In 1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence was signed, a Harvard professor named Edward Wigglesworth did the math on American population growth and could barely contain his excitement. He had found that the colonists were doubling their numbers every 25 years, mostly through births, and at that pace he projected that by the close of the 20th century there would be “ONE THOUSAND TWO-HUNDRED AND EIGHTY MILLIONS” of us (his capitalization, not mine). A billion Americans, and then some.
Sadly, there are only about 340 million of us today. We should be asking not just why we so badly undershot Wigglesworth’s hopes, but also whether we are about to start counting down instead of up.
If America’s population does decline, it will strain our entitlements system, damage the economy, reduce innovation and entrepreneurship, and cause serious labor shortages. But the majority point of view — held by major institutions like the Census Bureau, the United Nations and the Social Security trustees — is that the United States probably won’t face population decline until the 2080s, or even beyond 2100.
That forecast is far too optimistic. The more accurate projection, which I outlined in a recent report for my organization, the Institute for Family Studies, sees the American population beginning to shrink in the 2050s. It is a forecast so grim it could upend American budgeting and, thus, American politics.
Start with the number that drives everything else. The American fertility rate has fallen below 1.6 children per woman, a record low. Replacement rate, the level that merely holds a population steady before immigration, is about 2.1. If the current trend in shrinking births continues, it’s likely that the U.S. population will largely stop growing in the 2030s, and begin to decline in the 2050s. Peak America may come before millennials meet their grandkids (if they have any).
There are two major pieces of wishful thinking in the flights of fancy that underpin American population forecasts. The first is immigration. The Census Bureau assumes the United States will have an annual net migration (immigrants minus emigrants) of about one million immigrants through the end of the century. The United Nations and Social Security trustees assume about 1.2 million immigrants a year throughout the 21st century. None of these forecasts are plausible. Net migration under President Trump will most likely turn out to be near zero, and he won’t be the last immigration restrictionist in our nation’s highest office.
Moreover, birthrates are collapsing across the entire planet, not just here at home. The supply of would-be migrants will shrink as more countries run out of young people, and the skilled ones every aging country covets will be fought over. With most countries staring down the same cliff, and with emigration from the United States rising, permanent high net migration is more of an aspiration than a forecast.
But the second act of wishful thinking has an even bigger effect. Many forecasters are assuming that current low fertility rates are temporary, that women are merely delaying having children rather than forgoing it entirely. But this isn’t true: Research shows that delays in childbearing are usually not made up, and, anyway, estimates that take deferred childbearing into account have fallen by just as much as the headline fertility rate.
Up until quite recently, the Social Security trustees’ main scenario assumed that fertility rates will rise from now until 2050, and stabilize at 1.9 children per woman. In 2023, the Census Bureau predicted that fertility rates will only gradually decline from 1.64 to 1.58 by 2075. Spoiler: Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already shown a 1.57 fertility rate for 2025. The U.N. expects that the U.S. fertility rate will be flat at about 1.65 through the entire 21st century. To its credit, Social Security trustees released new numbers just last month that revised their expectations down to 1.75 in 2050, but that is overly optimistic. The Congressional Budget Office is more realistic, but even it predicts that fertility will decline to 1.53, then stabilize.
What evidence supports these predictions? Birthrates have fallen almost continuously for nearly 20 years, an entire generation. They have fallen through good economies and bad, through Republican administrations and Democratic ones, through every tax credit and child-care subsidy.
No matter what you believe to be the cause of falling birthrates, that decline is unlikely to spontaneously reverse: There’s no marriage boom on the horizon; young people aren’t switching off their phones; housing isn’t about to become vastly more affordable; and the decline of religion may have paused, but no great religious revival is in sight. Drawing up budget plans on the assumption that we have essentially reached our lowest fertility point, despite other rich countries’ rates being even lower, is nonsensical. I suspect that this error persists because the alternative is too dismaying to put in a government table.
Strip out the imaginary baby boom, put in realistic migration rates for the Trump presidency and the rest of the 21st century, and the trajectory of our population is more ominous. If birthrates continue to decline as they have been doing, then fertility will fall to 1.35 children per woman in 2050, and 1.15 by 2100. In that scenario, population growth will be anemic in the 2020s and 2030s, fall to essentially zero in the 2040s, and then, starting in the mid-2050s, experience a long, grinding decline. Each generation will be more than 30 percent smaller than the one before, the work force will shrink beneath the retirees it has to support, and the American century will give way to American contraction.
Only one state in the union, South Dakota, still has a birthrate near the level that would hold its population steady on its own. Every other state is below the line. Most are far below it. In parts of Kentucky, the state where I live, the effects of demographic decline are all too familiar. Entire towns left to be reclaimed by weeds and rust; real estate values drifting downward every year, destroying the saved-up wealth of retirees; school consolidations that force kids to ride on a bus for over an hour; out-migration by innovative and entrepreneurial people; bitterness among those left behind to watch their civilization rot.
None of this is destiny. Forecasting population isn’t like forecasting the weather: People can choose to marry and have children. The reason I can tell you now that the population will peak in the 2050s is precisely because I am describing the path we are on if nothing changes. We can try to prevent this from happening.
Closing a gap this size will not happen through a few thousand dollars of tax credits sprinkled on young families; we have tried pocket change, and pocket change has failed. It will take serious money aimed at the people doing the work of raising the next generation of Americans, an end to the marriage penalties woven through our tax and welfare codes, a surge in building family-size houses on par with the one during the last baby boom, and a culture that treats children as a future worth having rather than a lifestyle expense. Those are big asks, but they are things Americans can achieve if they set their mind to it.
Wigglesworth saw exponential growth as the mark of a heroic country. For the first century of our country’s life together, we stayed on that trajectory. Then we spent the last 150 years proving him too optimistic. The question for our country’s 250th birthday is how many more birthdays we want it to have, both for its babies and as a country.
Lyman Stone is the director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies and the director of research for the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence.
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