Speaker 1: Every year, the Center for Disease Control comes out with
Speaker 1: a report on the fertility rate in the United States,
Speaker 1: and to hear the reporting about it, the situation in
Speaker 1: the US is dire. More than three point eight million
Speaker 1: babies were born in the US last year. That's the
Speaker 1: lowest number since the next generation of Americans is getting smaller,
Speaker 1: not in size, but in number. So a mystery to
Speaker 1: researchers is why birth rates haven't increased along with the
Speaker 1: growing economy. So why all the panic, asked Gina Smilek,
Speaker 1: economics reporter who you might remember from episode one, and
Speaker 1: she says, it's because we really need more babies for
Speaker 1: the economy to grow. So basically, economic growth comes from
Speaker 1: just a couple of sources. One of them is population growth,
Speaker 1: the other is predictivity improvements. It's kind of just simple math,
Speaker 1: and I think that makes it nice to think about.
Speaker 1: And at the end of the day, that's kind of
Speaker 1: what it all boils down to. It's how many workers
Speaker 1: do you have available in your economy and how much
Speaker 1: can they produce? The thing is where at this place
Speaker 1: in the global economy where we're not seeing a lot
Speaker 1: of productivity growth anymore, So we're kind of muddling along
Speaker 1: with basically the same old, same old productivity growth much
Speaker 1: slower population growth, especially in advanced economies. In other words,
Speaker 1: women's contributions as mothers are responsible for powering economic growth.
Speaker 1: We don't usually think about it like that, but moms
Speaker 1: are making huge economic contributions. We've been spending the last
Speaker 1: few weeks talking about what motherhood does to women's earnings.
Speaker 1: We know about having kids makes it hard to work
Speaker 1: for pay, which is a drag on women, their families,
Speaker 1: and the economy. But there's also a flip side to that,
Speaker 1: which is because it's so hard to work for pay
Speaker 1: and have kids, many women just aren't having as many kids.
Speaker 1: The difficulty women have balancing children with their careers is
Speaker 1: one reason we're seeing lower fertility rates g S S.
Speaker 1: I think there are a lot of theories out there.
Speaker 1: I think the one that seems most immediately clear is
Speaker 1: that women have come into the labor market in a
Speaker 1: way that they previously weren't. I think more that's clearly
Speaker 1: not the whole story here, because we saw the fertility
Speaker 1: rate rise in the nineties and early two thousands, and
Speaker 1: it's fallen off again, and so I think we can
Speaker 1: attribute the remainder of that to a couple of things.
Speaker 1: One is the economy and the condition that the economy
Speaker 1: is in at any given moment. So, you know, I
Speaker 1: think child care is expensive, tuition is expensive, owning a
Speaker 1: house is expensive. Some of the reasons the fertility rate
Speaker 1: is falling are good, like having more women in the workforce,
Speaker 1: and we've also seen a decline in unintended pregnancies. And
Speaker 1: even lower fertility rates aren't all bad. The u n
Speaker 1: S Extinction report that just came out cited the growing
Speaker 1: population of humans as one of the reasons for shrinking
Speaker 1: populations of just about everything else. But lower fertility rates
Speaker 1: do create economic fallout, and countries facing this problem don't
Speaker 1: have any easy options for dealing with that. I think
Speaker 1: that's always the complicated thing when you hear these stories
Speaker 1: about the declining fertility rate couched as an automatic bat
Speaker 1: because there are good things about a declining fertility rate
Speaker 1: if it's coming for the right reasons. I think at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, though, you still are going
Speaker 1: to have to grapple with the reality that in the
Speaker 1: longer term it is going to reduce your economic potential
Speaker 1: unless you can come up with some other way to
Speaker 1: grow your economic potential. And so unless we all adopt
Speaker 1: much more permissive immigration policies, we are all going to
Speaker 1: eventually face slower population growth or shrinking populations. And you
Speaker 1: could do things like better train your existing workforce, get
Speaker 1: more people into jobs deep in your capital stock. But
Speaker 1: I don't think we're seeing a lot of active policy
Speaker 1: making around that yet, and that is going to have
Speaker 1: to change if people want to see the kind of
Speaker 1: growth that previous generations have enjoyed. When Gina says lower
Speaker 1: fertility rates are leading to slower economic growth, it doesn't
Speaker 1: just mean we're going to be less excited about the
Speaker 1: next g d P report. It means less prosperity for everyone.
Speaker 1: It means that populations will get older on average and
Speaker 1: have fewer young people to take on the social and
Speaker 1: financial costs of their care. And it means a potential
Speaker 1: global economic slowdown. When you look at the world, you know,
Speaker 1: what of the population like? Where is our place? Like?
Speaker 1: Where is our value? Deserve people for equal work? Is
Speaker 1: the time to make America make again? Last year, the
Speaker 1: US population grew by only zero point seven percent. The
Speaker 1: lowest growth rate is the Great Depression. There's in a
Speaker 1: single industry where women aren't punished for appropriating others are declining.
Speaker 1: Fertility rates are the result of women's success, their choices
Speaker 1: to pursue careers earlier, bare children later, oftentimes on their own.
Speaker 1: When women are financially stronger, it's good for their families,
Speaker 1: it's put money into the economy, into markets. It's good
Speaker 1: for everybody. And that becomes a problem when you're relying
Speaker 1: upon younger generations to pay for many of the social
Speaker 1: programs of older generations, of which there are now more
Speaker 1: people welcome to the paycheck. I'm Rebecca Greenfield. Having kids
Speaker 1: is hugely important to the economy, but we don't treat
Speaker 1: it that way. When women take time off from their
Speaker 1: jobs or work fewer hours to raise their kids, we
Speaker 1: view that as a reason to pay them less. But
Speaker 1: having and raising kids is work. It contributes to the GDP.
Speaker 1: It's a job that women are doing for free, and
Speaker 1: we penalize them for it. Low fertility rates aren't just
Speaker 1: a problem in the US right now. What we see
Speaker 1: around the world, mostly in advanced economies, is that women
Speaker 1: aren't having as many babies as they used to. Countries
Speaker 1: need couples to make two children to replace themselves. This
Speaker 1: is known as the replacement rate. The ideal rate is
Speaker 1: around two In places like Japan, Spain, Germany all over,
Speaker 1: they're not hitting that number. The individual reasons for not
Speaker 1: having children may be different, but for a lot of
Speaker 1: them it boils down to a decision between having kids
Speaker 1: and having a career, and if you want one, you
Speaker 1: may not want the other. I just never really had
Speaker 1: ambition towards having raising kids. I've always felt like in
Speaker 1: order to have the career that I want, it would
Speaker 1: have to be one or the other. I see my
Speaker 1: peers around me who have kids and how they control
Speaker 1: their life, and I'm kind of happy that I don't
Speaker 1: have that sort of control in place. I don't have
Speaker 1: kids because being a mom costs an enormous amount. I
Speaker 1: don't have kids because I don't feel financially secure enough
Speaker 1: we pay mentally emotionally, I worry about like missing out
Speaker 1: on the experience of having the bonds that women have
Speaker 1: around being mothers. It costs a lot physically, professionally, financially.
Speaker 1: There seems to be more ability for me to do
Speaker 1: things for work that my peers cannot because of children,
Speaker 1: you know, And I might feel differently if I could
Speaker 1: be a dad. Because the global economy demands women have children,
Speaker 1: countries often try to engineer it so women make that choice.
Speaker 1: In the US, we have child tax credits. Japan has
Speaker 1: experimented with giving couples one time cash payouts to have kids.
Speaker 1: The Italian government promoted a national Fertility Day. And then
Speaker 1: there's China. The low fertility rate there has been called
Speaker 1: a crisis. By some estimates. Women in China have between
Speaker 1: one point two and one point eight children each, below
Speaker 1: the number needed to sustain a growing economy and to
Speaker 1: support its rapidly aging population. China is a case study
Speaker 1: and how hard it is to get people to have
Speaker 1: more babies. China this morning is preparing to implement one
Speaker 1: of its most sweeping social changes in the last thirty
Speaker 1: five years. The government will allow married couples to have
Speaker 1: two kids instead of just one. This move comes as
Speaker 1: China grapples with an aging workforce and gender and balance.
Speaker 1: Since the nineteen eighties, China has told its citizens how
Speaker 1: many children they're allowed to have, beginning with the one
Speaker 1: child policy. In the nineteen sixties and seventies, the world
Speaker 1: was experiencing a population boom. The number of people was
Speaker 1: on track to double in around thirty years. Coming out
Speaker 1: of the Cultural Revolution, China was dealing with poverty, food shortages,
Speaker 1: and hunger. More people meant more mouths to feed well.
Speaker 1: The understanding was extremely simplistic. The idea is that if
Speaker 1: you have fewer birth born next year, you do not
Speaker 1: need to feed them. That was long Fun, a professor
Speaker 1: in the sociology department at the University of California, Irvine
Speaker 1: and one of the world's leading experts on Chinese demographics.
Speaker 1: The actual one child policy was not so simple. It
Speaker 1: only applied to members of China's Han ethnic majority. Some
Speaker 1: couples could apply to have more than one child if
Speaker 1: they lived in rural areas or if they were only children,
Speaker 1: but for the most part, you got one kid. The
Speaker 1: one child policy made the existing demographic trend more extreme.
Speaker 1: By the late nineteen seventies, women were already starting to
Speaker 1: have fewer children. Improvements in science meant there were lower
Speaker 1: infant mortality rates and more women were working too. Signs
Speaker 1: of trouble first started showing in when a population survey
Speaker 1: found the fertility rate was below the replacement rate. Not
Speaker 1: only did fewer women want lots of kids. Most of
Speaker 1: the ones who still did want them weren't allowed to
Speaker 1: have them. Women were forced to have abortions, There were
Speaker 1: forced serialization procedures, and because girl babies were seen as
Speaker 1: less desirable than boy babies, tens of thousands of them
Speaker 1: were abandoned or put up for adoption. Today there are
Speaker 1: thirty million more men in China than there are women,
Speaker 1: and the few women that there are were raised to
Speaker 1: be independent. There are is at least one I intended
Speaker 1: positive impact for women in China, that is many only
Speaker 1: children girls. Because they were only children, they received the
Speaker 1: totality of their parents investment in education, and so you
Speaker 1: have a young gin oration of women who are as
Speaker 1: well educated, and that has multiple effects in terms of
Speaker 1: their pursuit of their career and in terms of their
Speaker 1: desire to live independent life. Now population growth is down
Speaker 1: to less than a half percent, and by percent of
Speaker 1: the population will be over the age of sixty five.
Speaker 1: By then growth is projected to slow to zero and
Speaker 1: even turn negative. The ripple effects of all of this
Speaker 1: are already being felt. Because of this small birst cohort
Speaker 1: in the ES and the number of young people entering
Speaker 1: the label force has been going down, and it is
Speaker 1: going to continue to go down. And that also means
Speaker 1: that you're not going to have as many young couples
Speaker 1: who are gonna get married, and then to extend, you're
Speaker 1: not going to have many new babies because there are
Speaker 1: few parents, and you can think about the consumption impact
Speaker 1: where you would not need as many new housing units.
Speaker 1: So that effect has already started. And that's what China
Speaker 1: is dealing with now, a smaller, rising generation that's consuming less,
Speaker 1: producing less, and still not having kids. So in s
Speaker 1: facing this new demographic reality, China relax the one child
Speaker 1: policy and for the first time it allowed any couple
Speaker 1: to have two children. One Chinese government adopted to China
Speaker 1: policy in lots of people were very excited about this
Speaker 1: new change because one China policy has been in China
Speaker 1: for so long. The change itself seems really significant, and
Speaker 1: when it comes down to the impact of that policy,
Speaker 1: like how many new baby have been born in the
Speaker 1: past two years, the numbers are not that significant at all.
Speaker 1: That was on don Ley. She works in Bloomberg's Beijing bureau.
Speaker 1: She says many women in China don't want to have
Speaker 1: more than one kid. They say they want to focus
Speaker 1: on their careers. They say it's too expensive, and they
Speaker 1: say that they don't have enough help. Beverly Chen, she's
Speaker 1: in her med twenties. She was an architecture designer. She
Speaker 1: graduate from one of the best universities in China and
Speaker 1: then she settled down in hans Your wits to her husband.
Speaker 1: When Beverly had her first child, she stopped working to
Speaker 1: take care of him because she and her husband couldn't
Speaker 1: afford a nanny and the government doesn't provide any support.
Speaker 1: But she wasn't happy staying home joker. Raising a child
Speaker 1: at home is a tedious task and can be very
Speaker 1: challenging sometimes since I don't have the help needed, staying
Speaker 1: at home and not working disconnected me from the outside.
Speaker 1: That's Beverly. She and her husband actually co write little
Speaker 1: architectural firm, so when she had the baby, her husband
Speaker 1: showed her all the workloade so she can focus on
Speaker 1: the parenting part. That was how they decided to divide
Speaker 1: the labor in the house, and that's also one of
Speaker 1: the reason why she felt her value was undercut. The
Speaker 1: Chinese government desperately wants people like Beverly, educated married working
Speaker 1: women to have more kids and they've done a lot
Speaker 1: more than relax the one child policy. They've done some
Speaker 1: of the usual things like offer paid parental leave, tax breaks,
Speaker 1: and housing subsidies, but they've also gone way beyond that.
Speaker 1: The state run newspaper runs editorials about the best age
Speaker 1: for women to get pregnant. The government even sponsors dating
Speaker 1: meetups for young singles. In February, Beverly made what she
Speaker 1: called the hardest decision of her life. She sent her
Speaker 1: son to live with her in laws and her husband's
Speaker 1: hometown three hours away so that she could go back
Speaker 1: to work. She only sees her son twice a month.
Speaker 1: Having another kid isn't something she and her husband want,
Speaker 1: but even if they did, the logistics would be too
Speaker 1: complicated for them to manage. That is completely not on
Speaker 1: her agenda for now. She doesn't have but the help
Speaker 1: she needs to bring up this child. She's not happy
Speaker 1: with her circumstances at this moment, and if she's not
Speaker 1: happy as a mother, that would definitely affect her son
Speaker 1: in some kind of way. And also, she's very young
Speaker 1: at the age of you know, she has a lot
Speaker 1: of potential to do things that she want in her life.
Speaker 1: Stuff that she wanted to achieve with her knowledge, with
Speaker 1: her education and her degree. Sending her sound to her
Speaker 1: in laws. It's the only visible way that she can
Speaker 1: find at this moment. Women have too many reasons not
Speaker 1: to have kids, and those reasons go beyond how many
Speaker 1: they're allowed to have. Take Jenny John. She didn't want
Speaker 1: us to record her, but when we talked to her
Speaker 1: in Beijing, she said she has a thriving career as
Speaker 1: a tech executive, a husband, a great apartment, and one baby.
Speaker 1: But that's it for her. She's done. I know it
Speaker 1: sounds ridiculous for someone whose household income is around three
Speaker 1: d thousand per year, but she still complaints about her story.
Speaker 1: Cannot support another child because she needs to pay her mortgage,
Speaker 1: she needs to support her parents, and also she wants
Speaker 1: to get the best resource for her daughter. Because of
Speaker 1: the one child policy, there are now generations of only
Speaker 1: children who have to take care of their aging parents
Speaker 1: on top of any kids of their own. That's a
Speaker 1: big burden, especially for women in China who have been
Speaker 1: raised with the belief that they have a duty to
Speaker 1: work just like men. Dating back to the foundation of
Speaker 1: People's Republic or China, that was the slogan of women
Speaker 1: can hold half of the Sky was actually coined by
Speaker 1: the Communist Party itself. All of them wants to achieve
Speaker 1: something in their life and that won't be interfered by
Speaker 1: the desire of having more children. For a lot of
Speaker 1: Chinese women, having more children is threatening their ability to
Speaker 1: keep their jobs. That's what happened to Jane chen So.
Speaker 1: Jane had a master degree in journalism. She went back
Speaker 1: to Situan after graduation from our grad school, and then
Speaker 1: she found a job. Her supervisor gave her a quite
Speaker 1: hard time when she had her first child. On my
Speaker 1: supervisor said a woman would inevitably focus more on a
Speaker 1: family after having a baby. Well, just really actually linked out.
Speaker 1: She always thought I invested more energy into my family
Speaker 1: after having a baby. There's this tension. It's in the
Speaker 1: country's national interest for women to have more children, but
Speaker 1: it's in the employer's interest for them not to have
Speaker 1: more children, or for them to not hire women with children.
Speaker 1: Now that the one child policy has been relaxed, companies
Speaker 1: are more likely to discriminate against women because they're afraid
Speaker 1: that more kids will distract women from their jobs. China
Speaker 1: has laws that protect women from discrimination but enforcement is weak,
Speaker 1: so employers are still getting away with it. Jane's supervisor's
Speaker 1: attitude didn't make her think she should cut back on work.
Speaker 1: She worked just as many hours as she did before
Speaker 1: and says the numbers show her job performance was better
Speaker 1: than before she had a baby. It did make her
Speaker 1: think she should cut back on having kids. Should the
Speaker 1: whole what's your mill? Don't you need too that? Having
Speaker 1: another child is definitely not on my checklist. I'm just
Speaker 1: getting accustomed to the new job and I don't have
Speaker 1: the extra energy to take care of another newborn. I
Speaker 1: won't consider that option unless my son wants a sibling.
Speaker 1: China is considering what else they can do to persuade
Speaker 1: women to have more kids, including ending child restrictions altogether,
Speaker 1: but it could also pressure women in other ways, like
Speaker 1: limiting their access to abortions and divorce. The big question
Speaker 1: in all of this is why didn't anyone predict this
Speaker 1: disastrous population growth slow down before the policy went into effect.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't have taken complicated modeling to know that eventually the
Speaker 1: one child policy was going to cause a demographic crisis,
Speaker 1: So how did the Chinese government not see this coming?
Speaker 1: One fund says they did from the very beginning of
Speaker 1: the policy. Uh, it was seen as a policy of necessity,
Speaker 1: not of choice, from the very beginning when they announced
Speaker 1: the policy. Try to sell this to the public. They
Speaker 1: recognize there will be there would be negative consequences, but
Speaker 1: they also saw those were issues that would only come
Speaker 1: up thirty forty years down the boat. So they actually
Speaker 1: set in thirty years China would be a different place,
Speaker 1: then we could have a different policy. So there were
Speaker 1: anticipation of negative consequences. But as politicians, they want to
Speaker 1: kick the can down the road, so they want other
Speaker 1: people to pick it up, which is now. So that's
Speaker 1: where we are today, with a birth rate way below
Speaker 1: the replacement rate and with none of the attempts to
Speaker 1: fix it working. And it's women who are now stuck
Speaker 1: with the entire burden of fixing this problem. That's essentially
Speaker 1: not their fault. You know, the demographic reality has changed,
Speaker 1: but the mentality, I would say it's a sexist mentality,
Speaker 1: the status mentality has not changed. That is, when birds
Speaker 1: control needed to be exercised, it was job of women,
Speaker 1: so they shouldered physically disproportionate burden during that process. And
Speaker 1: now there's this concern for low fertility, and you have
Speaker 1: policymakers and some public opinion leaders would be turning this
Speaker 1: around and to make this a women's burden, a women's
Speaker 1: job as well. The causes of China's and pending population
Speaker 1: crisis may be unique, but countries around the world are
Speaker 1: struggling with the same problems. And it's not just about
Speaker 1: getting women to have more kids. A lot of people,
Speaker 1: women and men, don't want to have to choose between
Speaker 1: having a career and having a family. They want both,
Speaker 1: and if everybody who wanted to could have both, that'd
Speaker 1: be ideal, not just for women but for the economy.
Speaker 1: Countries do all these things to try to manipulate women
Speaker 1: into having babies, but there's another option. We can start
Speaker 1: treating motherhood like what it is, a job. There's one
Speaker 1: country that has relatively high fertility rates ant high workforce
Speaker 1: participation rates among women. It's the land of the lage
Speaker 1: Papas Sweden. Families in Sweden get a monthly allowance from
Speaker 1: the government for each kid until the kid hit sixteen.
Speaker 1: For women, men between the ages of and fifty four
Speaker 1: in Sweden work but they're also having more babies on
Speaker 1: average than women in China and here in the US.
Speaker 1: Next week on the Paycheck, the moment in history when
Speaker 1: the United States almost had it all figured out. There's
Speaker 1: first aid facilities there, so if your kid is sick,
Speaker 1: your kid is taking care of Your kid gets inoculations.
Speaker 1: They had art classes, there were outdoor recreational activities. They
Speaker 1: had nutritionists on staff so that your child was getting
Speaker 1: a well balanced meal. Thanks for listening to the Paycheck.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, please head on over to
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to great review and subscribe.
Speaker 1: The show was hosted and reported by me Rebecca Greenfield
Speaker 1: and reported by Jillian Goodman. This episode was edited by
Speaker 1: Jillian Goodman and produced by Liz Smith. We also had
Speaker 1: production help from Francesca Levy, Janet Paskin, Anthegat, Sic, Laura Carlson,
Speaker 1: and tofor Foreheads. Our original music is by Leo Sidron.
Speaker 1: Catherine Virginia did the illustrations on our show page, which
Speaker 1: you can find at Bloomberg dot com. Slash the Paycheck
Speaker 1: and thanks to all the women who spoke to us
Speaker 1: for this episode. Francesco Levie is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.