The Social Security Administration is still ignoring the baby bust

However, beneath those headlines simmers a more chronic problem. Uncle Sam’s long-term diagnosis for the health of Social Security relies on a completely unreasonable assumption that the birth rate, which is currently low and falling, will magically rebound to levels 20% higher than today’s.

This is a constant feature of the baby bust: National governments and international organizations assume impossibly high future birth rates despite consistently wrong past projections.

Some of the problem is Malthusian thinking. Thomas Malthus was an 18th-century British economist whose arguments about population growth inspired misanthropes and population controllers for more than 200 years. Malthus believed birth rates, in the long run, would be self-correcting, like prices: A wealthy society will have more babies, too many babies will make the society

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