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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. This year-long series began in July on the day that WNYC turned 100 years old, July 8th. We appreciate all the nice comments we've been getting about many of the segments being interesting and educational and relevant to today. We'll try to keep it so for the rest of the series as we enter the new year with things number 54 and 55; 100 years of birth rates, and 100 years of causes of death in the United States. Birth rates today, causes of death next week. These are related, obviously, and both have relevance to culture and politics and economics today.

On birth rates, we know the slur from our incoming vice president, calling some Americans "childless cat ladies," right? The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that gave us Project 2025, also gave us a critique of American culture last month that referred to "the harmful overconsumption of schooling" pushing the average age of childbearing later and the number of total births down. Also, Elon Musk has said, "A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far." Those worldviews are coming into power, and they connect with a religious and cultural right push against abortion rights, and for a return to traditional gender roles. And coupled with the anti-immigration movement, it also becomes a campaign to mostly have more white babies.

More people going to college these days, and more women going to college than men these days, and you get the Heritage Foundation writers coming out against what they call "overconsumption of education" along with these other culture war trends, and that's where we are. The grain of truth here is that the US Population is growing more slowly than in the past, and people are living longer, so the number of senior citizens is likely to pass the number of children in the country soon for the first time ever. And that could cause national debt issues as fewer workers are supporting more retired people on Social Security and Medicare. But making this less of a problem is the United States history of high immigration rates, so you see the policy tension there if the same people are pushing for more population growth and less immigration.

But all that is a story of the moment. That's context for which this segment will try to inform you. Let's look at 100 years of US birth rates and population growth and see how they have changed and changed society or changed with changes in society. Our guest for this is someone who watches these trends for a living. It's Mark Mather, a demographer. He is associate vice president for US programs at the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit that specializes in US and global population data to help inform policymakers. Mark, thanks for joining our 100 Years of 100 Things series. Welcome to WNYC.

Mark Mather: Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: And not to bury the lead, I'm looking at a chart that says the population growth rate was more than 20% between 1900 and 1910, it was then in the teens from 1910 through 1990, and it's been in the single digits here in the 21st century in this country. Another way to state it, in the decade after 1900, the population grew by 21% just in that decade, according to the Census Bureau. In the most recent decade, the population growth rate was only about 7%. So my first question to you is, what was going on between 1900 and 1910 that the country added 21% more residents?

Mark Mather: Yes. Early in the 20th century, we had pretty high immigration levels combined with pretty high fertility levels. Just as an anecdote, my grandmother was the youngest of 14 children. She was born in 1903, but it was not uncommon at the turn of the 20th century to see families that had four, five, six children, and a lot of that was really driven by people. You know, it was cultural norms at the time, expectations for women. There were expectations that you got married at a young age, and when you get married at a young age, you basically are extending the time period when you can have children, since most births do take place within marriage. If you combine that with, contraceptive use was really not a thing 100 years ago, that contributes to very high fertility rates.

Brian Lehrer: Also, infant death rate then compared to now, or not so much?

Mark Mather: Infant death rates were much higher at the time, sure, and that would be a contributing factor. Especially if you're living out in a rural area, there might be an expectation that you have lots of kids, expecting that some of them may not survive. We had things like the Spanish flu back then, there were more concerns about public health, and we didn't have all of the modern medicine that we have today.

Brian Lehrer: Taking yet another step back, so many of our topics in this 100 Years series seem to trace massive change to the start of the industrial era, which we can say began in the 1800s and really took off in the early 1900s. Does mass production and moving away from farming for much of the population relate to birth rates, how many kids women or couples were having on average?

Mark Mather: That is one of the potential explanations. Starting in the 1920s, we started to see birth rates decline, even before-- A lot of people think that the Great Depression was what really drove a sharp decline in birth rates in the 1930s, but fertility rates were declining by the mid-20s. Some people do think that's linked to urbanization, so people moving into cities. You're no longer working at home on the farm, you're working outside the home, so raising kids may have just become a lot more difficult and maybe more expensive for families, and so maybe they had fewer of them.

Brian Lehrer: How much demographic difference was there in that era, let's say the first few decades of the 20th century, based on income, or race, or any other factor, when you look at birth rates?

Mark Mather: We don't have really great data on birth rates for different population groups back then. We've got good data probably mid 20th century on, but we do know that there were lower birth rates in cities, for example, and people who are more highly educated tend to have lower birth rates. There are some patterns that have persisted over time. We don't know as much about particular population groups.

Brian Lehrer: And that was the Ellis Island era, so, as you've already mentioned, immigration played a role in that early 20th century population boom. Was the high population growth rate of the early 20th century considered a national asset? I mean, at the end of the first decade of the 20th century, after that big spurt in 1900 to 1910, there were still only 92 million people in the United States. Today we have 341 million. Was the high population growth rate of that time considered a national asset or a national problem, and did it play into the backlash against the Ellis Island era that led to the 1924 Immigration Act that mostly shut down immigration to the United States for decades?

Mark Mather: Yes, it's a good question. I don't think that people really viewed the overall population size or growth as an issue at the time, and they probably took the fertility levels and population growth for granted. It had been relatively high for many decades. I think that the backlash that you're talking about against immigrants was probably more based on economic concerns: Are immigrants coming in and competing for jobs? There was probably some element of racism, and at the time, there was a eugenics movement that was happening in a lot of places in the world, including the United States. Those are the factors that I've seen researchers point to in terms of the quotas that were put in place to really dramatically restrict immigration starting in the 1920s.

Brian Lehrer: Did the Great Depression in the 1930s have an impact on birth rates?

Mark Mather: We definitely saw fertility rates decline sharply in the 1930s, and I think it does have to do with people's optimism for the future. There just weren't many jobs, unemployment rates were high, so-- Yes, if people aren't confident about their future, they are less likely to be getting married and having kids.

Brian Lehrer: Confidence in the future, but also just affordability of the present, I imagine as well. I do see in that decade-by-decade Census Bureau chart I was looking at that there was a noticeable dip in in the 1930s. By the way, when we use the term fertility rates, is that the same as birth rates, or do the two terms have slightly different meanings?

Mark Mather: Yes, when I'm talking about fertility, and when demographers talk about fertility, they're usually referring to something called the total fertility rate, which is essentially the average number of births per woman. Right now, we're at about 1.6 births per woman. That's the expected number of births an average woman may have over her lifetime, over her reproductive of years, which is different from birth rates, which are typically just the total number of births per 1,000 women or 1,000 women of reproductive age.

Brian Lehrer: Now, listeners, as usual in our 100 Years segments, we invite your oral history calls. Maybe for today on this 100 years of birth rates or fertility rates and population growth in the US, how many kids are you having compared to your parents or any earlier generations in your family, and why? How many kids are you having, or did you have if you're done, compared to your parents or earlier generations in your family, and why? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text for Mark Mather, demographer, associate vice president for US programs at the Population Reference Bureau in this 100 Years of 100 Things series. Moving forward on the timeline, after World War II, we get to the era we call the baby boom. As we all know, it's the people born from just after World War II, 1946 until about 1964. Funny enough, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were two of the first baby boomers, they were both born in '46. Was there actually a baby boom in historical terms, Mark, or just compared to the war years when births did go down?

Mark Mather: Birth rates-- the fertility rate was definitely high during those years, and it's seen as an anomaly. It was definitely high relative to those very low fertility rates that you saw in the 1930s, but even before that, rates were lower than they were in the 1950s. We peaked at over 3.5 births per woman in the mid to late 1950s, so it was a very unusual time with really extraordinarily high fertility rates.

Brian Lehrer: The population growth rate then takes a substantial dip between the 1960 census to the 1970 census. Or put another way, the US population grew by 18% in the 1950s, but as the baby boom ended only by 13% in the 1960s, what changed?

Mark Mather: I'm going to point to that optimism that people had about the future. Again, it really started to fade in the 1960s. We had the 1973 oil crisis, sometimes called the oil shock of 1973/74, very high energy prices, fuel shortages, so a lot of demographers and others point to the economic crisis at the time, but I think college attendance also plays a role. We had a pretty significant increase in college attendance in the 1970s, so for that reason, we had more people who were probably postponing marriage and having kids because they were pursuing degrees.

Brian Lehrer: A listener writes, "Haha, politicians complaining about birth rates. I live in Brooklyn. My husband and I make a decent living and are comfortable. I'm 32, I wanted to start a family this year, but with childcare and rent taking 100% of my salary before any other expenses, I think raising a kid in Brooklyn will bankrupt me," so there's a little current context from one listener. Listeners, we're going to take a break. I see we have some interesting other oral history texts and phone calls coming in, and we will take this timeline up to the present and the present politics of birth or fertility rates and immigration with Mark Mather from the Population Reference Bureau and you, 212-433-WNYC. Stay tuned.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue in topic 54 in our 100 Years of 100 Things series. Today, 100 years of birth rates and population growth in the United States with Mark Mather, vice president for US programs at the Population Reference Bureau. We're inviting your oral history calls on how many kids are you having compared to your parents or earlier generations in your family? As we know, birth rates are declining in the United states in recent decades. 212-433-WNYC. Let's take a call right now from Reuben in Brooklyn. Reuben, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Reuben: Hi. Me and my wife decided to have one child. My parents had two, my grandparents had three children each. And our major motivating factor has been climate change. You know, what we see as the sort of certain threat of a changing climate and the add-on effects that that's going to have seemingly, the coming refugee crisis, the shortages that we can predict, and sort of concordantly with that, the rise of fascism and other radical right-wing ideologies in this country. It seems pretty certain that the world we're going to be bringing up our child in is going to be tougher. He's going to suffer more than we did, and it doesn't seem right to bring in more than one. We had our doubts about having even one for those reasons, but we decided for personal reasons to have one.

Brian Lehrer: Reuben, thank you very much. Interesting story. I can see a lot of heads nodding out there like, "Yes, kind of, me too." Maybe Gabby in Montclair is one of those. Gabby, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in.

Gabby: Thanks for having me. I am a millennial who is choosing to only have one child, which no one in my family has done before. My boomer parents are very confused by it and encouraging me to have another, but my husband and I are only having one because we think that one is very manageable. It fits with our lifestyle, we can afford it, and we don't really have to change much. But if we were to have more, then we wouldn't be able to do the things that we love to do with our children. I feel like our old parents' generation just had kids because that's just what you do. But we have said to ourselves, what would we do if we had more? We couldn't do it, so there you go.

Brian Lehrer: There you go. Gabby, thank you very much. One more in this set. Ellen in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Ellen.

Ellen: Hi. How are you doing?

Brian Lehrer: Good. Happy New Year.

Ellen: Good. Yes, Happy New Year. In my family, it seems to track exactly what you're talking about, which is that my grandparents on one side came from a family of 14, and on the other side came from a family of 7. Then my parents, all of the cousins all had, bizarrely, three children, and now all of the cousins are only having two, one, or none. I myself only had one, and it just seems that there's lots of reasons for that. I think my generation certainly, women worked. I worked, or I work, and I didn't have kids until late. Also, I live in Manhattan, and it's just not doable for-- I mean, I suppose if you got tons of money, but it's not doable, or very hard to be doable to have more than one kid at this point.

Brian Lehrer: Ellen, thank you very much. Mark Mather, back to the timeline, and as it relates to those callers, we left off in the 1970s, population growth rate continues to go down-- another couple of points in the '70s, another couple of points in the '80s. To what the callers have raised, particularly Ellen just there in the last call, how much is that from increasing gender equality in the workplace and more women going to college?

Mark Mather: I think that's probably the number one reason. More women going to college, delaying marriage so they can start careers, that seems to be one of the key factors. There's also been fewer births outside of marriage, especially among teens, and most people would think that's a good thing. Contraceptive use, obviously much greater now than it was a generation, two generations ago. There's also this broader cultural shift so that it's okay for young people to not get married and not start having kids at a young age. The culture has changed, and people feel like they have more options today than they did maybe a generation ago.

Brian Lehrer: The population growth rate does rebound to 13% in the 1990s, up from under 10%. Is that because the effects of the looser immigration laws of the 1960s are really starting to bear population fruit in the '90s?

Mark Mather: Yes, that's exactly what's happening. The fertility rates really didn't change much in the 1990s. They were quite stable at around 2 or 2.1 births per woman, but we had this relatively young population in the US-- we still have a pretty young population. And when you've got a young population, it creates what demographers call population momentum, because you've got lots of young people. Because of historical immigration, we had lots of young people who start families, and that contributes to population growth.

Brian Lehrer: Maria in Sea Bright, I think, is going to mention one thing in the decades that we've been talking about that hasn't come up yet, in the '60s and '70s and '80s and '90s, starting in the '60s. Maria, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Maria: Yes. Nobody has mentioned the pill. It was big in the '60s. It was the reason why all of us didn't have to get pregnant. Also, we were told in the '60s that there were too many people in the world, and that if we were good citizens, we would only have two, and so I had two. My mother was the first of nine, I was the first of eight, and I had two. Today, a lot of my grandchildren, and now I have great grandchildren, it's okay if they don't want to get married. And the boys have no interest in marriage, period, so I don't know what's going on, but it's certainly changed.

Brian Lehrer: Maria, thank you for that oral history. She mentions the pill. More effective birth control, I imagine, you would agree is a historical factor. But she also mentioned the concern about overpopulating the earth, and we also have a text to that effect. Listener asks, "Could you discuss the dangers of overpopulation versus low fertility and birth rates in relation to the survival of this country, and in fact, the species?" And certainly, Mark, if you look back over the last, I don't know, 50, 60 years, people used to talk about the population bomb, right? Certainly, globally, and to some degree in this country. Now people seem to be talking more about the risks of not having enough babies here and in other countries, so why did that change?

Mark Mather: Yes, the population bomb-- You know, it's interesting when you look at environmental factors, because climate can affect population, obviously, but population can also affect climate. And so overpopulation, combined with the types of consumption levels that we have in the United States, I think is key. As demographers, we're not just looking at population, but we're looking at how people are using resources. I mean, that's what really matters in terms of the impact on the environment. The caller had a great point that there are more people who are paying attention to the potential effect of having two kids instead of one kid. What's going to be the impact on the environment in their community? And so, yes, it raises a really good point.

Brian Lehrer: Can you talk for just a second about the US gravy boom, if you will, fewer births and older people living longer in the context of other industrialized countries? I have an article here, for example, for New Year's Day called Japan's Plans to Tackle Population Crisis in 2025. So where does the US fit in?

Mark Mather: Japan is a great kind of test case. The world is looking to Japan to see how they handle their population aging. It is currently the oldest population in the world, and if you've noticed, the population of Japan has not disappeared, the economy has not tanked. I think it's a good case study to show that population aging can be managed. The United States is not there yet, but with the right policies in place, I think it's something that we can deal with.

Brian Lehrer: Your article from September '23 looks ahead to the next 25 years. We see the number of seniors surpassing the number of kids for the first time in US history, and you kind of have an opposite take on immigration from what the national conversation has been, right? This election, as we know, was turned to some degree on, do we have too much immigration right now, at least illegal immigration? And yet you as a demographer seem to say we need immigration to keep the worker to seniors ratio, to keep the number of caregivers to seniors ratio in balance in this country, yes?

Mark Mather: Yes, at the national level. I realize that there are challenges at the local level. Sometimes when you've got too much population growth too fast, there are maybe some cultural-- There's some cultural backlash when you've got lots of immigrants coming in for the first time. But if you think nationally the US population would really be stagnant if it were not for immigration. And in the future, if fertility rates stay the way they are now and we continue to age as a population, immigration is really going to be the only way that we're going to fill the jobs that are going to be needed to keep the economy running in the future.

Brian Lehrer: I don't know if you as a demographer have a take on the politics and the ideology of this. This will be the last question, but how do you think of all this as a demographer? I mean, I could see a "two things are true at the same time" narrative here. On the one hand, we have this conservative agenda for more traditional gender roles, no abortion rights and low immigration, all of which adds up to more white babies as a religious or white nationalist agenda. On the other hand, we will have pressure on the national budget and on a caregiver to elderly person in need of care ratio, as you point out, with the curve of the age distribution. Those two trends intersect, and then it all seems to come down to whether we think it's important to import immigrants as an acceptable solution to the issue.

Mark Mather: Yes, and I agree 100%. It becomes a policy issue, ao as a demographer, and I think my colleagues would agree, we try not to get too involved in the politics of it. But we definitely see challenges down the road, and there is going to be this pretty dramatic population aging. We got more and more baby boomers turning 65 every day, so good policies need to be put in place to manage this. It's all about managing population change and looking towards the future, making sure that the people who are here are taken care of. That to us is much more important than just the raw numbers and how the population is growing or declining, and really, it is mostly a local issue. What's happening at the national level is one thing, but states and local areas are dealing with this in different ways. So it really becomes, what can state and local politicians do to manage these issues?

Brian Lehrer: Mark Mather, vice president of the Population Reference Bureau. That's thing number 54 in our 100 Years of 100 things, US birth rates and population growth over the last 100 years. Next week, a related segment, 100 years of causes of death in the United States. Mark, thanks a lot for today.

Mark Mather: Thank you so much.

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