Just What is the Total Fertility Rate in the U.S. and What Does it Tell Us About American Life?

It seems that natality has become a fashionable topic in America--mostly because of the culture war-minded right, but then, the logic of centrism and the biases of the media being what they are, it is that right which sets the agenda in American discourse, its grievances the ones that get discussed.

Of course, as is usually the case with the dialogue about such matters we hear little of substance. Consider the reality of the Total Fertility Rate (TFR). As a quick check of the World Bank's data set regarding the matter shows, the U.S. TFR had its ups and downs in the past. After the post-World War II "baby boom" the TFR trended downward, and fell especially steeply after the early 1970s, striking 1.7 in 1976. There was a recovery, but it was only at the end of the 1980s that the rate returned to replacement level, where it stayed for the '90s and '00s before dropping again after 2008-2009.

The reader who knows anything of economic history has likely noticed a commonality between the slippage in the 1970s, and the slippage after 2008-2009, namely that in each case it correlates with a nasty and prolonged economic shock, the kind that makes responsible people put off having families and children precisely because they are not confident of being in a position to take care of them. Indeed, it is significant that America's TFR hit its low in 2020, dropping to 1.6 amid the addition of the post-pandemic disruption of American life to the stresses of the Great Recession that, contrary to the press' stupid propaganda, never really went away, and with it the added disinclination to make the commitments involved in having children (as, of course, an enormous amount of data demonstrates).

Still, if there have been ups and downs it does seem to me that there is more at issue than the merely cyclical character of economic life. The highly insecure neoliberal way of life that the economically orthodox think is so delightful is anything but for the vast majority of those actually living it, and it seems to me that Emmanuel Todd is entirely right when he argues for the inverse relationship between neoliberalism and natality. Alas, our media, which in its usual manner hastened to give platforms to the culture warriors as they selectively seized on Todd's work as affirmation of their ideas, has no interest in platforming anyone likely to take up those ideas of Todd's, or for that matter, any alertness to hard economic realities and what they actually mean for those we more mendaciously than ever call "middle class." Instead when it comes to topics like that, outfits like the Times give us Justin Wolfers telling us "Don't worry, be happy" in pieces that absolutely embody Thomas Frank's characterization of the American news media's "paramount problem" as its "annoying professional-class assumptions."