U.S. birth rates resume falling while life expectancy increases for World Population Day 2024

Happy World Population Day! As I have all decade, I'm focusing on population growth or lack of it in the U.S., beginning with Fox 5 New York reporting US birth rate drops to record low in April.

New data from the CDC shows that US birthing rates hit a record low with roughly 76,000 fewer births than last year. It[']s the lowest one-year count since 1979. FOX 5 NY's Michelle Ross has more on what may be behind the drop.

This does a good job over covering the reasons for the decline, but it's not complete, so I'm turning to Queen City News, WJZY in Charlotte, North Carolina, reporting U.S. birth rate is on a rapid decline last month for an update and elaboration.

U.S. births were slipping for more than a decade before COVID-19 hit.

Both reports reinforce three of the points I made in CNBC asks 'Is The U.S. Running Out Of People?'

U.S. birth rates have been dropping for more than a decade and fertility rates have been dropping for even longer than that. In fact, U.S. fertility rates have been at or below replacement rate since 1973, when Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion. Economic uncertainty and other factors have contributed to the trend.
...
[I]ncreasing educational and economic opportunities for women is the number one way to decrease birth rates and keep them down, although increasing economic security might put a floor under the declining birth rates.
...
[I]f not enough babies are born in the U.S. to meet our job demand, the country can allow more immigration. I'm O.K. with that, but Donald Trump became president in large part because many Americans weren't and still aren't. That's why, when one of my students asked in 2015 if the U.S. would ever adopt Chinese population policies, I responded no, that's not the American way. If the U.S. thinks it has an overpopulation issue, it would restrict immigration.

Even if the country does not have an overpopulation issue, it might still think it has a different kind of demographic problem, which would still lead it to restrict immigration. In fact, the second chart I included in MSNBC examines Project 2025, part 5 lists even more extreme positions beyond restricting immigration: "Mass deportation of immigrants and incarceration in 'camps'" and "End birth right citizenship." Yikes, especially the second, which attacks the currently accepted idea of who is an American and will affect citizens and others here legally, not just undocumented immigrants.

Both of the above videos mentioned the economic impact of lower birth rates in the future, which is the main concern of CNBC Television's America's shrinking population: Economic impact of falling U.S. birth rate from May.

Melissa Kearney, University of Maryland economics professor, joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss the declining birth rate in the U.S., the economic impact of a shrinking population, and more.

On the one hand, Professor Melissa Kearney was able to give CNBC anchors Andrew Ross Sorkin and Rebecca Quick an answer that seemed to displease them, that no high-income country has been able to reverse sinking fertility rates, although France and Japan seem to have stabilized theirs, albeit still below replacement rate. That's not what they appear to have wanted to hear. On the other, she called concern about overpopulation "a misguided worry." Hmph. Again, I quote CNBC asks 'Is The U.S. Running Out Of People?'

[I]ncreased population is bad for the environment, as expressed by the variable P in I=P*A*T "where I is impact, P is population, A is affluence, and T is technology." Impact increases as both population and affluence increases; both drive up demand for resources and create more waste and pollution. Therefore, keeping population down will help the environment. By keeping human population below the carrying capacity for our species, it helps people as well.

I repeated this in PBS Terra asks 'What Happens When Demographics Change Forever?' That video mentioned Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, in which Ehrlich made a dire prediction about overpopulation causing mass famine. The video pointed out that didn't happen because people heeded the warning and greatly increased food production to stop that future from happening. One of those people was Norman Borlaug, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his contributions to the Green Revolution. World Food Program also won the Peace Prize for its efforts to feed the world and forestall famine. As a Crazy Eddie, I salute them.

With all the worry over low birth rates, it's not high birth rates that have increased population in the modern world, it's lower death rates. That ties into some good news from WFXR News in Roanoke, Virginia, US life expectancy rebounded in 2022, but not back to pre-pandemic levels.


Again, this is for 2022, the last full year of the pandemic, at least officially. We'll have to wait until November of this year to find out if life expectancy continued to rebound in 2023.

While I took a quick jab at the cut over the eye above, I promise to return to Project 2025 tomorrow now that I've finished celebrating three holidays over two days. Stay tuned.