Plummeting US Fertility Rate

Melissa Kearney, Aspen Economic Strategy Group Director & University of Maryland Professor of Economics discusses the economic consequences of declining birth rates and potential policy solutions.
--------
Connect with us on...

[nothingmatters]

It's simple. You can't afford a home, then you can't afford a family. No house, no family, then no kids. The greatest mistake it was to turn housing into an investment scheme.

[jer]

Nobody is bringing kids to this horrible situation, low wages, poor job opportunities and treatment, poor school performances, expensive health costs, bad government decisions.

[danjunk]

From 1995 to 2015 I watched rent, food and gas prices quadruple and wages stayed flat. from 2008 to 2011 it was very hard to find work and even harder to find a place to live. in 2015 three of my closest friends - very intelligent and productive young men in their 30s, college educated and very talented - took their own lives. They were overworked, crushed with unsustainable debt and saw no hope of improvement. Ive lost two more coworkers in the past two years again, young men in their 30s, very skilled workers who were unvaxxed, one died from sudden kidney failure the other had sudden neurological issues and became an alcoholic when he was sidelined from work.

It drives me nuts when people act like this is some kind of mystery. men cant afford families. child tax credits are bullshit. we need wage growth and affordable homes. child care is outragreously expensive. I have two coworkers who have kids. They are always missing work, always fighting with their wives and not saving for retirement. They're miserable. Women are miserable. When people see their peers having kids and being miserable they say no thanks. Once you pass a certain age, the foolishness of youth wears off. You start having outrageous medical expenses, paying an outrageous mortgage and realize you'll never be able to retire.

More and more people are pushing back retirement. If having kids means working until I die, no thanks. we have seen a remarkable decline in standard of living for the past few generations. We have too many billionaires and not enough sustainable households. people are totally atomized, they dont even have friends. mine are all dead. You need to more than double wages and cut prices more than in half. You can already see Japan, Korea, China, Italy and other parts of Europe collapsing. This is going to be demographic implosion. Total collapse of productivity and the tax base.

[jenniferhoff]

It's amazing to me that they act like this is such a mystery. Cost of living is outrageous. We can't afford to have children. And bringing children into a heartless corporate world? Forget it.

[anuragchakraborty]

A 7-minute video and not once did they mention anything about the worsening economic conditions for the youth today. How can you even think of starting a family when you can even barely support yourself thanks to poor wages, lack of decent jobs and non-existent job security?

[belleblanch]

I don't want my future children to be slaves. 🤷

[freeze]

We too broke to have no damn kids. Aint nobody got time for that, especially while we work 2.5 jobs just to pay rent.

[Zayden.]

I imagine a minimum of $250k annual household income is needed to have kids without facing traumatic conditions.

[lewisrashe]

I’m a US citizen in Mexico currently. Mexicans in Mexico can have large families because large homes are cheap and affordable. In the US even small apartments are very expensive and not affordable. Why would people in the US have a bunch of kids if they live in overpriced small apartments and small homes.

[joeysinclair]

The "American Dream" is just that… a dream.

[mihlayonke]

"Slaves must breed other slaves for a master to have someone do the job"

[danielmcarthur]

Well duh. We can't afford to have a family. It's not rocket science.

[ddez]

imagine wanting to have children in 2023... we cant ever afford rent imagine another human being.

[edwardp]

This segment missed the main obvious point. High living costs in nearly all US cities results in adults having less children. High costs mean men date less since they are the ones paying. High living costs make women want an increasingly smaller percentage of high earning men. Couples wait later to have children until they are more established in their careers to pay for childcare. Here's a novel idea - stop private equity firms like BlackRock and foreign investment companies from buying US homes. Home appreciation is beyond most American salaries. Our communities were never meant to be treated like stocks.

[CaptainCaveman]

It's not complicated. When a government goes into too much debt, it has to keep interest rates artificially low forever, to avoid default. When interest rates are held artificially low forever, life becomes ridiculously good for the early purchasers of assets (and of course for those who are already rich and therefore well invested by default). By the same token, life becomes increasingly DIFFICULT for the new entrants into society. So when everything costs too much, and you have no assets to offset the costs, then you CHOOSE to bring less children into the world. It's not complicated at all. Cue the "too-much avocado toast" arguments :-) (not wrong, just way too simplistic and myopic).

[petraullmann]

I am from Germany, having kids was way easier, maternity leave plus a 3 year leave after your child was born, baby bonuses for years, I didn’t have to go to work, easy to be a stay at home mom. Then we moved to the States, my kids father is American, now I see my own daughter miserably struggling with her one child, daycare is killing her, (she lives far away from me in another State) she barely sees her daughter because she’s always working, the rent is killing her, she works full time plus side jobs and yet she is on food stamps to barely have enough food. None of her old friends had kids, just watching her struggle made them decide against having kids.

[MonetaryRebel]

We can't afford houses!!!
Why would we have children when we can't afford houses?... I'm 30 years old. Make houses affordable, and we'll make families in those houses.

[MVPTC]

I was born in 1993…. Seems like my generation has been forced to have roommates because Rents and Mortgages are so expensive. In my area houses go for about $2500 a month (for a normal family home that has at least 3 bedrooms) Sacramento Ca

That means we would have to make over $7500 after tax to qualify. If you’re not married there is no way you could afford that unless you are in a high paying job. It’s a lot different then when my Mom and Dad paid less than $600 it seems like housing has went up by over 3x or more what it used to be….

[pinkpear]

Horrible world to bring a child into ppl are wise

[biashacker]

People are starting to figure out that they are only working so hard to make rich families that own everything even richer. This world is simply a giant plantation.