的1.5。
依赖移民人口来支撑我们的生育率也会带来一些问题，其中最重要的是它不大可能持续。在历史上，生育率低于更替生育水平的国家会开始面临劳工短缺的问题，因此会减少人口的输出。在拉丁美洲，生育率下降的情况甚至比美国还要极端。南美许多国家的生育率已经低于生育更替率，它们输往我们这儿的移民人数也非常少。此外，南美和中美洲其他国家的生育率也是急速下降，也许很快便会降至更替率的水平。
这正是墨西哥的状况。该国在1970年的生育率达6.72，如今则仅为更替率的水平，在40年中下降了72%。过去墨西哥每年都有数十万移民来到我们国家。然而，过去三年来，从墨西哥迁入美国的净人口数为零。移民的减少在部分程度上大概与近期的经济衰退有关，但是大部分原因可能源于人口结构的转变。
至于已经在美国的拉丁裔移民，我们无法指望他们永远都能在人口问题上有所帮助。长期以来他们一直承担着这个重任，整个美国的生育率为1.93，而拉丁裔美国人的生育率达到2.35。皮尤研究中心(Pew Center)最近的数据表明，拉丁裔移民的生育率正以惊人的速度下降。仅举一个例子，在2007年至2010年这三年间，出生于墨西哥的美国人的生育率下降了惊人的23%。
面临这种人口减少的状况，能够维持美国在世界上的地位的唯一方法是所有美国人──民主党人、共和党人、拉丁裔美国人、黑人、白人、犹太人、基督教徒以及无神论者──都决定生更多孩子。
问题是，虽然造人很有趣，但抚养孩子可不是这样。大量研究显示，如果将两个各方面情况都一模一样、只有生育状况不同的人进行比较，有孩子的人比没孩子的人的“非常快乐”的程度平均要低六个百分点左右。（这还只是有一个孩子的情况，每多一个孩子，快乐程度就要额外再降低两个百分点。）
不过，养育子女应该从来都不是轻松惬意的事。美国人的生活在过去40年间所经历的众多变化推动了生育率下降。高居前列的生活理念是“快乐”是美好生活的目标。如果我们要扭转这种下降趋势，就需要将“人类的繁荣比衡量纯粹的快乐有着更广泛更深远影响”这一理念重新引入美国社会。
我们还需要制订巧妙的鼓励生育的政策。美国政府无法说服民众去生育不想要的孩子，但是可以帮助他们生育想要的孩子。以下为三个起点：
-- 社会保障。在美国，社会保障体系承担着赡养老年人的大部分重担，而传统上这个责任都是落在成年子女身上的。让政府介入养老事务的反作用是它首先降低了人们生育孩子的动力。美国兰德公司(RAND)的一项研究表明，社会保障体系将美国的生育率压低了高达0.5个点。
为了清除这个障碍，一些分析家提出将税则精简至两个级别，大幅提高子女税收优惠幅度。其他一些分析家则建议免除家长在抚养孩子期间的社会保障和医疗部分的工资税──比如说生第一个孩子时减免三分之一，第二个孩子减免三分之二，生第三个孩子时则全部免除。（一旦孩子长到18岁，家长则要重新开始全额纳税。）
不论细则如何，它们的基本理论都是一样的──减轻承担着缔造新纳税人（也就是孩子）的成本的人的税收负担。
-- 高等教育。高等教育从各个方面抑制了生育率。它使结婚年龄推迟，引发债务，提高了生育的机会成本并且大幅增加了抚养孩子的费用。如果你疑虑高校系统的经济状况不佳，可以想想这一点：从1960年以来，美国民众生活中几乎其他每个行业的商品的实际成本都有所下降，与此同时读大学的实际成本却上涨了逾1,000%。
如果将大学也视作一个产业的话，每个人都会呼吁发起改革。但目前的现状却是，政治家们在尽力说服每个美国孩子入读目前成本过高的大学体系。我们如何能控制住大学教育的成本？首先，我们可以从消除大学作为文凭制造者的作用这一点开始，允许雇主自己举行测试来考核意向员工。或者，我们也可以鼓励各高校要更顺应市场的力量，设立精简的可授予联邦学位的机构为通过某项课程考试的学生颁发文凭。
--地价差距。建立家庭的一个重要因素是土地成本，它不仅决定住房成本，还决定了交通、娱乐、照顾孩子、孩子入学以及其他相当一部分事务的成本。虽然人口密集的都市，比如洛杉矶、纽约、华盛顿和芝加哥等，集中了最多的工作机会，但它们的土地成本也很高。改善公路交通系统和增加远程办公的机会将对帮助各家庭在生活成本低的地区生活起到很大作用。
上述这些想法只是一个起点，我们当然还需要其他措施来避免美国出现人口灾难。如果我们想继续引导世界，我们就必须找出一个增加人口的方法。
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国内生产总值位列世界前十的国家的总生育率*：
1. 美国：2.07
2. 中国：1.64
3. 日本：1.32
4. 德国：1.36
5. 法国：1.97
6. 巴西：1.9
7. 英国：1.83
8. 意大利：1.38
9. 俄罗斯联邦：1.44
10. 印度：2.73
*2005年至2010年的平均数据。
数据来源：联合国。
（本文作者乔纳森•拉斯特(Jonathan V. Last)为《旗帜周刊》(Weekly Standard)的资深作者。他也是由Encounter图书公司出版的《当无人生育时还能期盼什么：美国即将来临的人口灾难》(What to Expect When No One's Expecting: American's Coming Demographic Disaster)一书的作者，本文即节选自该书。）
（本文版权归道琼斯公司所有，未经许可不得翻译或转载。）
For more than three decades, Chinese women have been subjected to their country's brutal one-child policy. Those who try to have more children have been subjected to fines and forced abortions. Their houses have been razed and their husbands fired from their jobs. As a result, Chinese women have a fertility rate of 1.54. Here in America, white, college-educated women -- a good proxy for the middle class -- have a fertility rate of 1.6. America has its very own one-child policy. And we have chosen it for ourselves.
Forget the debt ceiling. Forget the fiscal cliff, the sequestration cliff and the entitlement cliff. Those are all just symptoms. What America really faces is a demographic cliff: The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate.
The fertility rate is the number of children an average woman bears over the course of her life. The replacement rate is 2.1. If the average woman has more children than that, population grows. Fewer, and it contracts. Today, America's total fertility rate is 1.93, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; it hasn't been above the replacement rate in a sustained way since the early 1970s.
The nation's falling fertility rate underlies many of our most difficult problems. Once a country's fertility rate falls consistently below replacement, its age profile begins to shift. You get more old people than young people. And eventually, as the bloated cohort of old people dies off, population begins to contract. This dual problem -- a population that is disproportionately old and shrinking overall -- has enormous economic, political and cultural consequences.
For two generations we've been lectured about the dangers of overpopulation. But the conventional wisdom on this issue is wrong, twice. First, global population growth is slowing to a halt and will begin to shrink within 60 years. Second, as the work of economists Esther Boserups and Julian Simon demonstrated, growing populations lead to increased innovation and conservation. Think about it: Since 1970, commodity prices have continued to fall and America's environment has become much cleaner and more sustainable -- even though our population has increased by more than 50%. Human ingenuity, it turns out, is the most precious resource.
Low-fertility societies don't innovate because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don't invest aggressively because, with the average age skewing higher, capital shifts to preserving and extending life and then begins drawing down. They cannot sustain social-security programs because they don't have enough workers to pay for the retirees. They cannot project power because they lack the money to pay for defense and the military-age manpower to serve in their armed forces.
There has been a great deal of political talk in recent years about whether America, once regarded as the shining city on a hill, is in decline. But decline isn't about whether Democrats or Republicans hold power; it isn't about political ideology at all. At its most basic, it's about the sustainability of human capital. Whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney took the oath of office last month, we would still be declining in the most important sense -- demographically. It is what drives everything else.
If our fertility rate were higher -- say 2.5, or even 2.2 -- many of our problems would be a lot more manageable. But our fertility rate isn't going up any time soon. In fact, it's probably heading lower. Much lower.
America's fertility rate began falling almost as soon as the nation was founded. In 1800, the average white American woman had seven children. (The first reliable data on black fertility begin in the 1850s.) Since then, our fertility rate has floated consistently downward, with only one major moment of increase -- the baby boom. In 1940, America's fertility rate was already skirting the replacement level, but after the war it jumped and remained elevated for a generation. Then, beginning in 1970, it began to sink like a stone.
There's a constellation of reasons for this decline: Middle-class wages began a long period of stagnation. College became a universal experience for most Americans, which not only pushed people into marrying later but made having children more expensive. Women began attending college in equal (and then greater) numbers than men. More important, women began branching out into careers beyond teaching and nursing. And the combination of the birth-control pill and the rise of cohabitation broke the iron triangle linking sex, marriage and childbearing.
This is only a partial list, and many of these developments are clearly positive. But even a social development that represents a net good can carry a serious cost.
By 1973, the U.S. was below the replacement rate, as was nearly every other Western country. Since then, the phenomenon of fertility collapse has spread around the globe: 97% of the world's population now lives in countries where the fertility rate is falling.
If you want to see what happens to a country once it hurls itself off the demographic cliff, look at Japan, with a fertility rate of 1.3. In the 1980s, everyone assumed the Japanese were on a path to owning the world. But the country's robust economic facade concealed a crumbling demographic structure.
The Japanese fertility rate began dipping beneath the replacement rate in 1960 for a number of complicated reasons (including a postwar push by the West to lower Japan's fertility rate, the soaring cost of having children and an overall decline in the marriage rate). By the 1980s, it was already clear that the country would eventually undergo a population contraction. In 1984, demographer Naohiro Ogawa warned that, 'Owing to a decrease in the growth rate of the labor force . . . Japan's economy is likely to slow down.' He predicted annual growth rates of 1% or even 0% in the first quarter of the 2000s.
From 1950 to 1973, Japan's total-factor productivity -- a good measure of economic dynamism -- increased by an average of 5.4% per year. From 1990 to 2006, it increased by just 0.63% per year. Since 1991, Japan's rate of GDP growth has exceeded 2.5% in only four years; its annual rate of growth has averaged 1.03%.
Because of its dismal fertility rate, Japan's population peaked in 2008; it has already shrunk by a million since then. Last year, for the first time, the Japanese bought more adult diapers than diapers for babies, and more than half the country was categorized as 'depopulated marginal land.' At the current fertility rate, by 2100 Japan's population will be less than half what it is now.
Can we keep the U.S. from becoming Japan? We have some advantages that the Japanese lack, beginning with a welcoming attitude toward immigration and robust religious faith, both of which buoy fertility. But in the long run, the answer is, probably not.
Conservatives like to think that if we could just provide the right tax incentives for childbearing, then Americans might go back to having children the way they did 40 years ago. Liberals like to think that if we would just be more like France -- offer state-run day care and other programs so women wouldn't have to choose between working and motherhood -- it would solve the problem. But the evidence suggests that neither path offers more than marginal gains. France, for example, hasn't been able to stay at the replacement rate, even with all its day-care spending.
Which leaves us with outsourcing our fertility. We've received a massive influx of immigrants from south of the border since the late 1970s. Immigration has kept America from careening over the demographic cliff. Today, there are roughly 38 million people in the U.S. who were born elsewhere. (Two-thirds of them are here legally.) To put that in perspective, consider that just four million babies are born annually in the U.S.
If you strip these immigrants -- and their relatively high fertility rates -- from our population profile, America suddenly looks an awful lot like continental Europe, which has a fertility rate of 1.5., if not quite as demographically terminal as Japan.
Relying on immigration to prop up our fertility rate also presents several problems, the most important of which is that it's unlikely to last. Historically, countries with fertility rates below replacement level start to face their own labor shortages, and they send fewer people abroad. In Latin America, the rates of fertility decline are even more extreme than in the U.S. Many countries in South America are already below replacement level, and they send very few immigrants our way. And every other country in Central and South America is on a steep dive toward the replacement line.
That is what's happened in Mexico. In 1970, the Mexican fertility rate was 6.72. Today, it's just at replacement, a drop of 72% in 40 years. Mexico used to send us several hundred thousand immigrants a year. For the last three years, there has been a net immigration of zero. Some of this decrease is probably related to the recent recession, but much of it is likely the result of a structural shift.
As for the Hispanic immigrants who are already here, we can't count on their demographic help forever. They've been doing the heavy lifting for a long time: While the nation as a whole has a fertility rate of 1.93, the Hispanic-American fertility rate is 2.35. But recent data from the Pew Center suggest that the fertility rate for Hispanic immigrants is falling at an incredible rate. To take just one example, in the three years between 2007 and 2010, the birthrate for Mexican-born Americans dropped by an astonishing 23%.
In the face of this decline, the only thing that will preserve America's place in the world is if all Americans -- Democrats, Republicans, Hispanics, blacks, whites, Jews, Christians and atheists -- decide to have more babies.
The problem is that, while making babies is fun, raising them isn't. A raft of research shows that if you take two people who are identical in every way except for childbearing status, the parent will be on average about six percentage points less likely to be 'very happy' than the nonparent. (That's just for one child. Knock off two more points for each additional bundle of joy.)
But then, parenting has probably never been a barrel of laughs. There have been lots of changes in American life over the last 40 years that have nudged our fertility rate downward. High on the list is the idea that 'happiness' is the lodestar of a life well-lived. If we're going to reverse this decline, we'll need to reintroduce into American culture the notion that human flourishing ranges wider and deeper than calculations of mere happiness.
We'll need smart pronatalist policies, too. The government cannot persuade Americans to have children they do not want, but it can help them to have the children they do want. Here are three starting points:
-- Social Security. In the U.S., the Social Security system has taken on most of the burden for caring for elderly adults, a duty that traditionally fell to grown-up children. A perverse effect of putting government in the business of eldercare has been to reduce the incentives to have children in the first place. One RAND study suggested that Social Security depresses the American fertility rate by as much as 0.5.
Looking to dismantle this roadblock, some analysts have suggested flattening the tax code to just two brackets and significantly raising the child tax credit. Others suggest exempting parents from payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare while they are raising children -- perhaps by a third for their first child, two-thirds for the second, and then completely for a third child. (Once the children turn 18, the parents would go back to paying their full share.)
Regardless of the particulars, the underlying theory is the same: To reduce the tax burden for people who take on the costs of creating new taxpayers (otherwise known as children).
-- College. Higher education dampens fertility in all sorts of ways. It delays marriage, incurs debt, increases the opportunity costs of childbearing and significantly increases the expense of raising a child. If you doubt that the economics of the university system are broken, consider this: Since 1960, the real cost of goods in nearly every other sector of American life has dropped. Meanwhile, the real cost of college has increased by more than 1,000%.
If college were another industry, everyone would be campaigning for reform. Instead, politicians are trying to push every kid in America into the current exorbitantly expensive system. How could we get college costs under control? For one, we could begin to eliminate college's role as a credentialing machine by allowing employers to give their own tests to prospective workers. Alternately, we could encourage the university system to be more responsive to market forces by creating a no-frills, federal degree-granting body that awards certificates to students who pass exams in a given subject.
--The Dirt Gap. A big factor in family formation is the cost of land: It determines not just housing expenses but also the costs of transportation, entertainment, baby sitting, school and pretty much everything else. And while intensely urban areas -- Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Chicago -- have the highest concentrations of jobs, they come with high land costs. Improving the highway system and boosting opportunities for telecommuting would go a long way in helping families to live in lower-cost areas.
These ideas are just a start; other measures certainly will be needed to avert a demographic disaster in the U.S. If we want to continue leading the world, we simply must figure out a way to have more babies.
---
Total fertility rate* of the top 10 countries by gross domestic product
1. U.S. 2.07
2. China 1.64
3. Japan 1.32
4. Germany 1.36
5. France 1.97
6. Brazil 1.9
7. U.K. 1.83
8. Italy 1.38
9. Russian Federation 1.44
10. India 2.73
*Average from 2005-10.
Source: United Nations
(Mr. Last is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard and author of 'What to Expect When No One's Expecting: American's Coming Demographic Disaster' (Encounter), from which this essay is adapted. )
Forget the debt ceiling. Forget the fiscal cliff, the sequestration cliff and the entitlement cliff. Those are all just symptoms. What America really faces is a demographic cliff: The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate.
The fertility rate is the number of children an average woman bears over the course of her life. The replacement rate is 2.1. If the average woman has more children than that, population grows. Fewer, and it contracts. Today, America's total fertility rate is 1.93, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; it hasn't been above the replacement rate in a sustained way since the early 1970s.
The nation's falling fertility rate underlies many of our most difficult problems. Once a country's fertility rate falls consistently below replacement, its age profile begins to shift. You get more old people than young people. And eventually, as the bloated cohort of old people dies off, population begins to contract. This dual problem -- a population that is disproportionately old and shrinking overall -- has enormous economic, political and cultural consequences.
For two generations we've been lectured about the dangers of overpopulation. But the conventional wisdom on this issue is wrong, twice. First, global population growth is slowing to a halt and will begin to shrink within 60 years. Second, as the work of economists Esther Boserups and Julian Simon demonstrated, growing populations lead to increased innovation and conservation. Think about it: Since 1970, commodity prices have continued to fall and America's environment has become much cleaner and more sustainable -- even though our population has increased by more than 50%. Human ingenuity, it turns out, is the most precious resource.
Low-fertility societies don't innovate because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don't invest aggressively because, with the average age skewing higher, capital shifts to preserving and extending life and then begins drawing down. They cannot sustain social-security programs because they don't have enough workers to pay for the retirees. They cannot project power because they lack the money to pay for defense and the military-age manpower to serve in their armed forces.
There has been a great deal of political talk in recent years about whether America, once regarded as the shining city on a hill, is in decline. But decline isn't about whether Democrats or Republicans hold power; it isn't about political ideology at all. At its most basic, it's about the sustainability of human capital. Whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney took the oath of office last month, we would still be declining in the most important sense -- demographically. It is what drives everything else.
If our fertility rate were higher -- say 2.5, or even 2.2 -- many of our problems would be a lot more manageable. But our fertility rate isn't going up any time soon. In fact, it's probably heading lower. Much lower.
America's fertility rate began falling almost as soon as the nation was founded. In 1800, the average white American woman had seven children. (The first reliable data on black fertility begin in the 1850s.) Since then, our fertility rate has floated consistently downward, with only one major moment of increase -- the baby boom. In 1940, America's fertility rate was already skirting the replacement level, but after the war it jumped and remained elevated for a generation. Then, beginning in 1970, it began to sink like a stone.
There's a constellation of reasons for this decline: Middle-class wages began a long period of stagnation. College became a universal experience for most Americans, which not only pushed people into marrying later but made having children more expensive. Women began attending college in equal (and then greater) numbers than men. More important, women began branching out into careers beyond teaching and nursing. And the combination of the birth-control pill and the rise of cohabitation broke the iron triangle linking sex, marriage and childbearing.
This is only a partial list, and many of these developments are clearly positive. But even a social development that represents a net good can carry a serious cost.
By 1973, the U.S. was below the replacement rate, as was nearly every other Western country. Since then, the phenomenon of fertility collapse has spread around the globe: 97% of the world's population now lives in countries where the fertility rate is falling.
If you want to see what happens to a country once it hurls itself off the demographic cliff, look at Japan, with a fertility rate of 1.3. In the 1980s, everyone assumed the Japanese were on a path to owning the world. But the country's robust economic facade concealed a crumbling demographic structure.
The Japanese fertility rate began dipping beneath the replacement rate in 1960 for a number of complicated reasons (including a postwar push by the West to lower Japan's fertility rate, the soaring cost of having children and an overall decline in the marriage rate). By the 1980s, it was already clear that the country would eventually undergo a population contraction. In 1984, demographer Naohiro Ogawa warned that, 'Owing to a decrease in the growth rate of the labor force . . . Japan's economy is likely to slow down.' He predicted annual growth rates of 1% or even 0% in the first quarter of the 2000s.
From 1950 to 1973, Japan's total-factor productivity -- a good measure of economic dynamism -- increased by an average of 5.4% per year. From 1990 to 2006, it increased by just 0.63% per year. Since 1991, Japan's rate of GDP growth has exceeded 2.5% in only four years; its annual rate of growth has averaged 1.03%.
Because of its dismal fertility rate, Japan's population peaked in 2008; it has already shrunk by a million since then. Last year, for the first time, the Japanese bought more adult diapers than diapers for babies, and more than half the country was categorized as 'depopulated marginal land.' At the current fertility rate, by 2100 Japan's population will be less than half what it is now.
Can we keep the U.S. from becoming Japan? We have some advantages that the Japanese lack, beginning with a welcoming attitude toward immigration and robust religious faith, both of which buoy fertility. But in the long run, the answer is, probably not.
Conservatives like to think that if we could just provide the right tax incentives for childbearing, then Americans might go back to having children the way they did 40 years ago. Liberals like to think that if we would just be more like France -- offer state-run day care and other programs so women wouldn't have to choose between working and motherhood -- it would solve the problem. But the evidence suggests that neither path offers more than marginal gains. France, for example, hasn't been able to stay at the replacement rate, even with all its day-care spending.
Which leaves us with outsourcing our fertility. We've received a massive influx of immigrants from south of the border since the late 1970s. Immigration has kept America from careening over the demographic cliff. Today, there are roughly 38 million people in the U.S. who were born elsewhere. (Two-thirds of them are here legally.) To put that in perspective, consider that just four million babies are born annually in the U.S.
If you strip these immigrants -- and their relatively high fertility rates -- from our population profile, America suddenly looks an awful lot like continental Europe, which has a fertility rate of 1.5., if not quite as demographically terminal as Japan.
Relying on immigration to prop up our fertility rate also presents several problems, the most important of which is that it's unlikely to last. Historically, countries with fertility rates below replacement level start to face their own labor shortages, and they send fewer people abroad. In Latin America, the rates of fertility decline are even more extreme than in the U.S. Many countries in South America are already below replacement level, and they send very few immigrants our way. And every other country in Central and South America is on a steep dive toward the replacement line.
That is what's happened in Mexico. In 1970, the Mexican fertility rate was 6.72. Today, it's just at replacement, a drop of 72% in 40 years. Mexico used to send us several hundred thousand immigrants a year. For the last three years, there has been a net immigration of zero. Some of this decrease is probably related to the recent recession, but much of it is likely the result of a structural shift.
As for the Hispanic immigrants who are already here, we can't count on their demographic help forever. They've been doing the heavy lifting for a long time: While the nation as a whole has a fertility rate of 1.93, the Hispanic-American fertility rate is 2.35. But recent data from the Pew Center suggest that the fertility rate for Hispanic immigrants is falling at an incredible rate. To take just one example, in the three years between 2007 and 2010, the birthrate for Mexican-born Americans dropped by an astonishing 23%.
In the face of this decline, the only thing that will preserve America's place in the world is if all Americans -- Democrats, Republicans, Hispanics, blacks, whites, Jews, Christians and atheists -- decide to have more babies.
The problem is that, while making babies is fun, raising them isn't. A raft of research shows that if you take two people who are identical in every way except for childbearing status, the parent will be on average about six percentage points less likely to be 'very happy' than the nonparent. (That's just for one child. Knock off two more points for each additional bundle of joy.)
But then, parenting has probably never been a barrel of laughs. There have been lots of changes in American life over the last 40 years that have nudged our fertility rate downward. High on the list is the idea that 'happiness' is the lodestar of a life well-lived. If we're going to reverse this decline, we'll need to reintroduce into American culture the notion that human flourishing ranges wider and deeper than calculations of mere happiness.
We'll need smart pronatalist policies, too. The government cannot persuade Americans to have children they do not want, but it can help them to have the children they do want. Here are three starting points:
-- Social Security. In the U.S., the Social Security system has taken on most of the burden for caring for elderly adults, a duty that traditionally fell to grown-up children. A perverse effect of putting government in the business of eldercare has been to reduce the incentives to have children in the first place. One RAND study suggested that Social Security depresses the American fertility rate by as much as 0.5.
Looking to dismantle this roadblock, some analysts have suggested flattening the tax code to just two brackets and significantly raising the child tax credit. Others suggest exempting parents from payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare while they are raising children -- perhaps by a third for their first child, two-thirds for the second, and then completely for a third child. (Once the children turn 18, the parents would go back to paying their full share.)
Regardless of the particulars, the underlying theory is the same: To reduce the tax burden for people who take on the costs of creating new taxpayers (otherwise known as children).
-- College. Higher education dampens fertility in all sorts of ways. It delays marriage, incurs debt, increases the opportunity costs of childbearing and significantly increases the expense of raising a child. If you doubt that the economics of the university system are broken, consider this: Since 1960, the real cost of goods in nearly every other sector of American life has dropped. Meanwhile, the real cost of college has increased by more than 1,000%.
If college were another industry, everyone would be campaigning for reform. Instead, politicians are trying to push every kid in America into the current exorbitantly expensive system. How could we get college costs under control? For one, we could begin to eliminate college's role as a credentialing machine by allowing employers to give their own tests to prospective workers. Alternately, we could encourage the university system to be more responsive to market forces by creating a no-frills, federal degree-granting body that awards certificates to students who pass exams in a given subject.
--The Dirt Gap. A big factor in family formation is the cost of land: It determines not just housing expenses but also the costs of transportation, entertainment, baby sitting, school and pretty much everything else. And while intensely urban areas -- Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Chicago -- have the highest concentrations of jobs, they come with high land costs. Improving the highway system and boosting opportunities for telecommuting would go a long way in helping families to live in lower-cost areas.
These ideas are just a start; other measures certainly will be needed to avert a demographic disaster in the U.S. If we want to continue leading the world, we simply must figure out a way to have more babies.
---
Total fertility rate* of the top 10 countries by gross domestic product
1. U.S. 2.07
2. China 1.64
3. Japan 1.32
4. Germany 1.36
5. France 1.97
6. Brazil 1.9
7. U.K. 1.83
8. Italy 1.38
9. Russian Federation 1.44
10. India 2.73
*Average from 2005-10.
Source: United Nations
(Mr. Last is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard and author of 'What to Expect When No One's Expecting: American's Coming Demographic Disaster' (Encounter), from which this essay is adapted. )
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