The United States Has a Keen Demographic Edge
Competitors of the United States face plunging birthrates and social gloom.
foreignpolicy.com
The United States Has a Keen Demographic Edge
Competitors of the United States face plunging birthrates and social gloom.
By Brent Peabody, a recent graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School.
A group of American elementary school students stands outside in rows. Most of the students are dressed in winter coats and holding hands with their classmates and raising them in the air.
Students from Watkins Elementary School take turns reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial on Jan. 12 in Washington, D.C. KENT NISHIMURA/GETTY IMAGES
MAY 13, 2024, 5:46 PM
U.S. politicians have begun to lament the country’s falling birthrate. Their concern is legitimate; The United States’ total fertility rate has fallen from a robust average of 2.12 births per woman in 2007 to less than 1.7 births per woman today. (Demographic experts generally identify 2.1 as the rate needed to keep the population stable absent immigration.) From a smaller tax base and a shrinking labor pool to higher pension burdens that could crowd out spending on things such as education and infrastructure, falling birthrates represent a looming social and economic drag on U.S. prosperity.
This discourse, however, misses key context—namely, that the demographic situations in China, Russia, and the European Union are an order of magnitude worse. Far from being a drag, the United States’ relatively strong demographic hand endows it with a key advantage in an age of great-power competition with China and Russia.
While the United States may be in demographic transition, its competitors are increasingly in demographic turmoil. Nowhere is this more apparent than China. In the span of less than a decade, its birthrate has plunged from 1.81 births per woman to 1.08, according to the official figures, placing it among the lowest anywhere. Chinese authorities anticipate a modest rebound, speculating that fertility rates will rise above 1.3 by 2035, a figure that would still spell demographic doom for the world’s second-most populous country.
But far from recovering, a confluence of demographic and social trends suggests that the Chinese birthrate still has further to fall.
Start with the fact that after decades of the one-child policy, there are dramatically fewer Chinese citizens able to have children in the first place. There are, for example, 216 million Chinese citizens in their 50s but just 181 million citizens in their 20s, meaning that the population is all but destined to fall since the pool of potential parents is now so much smaller.
Even worse, a societal preference for sons has created a severe shortage of women. There are a whopping 11.7 million more Chinese men in their 20s than there are women in the same age bracket. A small portion of this imbalance can be attributed to nature’s slight tendency for boys over girls at childbirth. (Some scientists speculate that humans may have evolved this tendency to compensate for higher mortality rates for men later on in the life cycle.)
A much larger share of the imbalance, however, can be attributed to the many sex-selective abortions and the Chinese girls who were put up for adoption during the peak years of gender selection, before government efforts began to close the gender gap. Decades of the one-child policy, in short, have resulted in a shortage of young people and an even greater shortage of young women. Both factors condemn the country to continued demographic decline for the foreseeable future.
Despite the government’s best efforts to convince people to have babies, including a turn to patriarchal language under Chinese President Xi Jinping, new social realities also suggest that China’s ultra-low birthrates are here to stay. Chief among these is a newfound and ingrained cultural preference for small families, especially among the generation of people who grew up without siblings. Chinese women surveyed about their preferences, for example, reported an ideal family size that averages to just 1.7 children, far lower than almost everywhere else in the world. This means that even if Beijing was able to afford every woman the perfect conditions for raising a family, Chinese fertility would still be far below the threshold required to maintain population size.
Also worrying for China is the rise of the tangping—the “lying flat” movement—a social phenomenon observed among young Chinese emerging from the anomie resulting from both China’s long COVID-19 lockdowns and a hypercompetitive academic culture. The movement, which rejects typical societal expectations (parenthood included) as a form of quiet but defiant protest against the state, has been subject to heavy censorship but still seems to capture the prevailing mood among young people. It bodes poorly for their future procreation.
The most unheralded driver of China’s demographic decline, however, is its continued urbanization. This factor correlates with fertility perhaps more than any other; higher housing costs, more liberal social norms, and a new economic logic (extra hands to help with work on a farm become more mouths to feed in a city) all conspire to make urban families much smaller than rural ones.
China’s relentless urbanization, then, promises to act as a continued check on Beijing’s ambitions to raise birthrates. Most worrying for Beijing is the fact China has a lot of room left to urbanize: Less than two-thirds of Chinese citizens live in cities, compared to 81 percent of South Koreans and 92 percent of Japanese. Beijing will find efforts to raise the birthrate even harder as a greater share of the 34 percent of its citizens currently living in rural areas decamps to cities.
Russia’s population also promises to plummet, but it’s expected to do so for a slightly different set of reasons. Like China, Russia’s population growth is constrained by the smaller generation of people now entering adulthood, an echo of the tumultuous 1990s, when birthrates first collapsed following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This reality means that the birthrate was already destined to fall due to the smaller pool of potential parents.
Unlike China, however, Russia has made this weak demographic hand even worse by starting a war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has locked Russia into a cycle of demographic decline in at least three ways. The first factor is death from the war itself, with many of Russia’s estimated 50,000 fatalities being from the same small generation—of those born in the 90s—that it can scarcely afford to lose. Second is the wave of emigration that the invasion and subsequent mobilization has caused, as many of the roughly 1 million Russians who have fled the war are in their prime childbearing years.
Above all, however, is the fact that military spending—which now stands at a record 6 percent of Russia’s GDP—has crowded out spending on education, health care, and other policies that induce family creation. Chief among these are the Kremlin’s generous natalist policies, which succeeded in meaningfully raising the birthrate and even led to a brief period of natural population growth from 2013 to 2016. But this is a far cry from 2021, when Russia’s population dropped by 1 million people—the opening shot in what will be a protracted period of decline.
Against this catastrophic backdrop in China and near-catastrophic backdrop in Russia, the United States’ relatively robust demography is a source of strength. It’s true that, like Europe, the United States is now entering an era of lower birthrates. But—buoyed by higher religiosity and strong Mormon and evangelical traditions that Europe lacks—this decline has been both more delayed and less dramatic than the precipitous drop seen across the EU.
The United Sates can also rely on its status as a first-choice destination for immigrants across the world, something that has propelled its continued population growth even as China and Russia have begun to decline. The United States’ world-beating universities and tech firms will continue to attract the world’s best and brightest while high wages and a tight labor market have incentivized an ever-growing number of lower-skilled migrants to arrive via the southern border.
While the United States will still have to adapt to realities such as higher pension obligations in the face of an aging population, it’s the inverted population pyramid seen in countries such as Russia and China that presents the greatest threat to productivity and growth.
Of course, Russia and China could yet climb out of the demographic holes that they have found themselves in. Both remain powerful autocracies that are potentially capable of corralling their people in ways that the United States and the West can’t—although encouraging population growth has, as autocracies such as Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania shows, often been far harder than limiting it.
But the United States shouldn’t discount its own strengths, chief of all the political and economic liberties that make it such an attractive location to move to and raise children in the first place. The United States will still have to contend with the numerous threats posed by Russia and China. Their falling populations, however, will make the job much easier.