In completely non-shocking news, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that American fertility hit an all-time low last year. We’re below 1.6 children per woman now.
The CDC’s updated figures for 2024 show that the total fertility rate dropped from 1.621 in 2023 to 1.599. That statistic is derived from a more detailed analysis of birth certificates and replaced earlier provisional estimates.
Welp. I don’t need to explain the math, but each step downward makes nosing up much harder.
The Atlantic had a piece on how the projections on fertility are all very wrong because they assume that countries like the United States will start bouncing back soon. They also have it hard-coded in that no country will ever dip below 0.5 children per woman. At this point, if fertility were film, we’d be in that scene in Margin Call where analyst Peter Sullivan decides to call his friends back to the office and explain that in fact we’re already blowing past the modeled data, and when it gets going, it goes sideways fast.
A few years ago I wrote about the need to resist Japanification, not just the economic emergency, but the cultural one:
Japan’s population peaked at around 128 million people in 2010. Since then it has been shrinking. The overall population declined in 2018 by 430,000, the equivalent of a midsize city. In raw numbers, Japan’s depopulation is proceeding at a pace that would keep up with or exceed the number of deaths inflicted during the height of Curtis LeMay’s terrifying fire-bombing campaign in the crescendo of World War II. LeMay’s campaign ended after a year. But Japan will continue to lose its midsize-city equivalents year after year, and there is no end in sight.
Japan’s fertility rate continues to fall and is now approximately 1.4 per woman, having dropped below replacement level back in the late 1970s. The effect on the social structure of Japan is radical. A below-replacement-level fertility rate could be considered something like a critically low rate of investment in posterity and in one’s own golden years. By hoarding and consuming the society’s resources through middle age, a generation of Japan has entered its old age without the economic and social protection offered by adult children. Thus the political process has to extract more resources from a shrinking productive-age cohort to support the elderly.
America of course would have a much harder experience of these changes given the demographic dissimilarities between old and young, between well-off native retirees and striving newcomers.