The Baby Boom and Baby Bust

The fertility of American women over the last 200 years has two salient features, portrayed in Figure 1. First, it has declined drastically. The average white woman bore 7 children in 1800. By 1990 this had dropped to just 2. This decline in fertility ran unabated during the 140-year period between 1800 and 1940. Second, fertility showed a surprising recovery between the mid1940s and mid-1960s. The upturn was large, a “baby boom.” Just how large depends upon the concept of fertility used. For example, the number of births per fecund woman increased by 41 percent between 1934 and 1959. Alternatively, the number of realized lifetime births per female was 28 percent higher for a woman born in 1932 (whose average child arrived in 1959) vis-à-vis one born in 1907 (whose average child was born in 1934). The difference between these two numbers suggests that the rise in fertility was compressed in time for two reasons. First, older women had more children. Second, so did younger women. But the high rates of fertility that younger women had early in their lives were not matched by higher rates of fertility later on. This leads to the last point. After the mid 1960s fertility reverted back to trend, or the “baby bust” resumed. Conventional wisdom links the baby boom with the end of the Great Depression and World War II. The popular view is that these traumatic events led to a drop in fertility. Part of the decline in fertility was due to economic hardship or a gloomy outlook about the future, which made it difficult to start a family. Part of it was due to the absence of so many young men, who had gone off to fight the war. After World War II fertility bounced up, as the men returned, the economy boomed, and a general feeling of optimism prevailed. Fertility rose to above-normal levels to make up for lost fertility during the Depression and war years. This * Greenwood: Department of Economics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627 (e-mail: [email protected]. rochester.edu); Seshadri: Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1180 Observatory Dr., Madison, WI 53706 (e-mail: [email protected]); Vandenbrouke: Department of Economics, University of Southern California, 3620 S. Vermont Ave. KAP 324F, Los Angeles, CA 90089 (e-mail: [email protected]). The authors express their appreciation to two referees for useful advice. They also thank Michael Haines, Karen Kopecky, Lee Ohanian, Michael Rolleigh, Aloysius Siow, Nancy Stokey, and Ming Hon Suen for their help. Financial support from the National Science Foundation (award number 0136055) is gratefully acknowledged. 1 The source for the data used is Donald J. Hernandez (1996, Tables 9 and 10). 2 The baby boom in the United States is conventionally dated as occurring between 1946 and 1964. These dates will be questioned in Section V. 3 Note that the average childbearing age was 27, roughly the horizontal distance between the two curves. 4 Surprisingly, there is a dearth of economic theories explaining the baby boom. One well-known theory connecting the Great Depression and World War II to the baby boom is by Richard A. Easterlin (2000). His theory is based on the concept of “relative income.” Fertility is high (low) when families’ material aspirations are low (high) relative to their projections about their lifetime income. On