Some will blame the quality of the schools. Others will cite the expensive cost of housing. These reasons are true and also beside the point.
When Boston’s public schools open on Sept. 5 there will probably be fewer children than ever showing up.
Consider these startling numbers: In 1980, the city’s population was 563,000 and there were about 85,000 kids in Boston’s schools. Today, the city’s population has grown by 12 percent to 630,000. All things being equal, the number of schoolchildren also should have risen about 12 percent — to 95,000. Instead, the number of students this year will be about 58,000 — 37,000 fewer than you’d expect it to be.
Some will blame the quality of the schools. Others will cite the expensive cost of housing. And then there are the demographic shifts: increasingly the city — with its nightlife and restaurants — appeals to younger singles and older empty nesters and not to families with kids.
All of these reasons are true and all of them are also beside the point. This isn’t a Boston problem or even a Massachusetts problem. The birth rate is declining across the nation.
And this isn’t even just a national problem. It’s worldwide. The “birth dearth” is a global phenomenon — a “crisis” in the eyes of some. Crisis? Maybe it’s really great news.
Everyone from Thomas Malthus to Paul Ehrlich, author of ”The Population Bomb,” has predicted that human population would continue to grow endlessly upward, with horrifying effects — starvation, wars, environmental destruction. For decades China — seemingly attuned to those worries — mandated a one-child policy, punishing those who had more. Dan Brown’s novel ”Inferno” imagined a scenario where his antihero tried — and successfully managed — to infect the world with a drug to dramatically curb fertility. And of course, Marvel’s Thanos — worried about galactic overpopulation — in one fell “Snap!” killed off half of all life in the universe.
All of them were wrong. The Earth’s population isn’t inexorably climbing. The so-called “replacement rate” is about 2.2 — in other words, one woman should have about 2.2 children to keep the population stable (the fraction accounts for those who never make it to child-bearing age or can’t have children at all).
In the United States, according to the CIA (apparently its spies are everywhere), we’re at 1.84. China is down to 1.55. India — once teeming with seemingly too many babies — is at 2.03. The United Nations now figures world population will peak at 10.4 billion in the 2080s. Others, such as the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, think the peak will happen even sooner.
Why the population implosion? It’s not just JD Vance’s fears of “childless cat ladies.” Nor is it simply that mandating seatbelts and car seats makes it impossible to have a gaggle of kids (no more piling the kids on top of each other). And while the lack of affordable child care is lamentable, that’s hardly what drives the decision to have a child (in fact, wealthier women — who presumably can better afford child care — have fewer children than those who are poorer).
In fact, it turns out that when women are educated, when they have opportunities to be more than just mothers, the desire to have lots of children goes away. A study reported by the World Bank, for example, found that “women with eight years of schooling would have a fertility rate 53 percentage points lower than those with no schooling at all.” That explains China and India. (It also explains why impoverished and uneducated nations such as Niger and Angola still have extraordinarily high birth rates.) And that explains Boston — and the United States — as well.
Does a shrinking population pose challenges? Sure. There are fears that fewer younger people won’t be able to support the pensions and Social Security payments being made to a large number of older folks. Economic growth could slow. There probably won’t be enough service members for the military.
I suspect these are all manageable. People and markets adjust to changing circumstances. Retirement ages may change; older people may work longer; AI can boost economic productivity; technology increasingly dominates warfare.
And here in Boston, rather than worrying about fewer children in the schools, perhaps we’ll be able to do a better job of educating the ones who remain.
This column appeared in The Boston Globe on September 3, 2024 at https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/09/03/opinion/boston-schools-fewer-children-birth-dearth.