America has seen increasing diversity and declining birth rates for a long time. Racial minorities made up about 10% of the population in 1950 but account for more than 40% today; the total fertility rate was 3.7 kids per woman in 1960, around 2.1 in 2007, and is about 1.7 today.
A viral new academic working paper by Umit G. Gurun and David H. Solomon argues the two trends may be linked: Perhaps rising diversity is a reason that birth rates are declining. This could be the case, for example, if people tend to marry others of the same race and have more trouble finding partners in diverse places, or if places with higher diversity tend to have lower levels of trust and more social isolation.
The study is an immensely complicated undertaking—much like another study Solomon co-authored linking car-seat mandates to fertility, which I wrote about for this blog in 2020. It could be wrong, and I’ll be discussing some reasons for healthy skepticism in this piece.
But the study presents an interesting new hypothesis and extensively tests that hypothesis against more than a century’s worth of census data on American women, not to mention data from other countries as well. Thus, it should at least inspire a lot more research and discussion on this issue.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Institute for Family Studies
______________________
Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
Photo by SeventyFour/Getty Images
