Nearly 75% of US counties lost population last year as deaths outnumbered births
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* lower fertility rates
* fewer immigrants
* Covid deaths
* opioids deaths
* increasing productivity in farming with the destruction of small farms and increased economic inequalities
* crumbling infrastructure in rural areas, from closing supermarkets and schools to deficient roads and services
Except for Covid I don't think any of these trends will revert soon. Many of these counties have degraded so much that they might be uncapable of atracting remote workers.
* people can afford fewer children, and many no children at all
* I'm guessing here but possibly people are coupling at a lower rate, and are living single long-term
* more people happy to say that they just plain don't want children, and have other interests instead
Cost is the biggest one I can think of. If you didn't walk out of the hospital with a 8k bill (on a good delivery) and then have to figure out how to afford $1,500 per month childcare after 12 weeks unpaid leave, people would probably have a lot more kids.
https://data.oecd.org/pop/fertility-rates.htm#:~:text=Fertil....
If people can't have children you can't fix that as easily as the factors causing people to not choose to have children.
A change to tax codes can immediately help alleviate the latter, for example.
Of course you are right that the underlying reasons are all relevant depending on the question, but they are all covered under the umbrella of "fertility rate".
In conclusion I am (pedantically?) arguing the definition of the term Fertility Rate, not anything else.
People are much more able to afford children today than in the past, and some of the most affluent places (e.g. DC) are the most childless.
I expect many the shine of many of the "pandemic homesteader" stories we've seen will tarnish pretty quickly as a result of this. How much of a discount are you willing to accept on the cost of living at the expense of safe drinking water? Are you old enough to be concerned about reliable emergency services, or access to a hospital? You're not getting a bargain by living in a rural area, you're getting the market price.
I agree up with well water, a septic field, and no sidewalks. Never doing that again. I want to be apart of human progress and have modern infrastructure. The septic field was probably the worst.
Access to healthcare is an issue depending on the area. There is zero financial incentive for healthcare workers to be in poor rural America. Really, though, it is a poverty issue. Rural areas, particularly those that were built around a specific and now defunct industry, such as coal mining, have a lack of available jobs and they are now unwilling to leave a town that no longer has a purpose to exist.
I've heard the opposite but it was all anecdotal. I heard surgeons and other doctors actually get paid a lot more to live in more rural areas because doctors generally don't want to live there so they have to do something to attract them.
As far as location is concerned, plenty of areas that are just 10 miles from a major metropolitan area are considered rural for census purposes. Owning a practice in a bucolic part of southern Connecticut is different from owning one in a Gold Rush ghost town. Population density is a still important, even if it matters less than it would for a major hospital system.
Not to mention there's the dating factor. While this may not be an issue for late-career/semi-retired doctors, the younger or divorced ones will face an ethical and professional dilemma regarding dating patients in a small town on top of the usual stressors in being a doctor.
Take Ault, Colorado, just for instance. Google says the population is 1,947. It declined from 2018 to 2019. (Not sure how Google knows that, when there wasn't a yearly census. Maybe better not to ask - Google's surveillance powers aren't the point here.)
Ault is this little small town. It's on a US highway. It's 17 minutes off of an interstate. It's 27 minutes to Fort Collins, a town of 100,000 people with a state university. It's 1:17 to Denver, a city of 4 million people.
So if you need a hospital, there's one 30 minutes away. If you absolutely need a big city hospital, it's an hour away. That's inconvenient, but you (hopefully) won't need it very often. Need an InstaCare type facility? There's probably one 20 minutes away, and almost certainly one 30 minutes away.
Need an appliance store? It's maybe 25 minutes away. Well, mine is 15 minutes away, and I'm in a big city.
Need a non-remote job? There's a fair amount of tech in Fort Collins. I've had worse commutes. (I didn't like them, but I've had them.)
So I'm not seeing the hard dichotomy between "big city" and "completely out in the sticks". It's a continuum.
(Certainly longer-standing trends will continue as trends, but... the "75%" stat seems like it'd point to covid isolation to me.)
[1]: https://ifstudies.org/blog/number-4-in-2021-more-faith-less-...
The small towns that have this stuff also have very high cost of living. Small towns and exurbs on the fringes of metros may pick up people as workers can go into cities when they need to for work or play, but you couldn’t pay me to live in most rural counties in this country.
People not from small towns also underestimate the level of substance abuse that these areas have — either from excessive drinking (and often drinking and driving) and drugs. I’ve had multiple high school classmates from my Ohio town die of opioid overdoses.
I think -if- small towns even -want- to attract remote workers, they'd need to solve this appearance of not at least being part of civilization. That said, the whole "Californians Please Stay Away" meme is common to a lot of small towns across America, so it's likely these places don't want me moving there anyway.
*Major ongoing cost of living spike (partially due to inflation) for people that would traditionally have kids.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-population...
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/net-...
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-population...
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/net-internati...
Also, immigrants tend to have more babies than do assimilated native-born Americans, as is also true in Europe. A direct result of the recent couple of decades of immigration would be a lot of larger families among immigrants, offsetting the trend toward smaller families or childlessness among native born white Americans (the least or 2nd least fertile subset of the population -- Asian Americans have lower overall birth rates).[2][3][4]
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenshoulberg/2021/07/11/here...
2. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/fertility-rates-in-the-u...
3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241514/birth-rate-by-eth...
4. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_01-508.pdf
Regarding the question of retirement... my wife and I have raised one kid, who is now 17. We're all on my company's group plan. I haven't seen the kind of expenses you are alluding to. However, university tuition is looming, and that WILL be expensive. Luckily, we have a 429 plan, which after 17 years has grown to be a decent sum.
The flip side of retirement is that children provide the parents with support in their old age. My mom, who just turned 95, has near constant attention from my sister who lives nearby. Many others I know are in the same boat - one or more children become their health advocates and protect them, and in some cases support them. Children, in my view, are a net asset, not a liability.
Definitely, but lack of mobility comes with its own (monetary and other) costs, in the modern economy especially.
> We're all on my company's group plan. I haven't seen the kind of expenses you are alluding to.
With most employers, adding your kid(s) to insurance most likely runs a few hundred dollars a month (over what you'd be paying otherwise) in premiums, and for the vast majority of people that'll still come with a large (high-four- or low-five-figures) max-out-of-pocket if something actually goes wrong with any of you. I expect spending ~$25,000 on medical expenses (including the birth and prenatal care, and cost of adding the kid to insurance) by the time a kid's 5 is fairly normal, even if the kid's fairly healthy (it can get so much worse than that if they're not), and that's just one expense. That figure's certainly in line with what I've seen for various friends who've started families in the last few years, ranging from very blue-collar up to other software developers.
There are employers who provide way better (very low max-out-of-pocket) insurance and cover most or all of the premium, even for family plans. Most people aren't employed by those employers, though.
I live in a city with, I gather, remarkably cheap child care. You're still looking at about $8,000/yr/kid if you don't mind a daycare that's not particularly good. If one partner stays home instead, the cost is much higher, even assuming pretty minimal earning potential. We do have family nearby, luckily, and we lean on them for help with child care all the time, but not for dedicated 5-days-a-week 48ish-weeks-a-year care. I'm sure some people get full-time care from family members who'd not otherwise be working, so it's basically free, but I doubt it's the norm.
Admittedly, the worst expenses are front-loaded. Lost income or childcare costs drop a lot when kids start going to school. The initial birth is gonna hit whatever your max-out-of-pocket is with your insurance, which is usually gonna be several thousand, but that's a one-time cost. Unfortunately, a dollar invested the day your kid is born is also worth a lot more than $1 by the time they leave the house, so the fact that it's front loaded isn't exactly a good thing, as far as retirement savings goes.
The elimination of poverty requires universal provision of education, women get educated, have less (no kids), birth rate drops and keeps dropping below the threshold of population stability.
I don't think there is any example of a society that has managed to reverse this trend. Maybe Ceaucescu Romania which at one point banned contraception and abortion, leading of course to the orphan crisis of the 1980's. Counter intuitively, devastating wars / famine also lead to post-crisis population boom, perhaps because education / career are entirely disrupted.
We probably need to think seriously about making people outside of the natural womb, can't see another way to reverse this trend outside of the above mentioned measures / circumstances
Israel is also booming economically as it is the 24th in terms of GDP per capita now and rising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... Israel has the 2nd largest per capita VC investment in the world: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/countries-most-startup-inve...
What are they doing that others are not?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/haredi-population-growing-twic...
1) immigration - of course Israel grants the right of every Jewish person to live in Israel, in fact paid an incentive to relocate. Presumably there a constant inflow from the Jewish diaspora and their descendants which might supplement the population
2) orthodox families, I'm guessing, have outsized families. Where women do not participate in the market economy, they end up having lots of kids instead
Again, no idea on the percentage contributions of either of these cases, but it might go some way toward explaining Israel's countervailing trend!
It's not just women. Somewhere around half of Haredi men do not work.
Or, stated less pejoratively, somewhere around half of Haredi men devote their lives to scholarship.
The US has a similar fertility-focused religious movement, but it's much more fringe and relatively smaller. Religious beliefs can drive super-high birth rates in pretty much any society, but aside from Israel, higher education has been associated with lower rates of religious belief. Declining religious participation and intensity of belief may well be contributing to the fall in global birth-rates.
You make it sound like this progression is inevitable like every slow decline is followed by a steep fall and then finally exponential bust which seems not very convincing.
It also creates friction politically, as the burden on the working populace increases due to a shift in working/non-working and almost no one wants to change for the worse. See the young vs the elderly and retirement ages, where the elderly will often vote for the young to carry the burden, and vice versa.
Long story short, it creates a situation where things have to change fundamentally or someone has to bite through the sour apple. Governments don't want to do either of these things.
What, really, is humanity doing? What is the point? The idea that our existence itself is ultimately grounded in economic growth feels pretty thin; I imagine it is to even the staunchest capitalists on any reflection.
There to me, is something ultimately embarrassing about this "problem". Its kinda like we invested a lot of time and resources to throw a party, and when only a few people show up, we start to diagnose what's wrong with those people that didn't come, and never once consider that it was a shitty party.
From where I sit, the relative cost of kids goes up. In major cities:
- Kids are expected to have their own bedrooms
- The cost of a 3-bedroom apartment is beyond the means of most families of child-bearing age
- For most people, life is debt-driven. Mortgage. Credit card. College. Etc.
- Work is out-of-the-house, so kids need child care, which is a major expense. With schools, kids still need child care after school. This is different from kids hanging out on a farm.
I'd like a big family, but I can't afford a big family. Ironically, my (poor) ancestors could.
A lot of this has to do with issues like zoning and building codes as well. Homes are /expensive/ to build in the US.
It's still doable but you have to sacrifice your standards of living, a tough trade-off to make.
> A lot of this has to do with issues like zoning and building codes as well.
The general trend of richer countries having fewer babies holds even in countries with wildly different zoning laws and expectations around living conditions. Japan’s fertility rate fell below replacement a long time ago, and even countries like India and Mexico are now at or below replacement levels.
For any given material explanation one can point to, there are clear counterexamples of countries without that material problem which still has a low fertility rate.
- The cost-of-living in India in Bangalore or Mumbai -- at a standard to afford a family -- is astronomical for relatively educated individuals making $10k/year. That's where affluent people live. It's not until you get into the real elites making $100k/year that it's easy again. That's the same worldwide. Even very poor countries have areas where these dynamics kick in.
- Where many poor people live, for example, on rural farms, it's possible to have lots of kids.
"Generous maternal benefits" don't come anywhere close to filling this gap.
You would expect some effect though, yet Northern Europe and Japan continue to have extremely low birth rates despite the efforts of their governments.
Also, many European countries saw fertility rates drop a long time ago, often back when housing was much, much cheaper. IIRC countries like Sweden and Norway dropped below replacement levels in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In countries I've been in, that period coincided with a move from farms, where land was ample, to cities, which were cramped. Big family housing wasn't really available; those cities had apartments which simply didn't really support larger families. Cost wasn't so much an issue for having a cramped 2 or 3 bedroom in the sixties, but beyond that, you moved into ultra-wealthy territory.
So I guess my question is whether you could write a little bit more about the Scandinavian countries. That's my own ignorance speaking.
Japanese cities are super-cramped. I would not want a big family in Tokyo.
Those adjustment factors would be things like -- what percentage of women have children, how many children do they have, how many children does the average nanny care for...
We could work through the various supply and demand factors, but, basically, whether compensated formally or not, if you hold the fertility rate fixed, then you also hold the amount-of-childcare fixed. There's some kind of conservation rule at work.
You can make the model a little bigger by including all the raising-of-children in those countries that are net exporters of people. Which there will be fewer and fewer of.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/in-georgia-a-religiously-inspired...
But is it something that needs to be "fixed"?
But obviously no one can pay that so either it's insurance or it goes to collections. In my case it's insurance. Only I've got a high deductible plan. 5k deductible. And because pregnancies go 9 months there's a chance that any given pregnancy costs 10k.
Meanwhile I asked my mom how much her pregnancies cost (all three c sections). Apparently insurance basically picked up all costs such that only trivial amounts were left over.
We've been extremely lucky to have ways to afford our children's births so far. Nothing we planned for just things that happened that saved us a ton of money. I honestly am not sure how most people handle this financially.
These lead to people postponing kids for years, so they all have them at the same time after. People in general don't want to have babies in high risk high danger situations.
At this point, its pretty clear that naturally starting and carrying a developing fetus is not an issue. Its the cost of the child after its born that's the issue. Having a bunch of babies coming out of artificial wombs is a recipe for disaster if they have no parents.
Have you learned nothing from the single parent household pandemic? Single parent children have much worse life outcomes than dual parent households. Zero parents? I'd imagine that would be worse.
1) Artificial wombs ≠ no parents. Kids might just be handed over to folks who want to parent but don't want the pregnancy / birth.
2) Kids could be raised by the state. Has been done before, though generally as a form of military service, thinking specifically of the Ottoman devshirme system; granted they did abduction, but are a decent example of state managed child rearing
3) Maybe robots could do the parenting. Eventually they may be able to make a passable attempt at it. Reminded of the movie 'Mother' - a dystopia obviously but still...better than no be at all!
Find a way to make the cost to parents zero over the lifetime of the kid for all the basics (child care, healthcare, food, clothing) and I bet rates shoot way up.
Having a kid is an extremely expensive luxury good right now. No wonder people are hesitant to do it.
though having a kid being a luxury good is likely a persistent condition regardless of how strong the welfare state is, unless you actually go to the point of paying women to have more children (something we should try btw). Right now the incentives are weak - cash bonus in some countries, some form of income support in others - all pretty small beer, not enough to make a difference!
However, the opposite happened. Likely that you are in the age where a lot of people get pregnant so this looked like a baby boom. In reality, birth went down in the western world.
A study in Canada: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/45-28-0001/2021001/artic...
In reality, it seems the existential dread of the past couple years has suppressed birthrates whereas a temporary shutdown in the past similarly leaves couples with a lot of boredom but -- critically -- not concerned about the overall wellbeing of their world.
And obviously not enough of them to offset decreased rates through the rest of the year.
And likely just regional/economic - I'm in an upper-middle class neighborhood and most people were able to work remotely and avoid the worst of the economic uncertainty.
Without the numbers, I would have said there was a snowstorm effect. With the numbers, there obviously wasn't.
I don't know that it's any better in the counties with shrinking population. The shrinking population reduces demand for all the services they might have been able to perform at a higher wage. And housing prices still seem to be rising. Again, not a big deal if you already own a home, but I think it locks out a good portion of a whole generation from home ownership.
Child poverty skyrocketed in the last year…
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if that grow was limited to 25% of counties (guessing major urban center or at least "corridors").
This is just from my observation of central Illinois; I’m assuming it’s the same all over.
So their fate with respect to population decline is probably different than rural parts of Central Illinois or rural parts of the East and Midwest.
1. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/20...
Covid primarily targets end of life individuals, so as that demographic shrinks so will the death rate.
Fertility however is another issue that I don't expect to fix itself anytime soon.
Once the bulk of the over-70s got vaccinated the impact of covid deaths was spread pretty evenly between generations over 30. So after summer 2021 (Delta and Omicron) this was not accurate.
It's pretty obvious last year was not part of a trend.
Note that this means the weighted experience of the overwhelming majority of people is they live in a growing county.
Lots of people are moving to big cities, immigration means that the population is still growing very slowly.
Even if all these small counties emptied out, I don't think many people would want to live in them, you can already snap up housing there at a bargain price.
It's only a bargain when you're looking at it from the perspective of someone making stupid money doing tech or high finance in a big city.
What I'd like to see but can't find in ten minutes of googling is a combination of these charts
https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/housing-stat...
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/20...
So that I could see a median income / housing cost ratio by county.
I still think the main reason that people aren't moving into these small counties with cheap housing though is that nobody wants to live there.
By many metrics they're not pleasant places to live.
Also, considering I created city-data.com with information about U.S. cities and counties, I know ;)
My assumption is that instead of moving to the biggest cities in the us, people are spreading out amongst the smaller cities, not the myriad of tiny counties in the US.
Am I wrong?
EDIT:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220324065328/https://www.nytim...
"But the 10 fastest growing counties last year accounted for nearly 80 percent of the national total, a testament not so much to the rapid pace of change in these places, but to the lack of significant growth in the rest of the nation."
- any territory should allow at maximum the quantity of people the territory can properly nourish;
- we (humans) need a relatively young population because any country full of elderly is a dead one, so a certain "slow balance" is needed.
That's means, for instance, if today a territory can nourish enough from local *developed* resources 40% of it's resident that territory must spark a debate for crafting a process to push enough people to leave, no strong imposition, no force but a development that slowly realize the goal because so far commerce can provide food so there is no emergency and so nothing that demand emergency measures.
Similarly at population level: we are too much for our territory? Ok, so population need to reduce but of course just making less babies is not a solution because makes the population elder and prone to kill it in the mean/long run, again so far we still eat and live in general, so no emergency, we just need to incentive a single baby per family, if it's interesting to have a baby but not more than one we can probably control the demography. Again no obligation, no disincentives.
Such decisions must be done by public process with Democratic means, of course.
Long story short: acting quickly is a thing most understand, can agree or disagree but understand. Acting slowly looking at the long run is a complex thing most fail both to understand and see. We must improve in that area then...
So kick everyone out of cities?
Not extreme enough to force, but strong enough to makes people doing some math.
In mere territorial terms though I'm talking about a not that small administrative subdivision of a country, like a region/department and the design in terms of mere territory-wide planning like "here we will not allow new constructions anymore and we skyrocket some costs to push some out, there we allow new residential constructions, and there new factories/farms".
Something similar essentially already exists in all the developed world, only it's mostly tailored to satisfy some wealthy and political interests more than really wight territorial resources.