Here's how fertility is changing in select countries over the last decade, grouped by region, with regions arranged by their 2007 fertility rates.pic.twitter.com/tXpYYiItqM
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Here's how fertility is changing in select countries over the last decade, grouped by region, with regions arranged by their 2007 fertility rates.pic.twitter.com/tXpYYiItqM
What you can see is that birth rates are plummeting in high-fertility transitional countries.... But they're also falling in "high fertility rich countries"! Rich countries with traditionally robust birth countries, like Sweden and the US, are seeing steep declines.
IN FACT, the sharpest birth rate decline anywhere in the world in recent years (this is bonus twitter content btw, not in the article), is actually in FINLAND. Folks, it ain't about the social safety net.
So anyways, we can look at how fertility rates are changing vs. what they were at a decade ago, and see if there are trends. Heyyyy there are. Countries around 1.4-1.8 TFR have little change in TFR on average. Higher countries have declines.pic.twitter.com/Vtb6CSXWZM
In the research for this article, I reproduced this figures for the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, etc. In the 60s, the convergence point looked like 2.2. It's fallen steadily every decade to, today, being around 1.7. "Fertility transition" is really just "persistent decline."
SOme countries are truly testing new lows for fertility. Enter, South Korea, where over a decade of costly pro-natal policymaking has done diddly squat (probably because none of it was focused on reducing the intensity of Korean work and schooling norms....).pic.twitter.com/z5sftnIoxO
There are countries with higher birth rates and increases in recent years. Mostly post-Soviet countries making recoveries from 1990s lows. Those increases won't last forever, even in high-TFR societies like Mongolia.pic.twitter.com/O82Yw9VXnj
I mean heck even in high-fertility societies like Israel, we're seeing declines! Israeli Jewish TFR in 2019 is probably going to fall for the first time in decades!pic.twitter.com/4k6mnpp36d
Folks, the global fertility slump is real, it is big, and it is not being driven just by Your Preferred Local Grievance. It's a feature of rich AND poor societies (many poor countries have below-replacement TFR now too!), and of societies with smaller and bigger welfare states.
The places and groups resisting it are mostly characterized by strange idiosyncracies: nationalist revivals in the wake of increasingly-historically-distance communism, bubbles of high religiosity, or other similar cases that seem to speak to cultural, not economic, differences.
And yet, even those cultures with more robust fertility-promoting norms are now seeing decline. Maybe their norms are changing. I dunno. This piece is descriptive, not trying to answer the question of causality.
But I do know that if your investment portfolio is heavily exposed to assets the value of which in some sense depended on near-replacement-rate fertility, you're in for a rough future. Oh, wait, that's..... all.... assets.... uhhh... NEGATIVE INTEREST RATES 4EVA
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