Demographics

There’s been some suggestions that the cost of housing reduces fertility, through the fact that children continue have to live with their parents for longer, and so don’t want or can’t have children of their own (or perhaps don’t get the opportunity?). The classic example of this is Italian men, where it seems (this would need checking) 50% of men under 30 still live with their parents. Hence, if US housing is cheaper (which I presume it is) then this could be an explanation.

However one could easily argue the oppsite. Certainly in inner London I can think of couples I know who probably are living to together mainly because they couldn’t afford to live on their own, which I suppose could lead to more children…

Please revise “America” or “the US” in this excerpted statement; easy to lose your point here: “So I’d predict, if I were just coming at things a priori , a lower birthrate in America than the US.”

[Thanks, I’ve fixed this – sloppy typing. C]

I don’t think birth control is as available in the US as it is in Europe. For that and other reasons, the US is higher in some of the things that US conservatives most deplore: especially STD, teen births and abortions. I think that the US “just say no” approach to everything means that kids who aren’t completely obedient don’t have any prudent guidelines for their behavior at all. It’s sort of a cliche among sleazy guys that girls from a heavy religious background are among the easiest scores.

I’ve definitely heard and read many times (i.e. such that it seems to be common knowledge, but I don’t have statistics, though I should think a google of something like ‘demographic statistics US’ would get you a wealth of stuff from the US census department) that the birth rate is much higher among immigrants here (in the States).

Luckily I had a UN world population survey handy so here is what is says.

Interestingly the US birth rate was the lowest in its history last year at 13.9 per 1000 people (this includes all people). Yet in Europe, only one country was higher than this, Ireland, at 14.8, then France 12.9, Netherlands 12.5. At the other end Germany 8.8, Greece 9, Italy 9.6 were the lowest. The EU average was 10.6.

The consequence of this was that both the US and the EU had about 4mn births, but obviously given the EU’s population is much larger than the US’s (379 to about 289) the average is lower.

This is magnified because the same is not true of deaths — indeed Europe’s aging population meants it has proportionately more detahs (1% to 0.9%) Thus in 2002 there were 3.7m deaths in the EU comapared with 2.4m in the US.

Add in more immigration in the US and you get your rapidly rising population.

This does not answer, why? Looking at various immigrant rates they are on the whole higher, but US white fertility rate is higher too so there is probably a bit more too it.

This short paper backs up ‘it’s the housing market’ view.

http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/alesina/columns/ageing_Europe.pdf

Gosta Esping-Andersen (a European sociologist) claims, in his book Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies, that the most valuable comparison of fertility rates is between European countries, which have similar levels of economic growth and population density. Among these countries, those that offer state-sponsored child and elderly care (i.e. Netherlands) have higher birth rates than countries sticking with traditional family policies (i.e. Italy). Moreover, countries with state-sponsored caregiving services also have higher employement rates. Esping-Andersen is obviously a supporter of strong welfare regimes and claims that these kinds of policies effectively combat Eurosclerosis, given that both high fertility rates and high employment positively affect economic expansion.

So the U.S. appears to be the exception to the overall pattern. I’m not sure I know exactly why, although I suspect it has less to do with immigrant populations than it does with the amount of wealth concentrated in the U.S. economy. The costs of providing child care are overcome by the relative prosperity of the middle-class in the U.S. compared to the middle-class in other countries. Immigrants arriving to the U.S. are likely given more economic opportunities in the U.S. than elsewhere, which positively affects their birth-rate.

However, it’s also possible that the U.S. is on the negative slope of economic expansion, yet citizens continue to behave as if the economy will expand indefinitely.

Probably the difference in immigration: first- and second-generation. But I don’t think it’s something to sneer about (“dirty secret”?). American society’s openness and its ability to assimilate chalk up as big pluses. European society can’t deal with the present number of immigrants – witness all the anti-immigration political parties. It’s either breed or die; and they’re having a hard time breeding.

Also some other commenter in the other thread mentioned the lack of kids in Europe favors the Old Continent in per capita G.D.P. comparisons Very true. You could say that the Europeans have fewer kids because they’re better off; or that they’re better off (now anyway!) because they have fewer kids.

Has anyone tried breaking things down in terms of religiosity? I’d expect that the US might have a more religious middle class than the EU, and that religiosity would correlate with family size–but I don’t know any numbers.

http://www.int-res.com/articles/esep/2002/article1.pdf
This is a paper [warning PDF format] that gives some explanation on declining birth rates. Of interest, the fact that the the US birth rate is driven up substantially by 1st generation immigrants (10% of population but 18% of births), and that the prime factors in driving down birth rates are economic prosperity and marriage at later age, which override even the strongest pronatal religious influences.

Thanks chris, I’ll take a look on those numbers tomorrow, but a quick glance tells me that the difference can’t be that great, though the US probably has more immigrants per capita than the EU as a whole (in total numbers the EU might have more).

The bit about dirty secret wasn’t a sneer at immigration per se, it was a sneer at the way people seldom or never put it in those terms, but rather approach it in a roundabout or sometimes euphemistic or other times downright dishonest way. Sorry, but I’m a great believer in bluntness.

Chris’ original question doesn’t seem to have been answered, though. Who’s having all those extra American kids?

We’re getting a lot of anecdotal “seems to me” discussion, but that’s — sorry — pretty worthless. Also some nice cites, but they don’t seem to be answering the question that was asked. Yeah, first-generation immigrants are having more kids, but they’re a fairly small (~10%) part of the population, and lowering their birthrates to match the national average still leaves the US with a rate well above the European average.

Can’t anyone come up with, say, a birthrate-income curve for the US? Surely there ought to be a way to get the data out of census.gov.

Doug M. — Irish/American, married to a German, father of two

This basically answers those questions

http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p20-543rv.pdf

I didn’t read it all but it seems that Hispanic women have more children, but that isn’t really enough to make the oveall figures that much higher. Income doesn’t seem to play much of a role (but I only skimmed this bit).

A quote i saw from a demographer went like this

, “”The U.S. is the most fertile of developed nations,” he said, just above the replacement rate of 2.0, to replace two parents. He discounts ethnicity as the major cause.

“Even if you tried to match European-Americans with their country of origins, fertility would be higher than in Europe,” he said. “New wealth doesn’t explain it. My pet theory — and you can’t prove this — is that it has to do with greater religiosity than in Europe or Japan.”

Oh sorry I don’t know if you saw that was a quote from a demographer, not me. And one I didn’t actually mean to include after the ‘he said’. I don’t buy the religous argument myself.

Perhaps it’s to do with pensions. Germany has a generous state pension scheme so people don’t feel they need children to look after them….

Chris K – does the Germany migration figure include gastarbeiter (guest workers)? It might account for the higher migration figure if it does.

“Did the US become less religious than Europe during those years only to bounce back after 1980?”

The religious revival that started in the 1970s has been quite marked. I live in a country in which 96% of the population says it believes in God, which, I’ve read, is about the highest percent in the world. One historian argues that America is now undergoing its fourth Great Awakening. It’s worth noting that the best selling fiction in America during the 1990s were the Left Behind books. Are these the kinds of books that would sell in Europe?

As to immigration in Europe and America, I read in the Economist that both “countries” have received about the same absolute number of immigrants during the last 20 years, but that this would represent a greater percent increase for America.

My own feeling is that America has a higher birth-rate than Europe because it is more religous. Eve Tushnet typifies the trend when she says that the whole point of leading a self-conquered life is to make yourself more able to raise more children.

More so, most of my liberal friends are religious. It is not merely the political right that is religous. Most of my liberal college educated friends who hate George Bush are quite religous. It is a universal experience in America to be religous.