Population: Welcome Decline

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The great American baby boom is over. The explosive population surge that added some 40 million citizens to the U.S. in the 15 years after V-J day has subsided and may well continue to decline. The trend, only now showing up with any certainty on demographers' charts, is unlikely to make headlines; yet it speaks meaningfully to the nation's spiritual and material wellbeing, today and for years to come.

In 1965 the number of births in the U.S. dropped to the lowest figure since 1951—3,767,000—while the birth rate receded to the prewar level of 1940. A quarter of a million fewer babies were born last year than in 1964; half a million fewer than in the alltime peak year of 1957. Births still exceeded deaths by a wide margin last year, and the overall population increase was only slightly checked. Total population is now 196,464,000.

The birth rate—yearly births per 1,000 population—began its decline in 1958, twelve years after its precipitate climb, then drifted slowly downward through '59, '60, and '61. In 1962 the curve dropped sharply and continued its steep dip through the first months of 1966. Preliminary figures for the first two months of this year show an even lower rate than for the same period in 1965. The fertility rate, which relates directly to the number of young people rather than to the population as a whole, has shown a slightly slower drop because the young, "fertile" segment of the population, mostly born in the '30s, is proportionally smaller than it was a few years ago. Yet this key index, too, was down to its lowest level in two decades.

The Poll. The pivotal factor in the decline, says Philip M. Hauser, director of the University of Chicago's Population Research Center, has been the decision of couples to forgo a third and fourth child, substituting, perhaps, a second car and color TV. Eighty percent of the birthrate drop from 1915 to 1933—the historic low year—was a result of a falling off in third and fourth births, he notes, while 80% of the increase thereafter was caused by a jump in third and fourth children.

"The number of children one has," declares Hauser, "has become the subject of fad and fashion. This is the same kind of pattern that enters into other kinds of consumer habits. The third and fourth child were a form of status during the post-World War II baby boom. Now fashion is swinging women to the view that it is desirable to have fewer children." Mass communications media, Anthropologist Margaret Mead points out, have made birth control "more socially and ethically acceptable," and it is no longer fashionable for the educated to have large families.

A recent Gallup poll affirmed that big families are losing vogue. In 1945, just I as the baby boom was getting under way, 49% of the people polled said the ideal family should have four or more children. Today the figure is down to 35%, about where it was when the question was first asked 30 years ago. Just as important, notes Gallup, Americans no longer associate a growing population with progress; indeed, more than two-thirds look upon it as a "serious problem."