Expecting the Unexpected
Some fellow San Francisco baseball season-ticket holders recently announced the impending birth of their first child. After congratulating them on the news, I had to ask: “Are you sure now is the best time to bring another Giants fan into this world?” Maybe I’m being too cautious. It’s not that the current season isn’t going that badly. It is. It’s just that, given average life expectancy and the promise of longevity gains, there’s a chance that a child born in 2026 can still expect to live long enough to see the team’s hitting improve. Probably. But my concerns serve as a pretty decent metaphor for birth rate trends across many nations. Even where economic and other factors suggest people should be making more babies, they’re making fewer. “This is not simply a matter of affordability, the buzzword so often invoked to explain why people are choosing to have smaller families … What unites these disparate cultures, policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline.” Anna Louie Sussman in the NYT (Gift Article): Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All. (In short, people have no idea what to expect when they’re expecting.)
+ Sussman, the author of the forthcoming book Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty, shares some of the potential factors driving the ambivalence. “In the United States, job tenures have contracted and income volatility has risen. Life expectancy, once on an inexorable march upward, has fallen for less-educated women and men. Many of the forces our economy is built on — A.I., immigration, global trade — feel distressingly volatile; disruption, once a byword for a disturbance or problem, is the governing ethos of a terrifyingly powerful sector of our economy. The rise of prediction markets has turned the world into one large casino. The climate crisis is spiraling, as are the costs of everything that could enable parenthood, whether that’s a roof over one’s head or child care. The past half-century has brought us breathtaking inequality, accompanied by a sharp decline in social mobility. The two generations currently of childbearing age bear the psychological and financial scars of coming of age amid world-scale catastrophes: Older millennials entered the labor market during the Great Recession; many watched their parents lose their jobs or homes. Gen Z, whose lives were upturned by the Covid-19 pandemic, now find themselves competing against A.I. for entry-level jobs and even prospective partners. The man running America seems single-mindedly devoted to chaos at home and abroad.”
+ I can tell by this brief overview of the state of the world that Sussman is probably a NextDraft subscriber. I’m not sure all sociologists and economists will agree that stress and uncertainty are the key factors driving down natality across the world, but it definitely helps explain why, even this season, I’d rather watch Giants games than the news.
