The United States of America
✨The next six months! ✨
What is coming up for the United States for the next six months?
The US is undeniably going through some turbulent times. One of the biggest and not hyped up challenges the US faces however, is the declining birthrate.
Most of us realize the incredible challenges people face in our societies when it come to raising children - it’s as if everything is made deliberately difficult or purposefully expensive that is absolutely needed, not to mention medical expenses if those need to be incurred. But, I find there is also a spiritual depression rampant in societies of the West, a disconnect from life, a spiritual dis-ease.
Wellesley College writers wrote for Econofact in The Mystery of the Declining US Birth Rate (January 2022), that:
The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes.
They also wrote:
“But something changed around the time of the Great Recession (2007); the birth rate fell precipitously, and it did not recover when the economy improved. Rather, the U.S. birth rate has continued a steady descent. As of 2020, the U.S. birth rate was 55.8 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44, a decline of almost 20 percent from the rate of 69.3 in 2007.
The decline in births cannot readily be explained by changing population composition. The sustained decline in U.S. births since 2007 has been driven by declining births among many demographic groups, rather than by changes in population composition. Births have fallen among women in their early 20s, late 20s, and teens (in fact, the teen birth rate in the U.S. has been falling steadily since the mid-1990s). Births have fallen among white women, Black women, and Hispanic women, with the largest declines among Hispanic women. Births have also fallen among women with and without college degrees and among both married and unmarried women. The population of U.S. women of childbearing age has actually shifted toward groups that tend to have higher birth rates, not lower birth rates, with the exception of a rising share of women of childbearing age being unmarried.
No obvious policy or economic factor can explain much of the decline. The onset of the Great Recession clearly played a role in the early stages of the decline. Beyond that, it is difficult to identify any policy or economic factor that can statistically account for the continued decline. Casual observers have suggested that a variety of potential factors are responsible for the decline, including greater take-up of highly effective contraception, the high cost of raising children, improved occupational opportunities for women, and the high level of student debt carried by young adults. Our research finds little empirical support for these possible explanations. Moreover, none of the measures that have been shown in previous research to have a causal effect on annual birth rates – such as labor market conditions (beyond the Great Recession), certain social policy indicators (such as child support enforcement) or reproductive health policy measures (such as abortion clinic closures) – have changed in ways that can account for the drop in the national birth rate since 2007. “
There was a very slight uptick in the birthrate post covid, however it is insignificant in the overall drop, which is continuing again in 2023:
So what could possibly cause this decline - which is rampant across industrialized “western” societies? China is also experiencing a birth rate decline, evident in this article: “Nestle plans to close an infant formula factory due to China’s plunging birth rate”
All the studies on birth rate and fertility fail to look at one thing which is glaringly obvious to me: the belief and faith in the divinity, value, purpose and desirability of human life.
There is a spiritual disease which is rampant in western societies, and it goes by many names. It’s tendrils are even found in the materialistic versions of new age prosperity spirituality/gospel beloved by so many. This deep spiritual wound underlies the deep divide between nature and man and is represented in the current rise of a specific nature and type of Tech and AI.
How does a low fertility rate affect society? An aging population and no youth to follow can place immense pressure on pension systems, healthcare, and social support services. Governments must allocate more resources to cater to the needs of an aging populace, potentially straining public finances.
The strain can lead to safety-net gaps, a lack of employees, lack of innovation in the workforce, lack of service/care, lack of funds for schools, pensions, etc, right up to housing market crashes. The system as it is now, is dependent on the steady supply of human labour and is unsustainable without it. Where will it come from?
This is one of the many topics brought up in the video on predictions for the United States over the next six months:
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