by Lyman Stone (@lymanstoneky)
With fertility falling around the world, many commentators and governments are scrambling to figure out why and what can be done. A recent Financial Times article, which heavily cited previous work at IFS and replicated some of our analyses, correctly pointed the finger at the main culprit the decline in fertility: falling marriage rates. Declining marriage is the proximate cause of falling fertility in many societies today.
This surprises many people, because, in the public’s imagination, nonmarital childbearing is running rampant, while marriage is becoming a thing of the past. In short, these impressions are wrong. In the U.S., the share of births born to unmarried parents is gradually drifting downwards these days. But more to the point, far from being a thing of the past, marriage remains overwhelmingly predictive of fertility behavior. Married people make more babies, and this is true all around the world, as we showed in a 2022 report.
