Click to enlarge.
August 1, 2013
Fertility forecast: Baby bust is over; births will rise
The total fertility rate in the USA is predicted to rise from a 25-year low of 1.89 children per woman in 2012 to 1.90 in 2013, according to the U.S. Fertility Forecast report released today by Demographic Intelligence.
1.89 to 1.90! Color me impressed! A few more years of that and we might even make it back to the declining long-term trend line. As a side note, it takes a rate of 2.1 to maintain a stable population. Otherwise, immigration for the win! It's the land of the free. What could possibly go wrong?
Among women aged 15-44, those who attend religious services weekly or more have 1.42 children, compared with the 1.11 children of women who rarely or never attend.
Women who attend religious services weekly intend to have 2.62 children, and those who rarely or never go want to have 2.10 children.
Women who attend religious services weekly intend to have 2.62 children, and those who rarely or never go want to have 2.10 children.
The following chart shows real annual religious construction spending per capita (August 2013 dollars).
Click to enlarge.
I'll leave the trend line as an exercise for the reader. Got crayon?
I'm not a religious person but I can say this. Over the long-term, we appear to be ZIRPing to Japanese hell in a handbasket. The future's so bright I gotta buy glasses.
Source Data:
Demographics of the United States
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart
Immigration, I mean amnesty, is our real plan and a big difference between the US/Mexico and Japan. The Japanese are xenophobic and won't import millions of low wage laborers each year like the US to fill the underclass.
ReplyDeleteI much, much, much prefer Japan's demographics to ours.
ReplyDeleteThey're already mostly through the induction of their old person population. The infrastructure they have now only needs to expand 10-20% more from here, since their postwar baby boom was a tiny two-year blip in the late 1940s.
Ours went on and on for all of the 1950s and the JFK era, so our story of 2020-2040 is going to be the expansion of the Senior Welfare State ("Socialism for me but not for thee!").
People think we need new bodies for economic growth, I think that's bunk.
We need to invest in developing the latent human capital we have. We've got millions of brilliant minds totally wasted via our shitty socio-economic sorting dynamics and rife rent-seeking pulling money out of the working class faster than their wages and gov't freebies puts it in.
My one great hope is that Japan's coming depopulation completely eviscerates their still-stratospheric real estate sector.
Our demographics and immigration are such that I don't see any let-up in continued rent-tap in land here.
There's going to be maybe 440M people here in 2050. Make Room! Make Room!
Mr Slippery,
ReplyDeleteThe more people we can bring in from Mexico the more there will be to pay off our national debt!
And as we all know, everyone needs a place to live. More people means inflationary home prices. So what if the extra people can't afford it!
Scarcasm: It burns and leaves an easy mark.
Troy,
ReplyDeleteI much, much, much prefer Japan's demographics to ours.
At the rate Japan's population is going, there will be just one guy left at some point and he'll get a bill for the entire debt.
Talk about price shock!
Then again, that would still be preferable to having to support many millions of people on food stamps in addition to that.
Seems like a lose-lose situation for both the US and Japan over the long-term to me. Hope I'm wrong!
Back in summer '89 I was thinking what foreign language to study, Japanese or Chinese.
ReplyDelete(Going in, I was supposed to graduate in June 1989. but that is another story).
Of course back then Japan had all the press while China was still a basket case.
I don't regret my choice, and by the looks of it, I think it might even pay off pretty well for me. I could handle retiring to Japan ca. 2020, I think.
The 3 richest bona-fide trading states are Norway ($90,000 per-capita NIIP), Taiwan ($34,000), and Japan ($27,000).
US's pre-capita NIIP -- negative $13,000
Luckily, it's just numbers at this point
Troy,
ReplyDeleteJapan will be increasingly self-sufficient in food and all other necessities, including energy.
Plenty of employment opportunities in energy for the Japanese. No doubt about it. Sigh.