America Faces A Massive Underpopulation Problem As Families Have Too Few Kids To Replace The Population

lifenews.com

America is shrinking. I don’t mean we’re getting shorter, I mean that we aren’t having enough babies. Here’s why that’s bad news. 

An old Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson portrays an average American couple welcoming visitors to their home. In the corner of the living room sits a little boy watching TV and next to him, is half of another little boy. “Come on in!” exclaim the couple, “Have you met Russel and Bill, our 1.5 children?”

Larson’s attempt to make fun of the American average, unfortunately, wasn’t that far off. In fact, America’s fertility rate may be hitting a historic low.

Lyman Stone, an economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, writes at Medium about what he’s calling “the great baby bust of 2017.”

The latest official estimate—taken from two-year-old data—puts the U.S. fertility rate at 1.84. In other words, the average American woman will have just under two children in her lifetime. This is well below the replacement rate, or the average number of children necessary to keep a country’s population from declining.

But as Stone argues, this estimate is already hopelessly out-of-date. Using monthly birth data from 2016 and 2017, he suggests the birth rate in America has plummeted to somewhere near 1.77 births on average.