THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO SHOW UP: Michael Barone: Will the trend toward low birth rates be reversed?

Sometimes a society’s values change sharply with almost no one noticing, much less anticipating the consequences. In 1968, according to a Gallup survey, 70 percent of American adults said that a family of three or more children was “ideal”—about the same number as in Gallup surveys starting in 1938. That number helps explain the postwar baby boom that exploded after Americans were no longer constrained by depression and world war.

Those values and those numbers didn’t last. By 1978, Gallup reported that only 32 percent considered three or more children “ideal.” The numbers have hovered around there ever since, spiking to just 41 percent amid the late 1990s tech boom.

The change in values and behavior took time to register. Just before the 1972 election, Richard Nixon and a Democratic Congress goosed up Social Security benefits. They figured the baby boom generation was just delaying producing a baby boom of its own. They were wrong, and Social Security has needed patching up ever since. . . .

The trend varies among demographic groups. Native-born Hispanics and blacks used to have above-replacement (2.1 births per woman) rates. Now they’re below-replacement, almost as low as native-born whites and Asians, which are down only a bit. Immigrant birth levels remain above replacement levels among blacks, but only barely above among Hispanics and below among whites and Asians.

One possible consequence: Those often gleeful predictions that whites will soon be a minority will not be realized so soon, or maybe ever. Nor is it clear, as sociologist Richard Alba has suggested, that often-intermarrying Hispanics and Asians will see themselves as aggrieved minorities. They might, as Italians and Poles once did, just blend in.

Also, the sharp drop in Hispanic birth rates, combined with the sharp drop in Hispanic (especially Mexican) immigration post-2007, means a lower proportion of immigrants with low skills competing for jobs with low-skilled Americans. Asian immigrants may outnumber Hispanics and arrive with significantly higher skill levels. So do immigrants from African countries like Nigeria and Ghana. Their capacity for expanding the economy rather than competing for low-skilled jobs may point to unexpected growth. And neither group arrives with grievances rooted in slavery and American racial segregation.

Other familiar trends may be reversed. Demographer Lyman Stone, citing various data, argues that “the decline in fertility is mostly due to declining marriage,” as he writes in IFS Studies. The issue lies with black and lower-income white women having difficulty finding suitable spouses. They might have more success if the recent increase in downscale wages continues.

Similarly, fewer young people would get caught in the trap of incurring huge college debt for worthless degrees (or no degrees at all) if, as the Manhattan Institute’s Aaron Renn suggests, higher education enrollments, already declining, start plunging precipitously around 2025. Might young people who bypass college find constructive jobs and marry and raise families as their counterparts did in the postwar years?

That would be good.