THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN FERTILITY

American fertility is now lower than ever before. Although some evidence suggests upward pressure on fertility, at least in the short run, the trend is more likely to be downward. The source of low fertility is change in the family institution, in particular the increased respectability of non-maternal roles for women and the decreased importance of parents and children for each other. The substantial social and political consequences of the population transformation will provoke interest in demographic remedies, but probably to little avail. Institutional adaptation is appropriate and preferable. Some thirty years ago, just after the end of the second world war, the contributors to population literature seemed obsessed with the long-standing decline of fertility. In the United States, the total fertility rate-a measure of the number of children born per woman over the course of her life-time-had slid steadily downward from more than seven, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to somewhere in the neighborhood of two. The accepted explanation was the complex changes summed up under the rubric of "modernization." Since nothing was perceived to stand in the way of that juggernaut, the prognosis was still further reproductive retrenchment, perhaps even to extinction. To be sure, the postwar birth rate was up a bit, but everyone wrote that off as only a momentary interruption of our demographic version of the Decline of the West (Population Index, 1948). The only problem was that the forecast proved to be very wrong. In the late 1970s, most demographers are again predicting a cessation of growth in the United States, and on essentially the same theoretical premises (Current Population Reports, 1975). But, given the previous forecasting debacle, why should anyone pay attention to a demographer who presumes to talk about the future of fertility? To find out what went wrong before, and try not to make the same mistakes again, consider the situation a generation ago. Demographers had available a rather brief history of American fertility, utilizing unsophisticated measures, along with impressions of the nineteenth century, and that added onto a large amount of presumably comparable European experience. The history was straightforward-decline all the way-and the obvious correlates were the various aspects of the modernization process. The latter continued but the former did not. As the years after World War II passed, fertility stayed high. With each annual addition to the evidence, a bit more of the confidence of demographers in their ideas disappeared. Their morale was shattered by the baby boom, and their general response was to abandon theoretical pretensions and retreat into the empty safety of empiricism. In my judgement, they were victims of a failure of nerve: they should have stuck to their theoretical guns. The contemporary history of American fertility, dated conveniently in terms of how long we have had the kinds of statistics necessary for refined measurement, extends over about sixty years. Within this same time span, the dominant feature is a single massive fluctuation, with a trough in the mid-1930s, a peak in the mid-1950s, and a further collapse in the past decade. What explanation of this fluctuation can we find to give us a basis for an informed guess as to what happens next? In his presidential address to the Population Association of America, Richard Easterlin (1978) proposed an alternative to the conventional wisdom which he claimed had led us astray. He said