Babies back in style

The longest and deepest baby recession since the 1970s may be coming to an end

The decline in births in the United States since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008 may finally be coming to an end. On an annualized basis, the cumulative decline over the last 5+ years has as meant nearly 1.5M kids have not been born. That is a lot of people who don’t exist, especially when you compare that to the current 3.8M kids under the age of 1 in the United States.

1.5M also means a lot of young adults and potential parents are saying that they are not quite ready, financially or otherwise, to take on the commitment of a life, and a lifetime. That’s a lot of leaning in (Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead ) if indeed we’re witnessing a deeper secular change in the attitude women and their partners have toward having children.

Our model below shows why we think the baby trend is turning. While we can’t measure attitudes, we can measure the result using some clever manipulation of data the federal government produces each month. Small postitive percentage changes in the last 6 months could be the beginning of a much bigger move over years to come. There are after all 1.5M biological clocks ticking away all across the country.

There are plenty of reasons to care about the trend in baby making in the United States. Our work on the US Medical Economy has drawn us into the analysis, but there are others. By far and away, having a baby is the single biggest reason anyone not on Medicare is admitted to a hospital, accounting for 30% of all admissions. But there are other reasons to care that can threaten whole economies and countries. Russia is certainly concerned with declining births in their country (Russia’s population decline spells trouble ).

The Great Depression saw the biggest decline in birth rates over the last 100 years, and the current one is pretty close in scale. The Depression however was followed by the Baby Boomers, The Boomer Echo, and the generations in between. These cycles play big roles in political, economic, and social trends as the synchronized peaks and troughs of millions of people wind through the system. Of course there is always the alternative downside scenario lurking in a Children of Men like dytopia if we’re wrong.