You may have seen the headlines recently: “Social Security, Medicare to Run Short of Funds in 2023, Trustees Say.” Last year, the date was 2034, so doomsday is getting closer.
However, beneath those headlines simmers a more chronic problem. Uncle Sam’s long-term diagnosis for the health of Social Security relies on a completely unreasonable assumption that the birth rate, which is currently low and falling, will magically rebound to levels 20% higher than today’s.
This is a constant feature of the baby bust: National governments and international organizations assume impossibly high future birth rates despite consistently wrong past projections.
Some of the problem is Malthusian thinking. Thomas Malthus was an 18th-century British economist whose arguments about population growth inspired misanthropes and population controllers for more than 200 years. Malthus believed birth rates, in the long run, would be self-correcting, like prices: A wealthy society will have more babies, too many babies will make the society poor, which will cause the society to have fewer babies, which will make the society wealthy again.
Maybe that was true before the sexual revolution and “the pill,” but it’s not true today. Low birth rates, in the modern world, beget lower birth rates for a hundred reasons.
However, the Social Security Administration assumes that our current birth rate, which is just above 1.62 babies per woman, is the nadir — that last year will prove the lowest birth rate ever, and birth rates will climb every year for decades. This has been its assumption every year recently.
The SSA models a straight line rebound from 1.6 babies today to 1.9 in 2050. (These numbers don’t affect the solvency of Social Security between now and 2033 because babies born next year wouldn’t enter the workforce until the 2050s.) Yes, birth rates have gone up and down over the past 100 years of U.S. history, but the more relevant precedent might be the more recent one: No country that has fallen significantly below the replacement birth rate of 2.1 has seen a lasting rebound.
Nevertheless, the SSA believes the United States will be the exception — its 15 years of low and falling birth rates will prove an aberration.
Malthus isn’t the culprit in this specific case. Instead, the SSA is buying into what I call the “Happy Planning Theory.” It’s a favorite theory of the liberal commentariat, and it goes like this:
Thanks to universally available contraception and increased educational and professional opportunities for women, Americans are starting families later. But these later marriages are stronger, and due to healthier diets, more exercise, and above all, reproductive technology (mostly in vitro fertilization), women can have babies into their late 30s and even their 40s with little trouble. The result is more intentionally planned families raised by more mature, established couples.
Here’s how the SSA’s trustees put it: “The Trustees continue to assume that recent low rates of period fertility are, in part, indicative of a gradual shift to older ages of childbearing for younger birth cohorts.”
It’s a self-flattering story of autonomy, feminism, and progress. It’s also vastly overstated.
Yes, women are shifting their childbearing later. Yes, more women are having more babies after age 35. Yes, this could skew the current birth rate numbers a bit. But no, the added babies born to 38-year-olds are not going to make up for the massive drop in babies born to 20-something-year-olds.
Economists Melissa Kearney and Philip Levine crunched the numbers in 2021 and found that “to maintain the total childbearing rates of earlier cohorts, women who are now in their 20s and 30s will have to have substantially more births after age 30 than earlier cohorts.” Will this happen? “Probably not,” they concluded.
Levine and Kearney based their conclusions on their observations of what Generation Z and younger millennials have done to date. You could throw onto that pile a recent Pew survey that found American men and women are reducing the number of children they say they want.
Most importantly, though, may be all the ways recent low birth rates drive down current and future birth rates.
A society with fewer babies is a society with fewer big brothers and big sisters, a society with fewer cousins, and a society in which people just do less caring for and thinking about babies.
A city or town with fewer children is a city or town with fewer accommodations for children and parents — fewer family-friendly restaurants, fewer playgrounds, more dog parks, and less tolerance for kids in coffee shops.
ON FATHER’S DAY, TIME FOR A LITTLE MORE PATRIARCHY
And a social circle where nobody is getting married and having kids is a social circle where nobody will want to get married and have kids.
Absent some massive cultural shift, we’re headed down a steep demographic slope. Social Security’s long-run picture will be far worse than the trustees admit.