Fertility

Since 2021, 80 Percent of Population Growth in the US Has Been from International Migration

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

The following chart shows cumulative population growth in the US since 2010, from two sources: the natural population growth (birth minus deaths) and international migration:

In total, the US population has increased by about 30 million people since 2010. Cumulatively, about 55 percent of the growth has been from international migration, but there are two distinct periods within this 15-year timeframe. From 2010 to 2020, about 60 percent of the population growth was from natural population change, both cumulatively and in most of those years. From 2021 forward, 70-90 percent of the growth has been from international migration.

The flip in 2021 happens because both factors changed. First, the natural rate of population growth slowed dramatically, with just 146,000 people added to the population, compared with close to 1 million or more before the COVID pandemic. The decline in population growth is a result of gradually slowing birth rates, but also skyrocketing death rates in 2021-2022: about 3.4 million deaths per year, compared with about 2.8 million pre-pandemic. Second, international migration picked up dramatically, from around half a million people in 2019-2020, to an average of over 2 million per year from 2022-2024.

Note: the years in this data run from July to June, so when it says 2025 in the chart, this means from 7/1/2024 to 6/30/2025. Thus, we don’t yet have a full year of data under Trump. But even with the half year under Trump, which includes 6-7 months under Biden when the border policy was already being reversed, the latest year of data from Census suggests the US still had a net international migration of almost 1.3 million people. That’s half the number from 2024, but still well above pre-pandemic numbers. Keep in mind that these are estimates, subject to change, and estimating changes in the illegal immigrant population is often very difficult to do accurately. But these are probably the best estimates that we have right now.

What does the future hold? Of course, any future projection has to make assumptions about how both the birth rate and immigration rate will change over the coming years. But a recent estimate from CBO suggests that by around 2032-2033 the natural rate of population growth will essentially hit zero, and that by the early 2050s it will be so negative as to completely offset the projected immigration. In other words, total population growth could essentially be zero in the US by 2055 or so. That’s 30 years in the future, so take it with a grain of salt, as any small change in immigration, births, or deaths could throw that projection way off. But it seems like a fairly likely scenario.

Which Economies Grow with Shrinking Populations?

Zachary Bartsch4 Comments

If you didn’t know, China has had negative population growth for the past 4 years. Japan has had negative population growth for the past 15 years. The public and economists both have some decent intuition that a falling population makes falling total output more likely. Economists, however, maintain that income per capita is not so certain to fall. After all, both the numerator and denominator of GDP per capita can fall such that the net effect on the entire ratio is a wash or even increase. In fact, aggregate real output can still continue to grow *if* labor productivity rises faster than the rate of employment decline.

But this is a big if. After all, some of the thrust of endogenous growth theory emphasizes that population growth corresponds to more human brains, which results in more innovation when those brains engage with economic problems. Therefore, in the long run, smaller populations innovate more slowly than larger populations. Furthermore, given that information can cross borders relatively easily no one on the globe is insulated from the effects of lower global population. Because information crosses borders relatively well, the brains-to-riches model doesn’t tell us who will innovate more or experience greater productivity growth.

What follows is not the only answer. There are certainly multiple. For example, recent Nobel Prize winner Joel Mokyr says that both basic science *and* knowledge about applications must grow together. That’s not the route that I’ll elaborate.

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Assorted Links on Women and Family

Joy Buchanan3 Comments

First, there have been many tweets about Sophie Turner as a young mom and human who is getting divorced. Here’s an article (Stylist UK).

Also so many tweets about the 29-year-old who made eggs on the weekend. Here’s an article about it by Mary Harrington.

Thirdly, Understanding the Baby Boom (Works in Progress)

Parenthood rapidly became much easier and safer between the 1930s and 1950s. The spread of labour-saving devices in the home such as washing machines and fridges made raising children easier; improvements in medicine making childbirth safer; and easier access to housing made it cheaper to house larger families.

Anvar Sarygulov & Phoebe Arslanagic-Wakefield

I hate to be the next person publicly talking about Joe Jonas and Sophia Turner. I wish them both the best, and this kind of attention is probably hard on their kids. Anyway… what interests me about this case is that parenting seems to have been hard on them, even though Joe Jonas is worth $50 million. They could have a washing machine on every floor of their huge house. So, do the Works in Progress authors really understand the Baby Boom?

Awards for young talent are antinatalist

Joy Buchanan8 Comments

Another announcement just went out in my field to apply for an award for research support. This one is for early-career people. There are parameters about who can apply.

I know one of the men on the committee, and it would never occur to him in a thousand years that the structure of this prize discriminates against mothers. He probably thinks he’ll give equal consideration to everyone, which might be true in a sense, but there are a lot of people who are not allowed to put themselves in the pool. For this specific research prize, they don’t actually list an age limit, but they care about how fast you have progressed through the PhD->job track.

Let’s just say that this blog post is about every “under 30” or “under 40” prize that you can think of. Any prize that is age-limited sends the message that you had better accomplish whatever you are going to accomplish professionally first. Having kids needs to be the afterthought, chronologically.

Biologically, for men and especially women, having a kid before you turn 30 makes sense, if you ever want to have one. Professionally, there are a lot of implicit barriers to doing this. One of the few remaining explicit barriers that I can think of is these age-stage-specific prizes.

In case someone out there is thinking that IVF solves this, I’d like to point out that it’s really miserable and of course does not always work. In case someone out there is thinking “Bryan Caplan already showed that parenting is easy, so why does this matter?” I have a whole rant about that from last year.

Minor Investment

Zachary Bartsch8 Comments

Gary Becker, the Nobel laureate in economics, applied economic reasoning to social circumstances and particularly to families. He argued that children are a normal consumption good, and people consume more children with higher incomes. However, he also emphasized a quantity-quality trade-off. More children in a family means fewer resources and attention for each child. Higher-income couples may opt to invest in classes, training, and spend more time with a unitary child rather than increasing the number of children.

However, goods have multiple attributes and children do not merely provide a stream of consumption value while in the household. They offer access to future resources when they become employed themselves. Having more children or higher-quality children increases the economic benefits that older parents can enjoy, such as more help with household activities and the ability to travel with their adult children. Old-age benefits such as social security now serve the function of insulating people from their prior investments in future consumption.

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