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INTRO: In April, the federal government reported that America’s total fertility rate—the number of children a woman is statistically expected to have over her lifetime—had dropped to 1.57.
The alarm was immediate, with lawmakers and pundits invoking the specter of a graying, shrinking America unable to fund its elders. But experts who have spent careers studying this number had a somewhat different reaction: We’ve seen this movie before.
“Completed fertility among all U.S. women was lower for those born around 1955 than for those born around 1980, and it was much lower for college-graduate women born around 1955 than for those born around 1980,” says Claudia Goldin, a professor of economics at Harvard and a Nobel laureate who has studied women, work and family for decades. “We’ve been having this conversation for 50 years. Why is it all of a sudden a problem now?”
That isn’t to say the downward trend should be ignored... (MORE - details)
INTRO: In April, the federal government reported that America’s total fertility rate—the number of children a woman is statistically expected to have over her lifetime—had dropped to 1.57.
The alarm was immediate, with lawmakers and pundits invoking the specter of a graying, shrinking America unable to fund its elders. But experts who have spent careers studying this number had a somewhat different reaction: We’ve seen this movie before.
“Completed fertility among all U.S. women was lower for those born around 1955 than for those born around 1980, and it was much lower for college-graduate women born around 1955 than for those born around 1980,” says Claudia Goldin, a professor of economics at Harvard and a Nobel laureate who has studied women, work and family for decades. “We’ve been having this conversation for 50 years. Why is it all of a sudden a problem now?”
That isn’t to say the downward trend should be ignored... (MORE - details)