Parking a link: “Baby Bust Threatens Growth”

Last updated on: February 26, 2015 at 10:53 pm by Jane the Actuary

Parking a link: “Baby Bust Threatens Growth” 2015-02-26T22:53:31-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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From the Wall Street Journal. (The link, if I did this right, goes directly to a google search for which the article is the first result.)

The current fertility rate in the United States, expressed as average number of children per women, is 1.86. Not as bad as most other developed nations (e.g., Germany, Japan, etc. — if I had followed up on my start a could weeks ago and gotten my posts labelled you could see my prior commentary and statistics) but still, absent immigration, an indicator of declining population in the future.

Is the answer, “well, we just need immigration, and at even higher rates?” Maybe, if we’re selective. But if the idea is just to add warm bodies to the American population? Sure, let’s replace a population educated in American schools, with (for all that we like to criticize Americans as lazy) a high degree of achievement and skill, with one cohort after the next of adults who have considerable less education and fewer specialized skills, and let’s see what happens to the economy.

Is this just a temporary blip, because we all know that “everyone” really wants the idea of two children, so that, over time, adding in the oversized families of the underclass and religious fundamentalists, we’ll be back to 2.1 in no time? Maybe — but a look at nearly all other developed countries shows that there is nothing “magical” about 2.1 children as far as the desires, not of economists, but of actual individuals.

More likely, economists, demographers, and other such experts need to stretch their minds a bit. Japan is, after all, looking heavily at robotics as a response to labor force declines and an increased elderly population (and I’m all for a robot that can help an elderly or otherwise impaired person with their personal needs — e.g., toileting, transferring). I am not a population controller (by no means!), but, at the same time, I don’t think it is at all appropriate, in the year 2014, to insist that, in order for our country to prosper, we need the population go continually increase. Maybe it’s just the fault of GDP and other economic measures being calculated on a total-population basis, rather than a per-capita, or per-adult, or per-working-age-adult basis.

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