America has
fewer children
now than it did 10 years ago. That’s not in terms of percentages but raw numbers. New
Census Bureau
data released on Thursday show how the
age pyramid
of the United States is looking less like a pyramid and more like an upside-down onion or a vase.
America has more people in their 60s than we have under age 10.
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We’ll get to that onion-vase in a minute, but let’s just start with the minor shortage,
which was discovered in the most recent census
.
“In 2020, there were over 73.1 million children under age 18,” the Census Bureau
said
, “down 1.4% from 74.2 million in 2010. The biggest decline was among the under-5 age group, whose share of the population dropped by 8.9% or 1.8 million.”
Every year, we have fewer and fewer children.
Here’s the age pyramid right now:
Notice that the most numerous age cohort is 20 to 24 years old. There are slightly fewer people in the 15-19 group and then even fewer people between the ages of 10 and 14. Below that, the dropoffs are even greater, with the under-5 cohort being smaller than any cohort under age 65.
Sliced another way: We have about 39.5 million people in their 60s, compared to about 38.5 million under age 10.
Age distributions like this are typically called “age pyramids,” because naturally, the older groups at the top tend to be smaller than the younger groups at the bottom. That’s because people die as they get older, and because historically, woman have had more than 2.1 children, and so the population has generally grown.
The U.S. is far below the 2.1 replacement level, and that birthrate (called the total fertility rate) has been falling since the Great Recession.
The result is closing schools and a
culture that is increasingly unaccustomed to seeing children
. All of these changes, I believe, will fuel a further birthrate collapse, driving the U.S. down toward Korea-level birthrates.
