Does anyone believe Zoomers are worse off than young people during the Depression, when the birth rate was far higher? That generation gazed back at the Roaring ’20s. Why did they have kids? The birth rate was over four times higher in the early 1800s, when around 90 percent of Americans had to wake up before dawn to engage in the backbreaking work of farming — often subsistence farming — with no other prospects available.

The replacement rate began to drop after the post-war boom and has dropped, or remained stagnant, under virtually every president since Eisenhower. Replacement rates dropped during recessions and during booms. It dropped under Donald Trump. It dropped under Joe Biden.

Birth rates drop under leftist governments and capitalist governments and hybrid governments. They dropped in both socialist India and nationalist Hindi India, and in both communist Hungary and Russia and nationalist Hungary and Russia. Birth rates have been declining in China and in the Islamic world. Twice as many Japanese died than were born in 2023. Is it because they’re poor? The place with the highest birth rates is sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest place of all.