Imagine purporting to be a journalist and saying there were no economic changes after 2007.
So I actually found the original article (you can get the whole thing for free online on the American Economic Association: it's the Journal of Economic Perspectives vol. 36, no. 1, Winter 2022). It's coauthored by Melissa Kearney – whose whole thing is researching income inequality and poverty and explaining why social programs are a good thing – and Phillip Levine, who does this work with her a lot.
Now, bearing in mind that I am not an economist and do not understand the math involved at all, this is my understanding of the study:
- Birth rates fell a shit-ton in 2007, which everyone expected, but never bounced back (as they had in previous recessions), and in fact kept going down.
- This is across demographic groups, though some groups (like Hispanic women) had greater drops in birth rate than others.
- This is associated with education rates but in a really interesting way: women with no high school degree at all and women with a full college degree had bigger drops in birth rate than women who graduated high school but either didn't go to college or dropped out of college. Like, it's not an Idiocracy/eugenics-style "only very educated people are having fewer kids while the poorly-educated peasants are breeding like rabbits" scenario.
- Mathematically, the drops don't correlate with obvious external factors, like a sudden change in economic policy or a consistent decades-long downturn in employment rates.
- They also rule out rising costs of housing and education and whatnot, because, again, it's dropping across demographics.
- It's better correlated to age cohort: people born around the same time are hitting adulthood around the same time and having fewer and fewer kids. Not that people are marrying and having kids later (though that is happening), but that their whole age group are having fewer and fewer kids.
- To be clear: this is basically saying that I, a person born in 1993, am more likely to have kids than someone born in 2003 but less likely than someone born in 1983, regardless of how old I am. Like, it's not "when everyone born in 1993 hits 30, they'll start having kids, even though 80s kids got married at 20," it's "people born in 1993 are just not having as many kids as people born in 1983, period."
They attribute this to some kind of cultural shift around parenting (the resources it requires contrasted with the desire to work or have leisure time), but I think it doesn't go into the psychology of it enough, particularly how younger and younger people have experienced more and more world-ending trauma. Like,
