Americans are having fewer children, endangering the economy, the social safety net, and most importantly, the social fabric. The essential question is: why?
This isn’t a strictly local issue. Fertility is declining worldwide due to factors ranging from social expectations and hyper-capitalism in Japan to declines in desired family size in southern Europe. But in the United States, the data make clear that Americans want more kids than they are having, and that marriage is the best predictor for having children. This raises another simple, pressing question: Why aren’t Americans getting married and starting families?
The answer lies in the economic and social dislocation of working-class Americans, and working-class men in particular. From the late 1990s through the early 2000s, globalization, deindustrialization, and high levels of immigration contributed to the erosion of jobs that historically offered the working class real economic security. As these jobs disappeared, men became less marriageable, leading to a drop in marriage rates and, by extension, fertility.
Any hope of mitigating this trend will require policymakers to restore the economic foundations necessary for family formation. Neither family affordability generally, nor male marriageability and marriage rates in particular, will improve without better economic prospects for working-class Americans. To achieve this, we must protect U.S. markets, direct capital investment into high-productivity sectors, expand vocational training and workforce development, and limit immigration.
The Demographic Crisis
The natural replacement fertility rate is roughly 2.1, meaning U.S. couples must have on average 2.1 children to maintain current population levels. The United States has not maintained that rate since 2008, with the total fertility rate falling to 1.6 in 2024. If fertility falls too far, the U.S. will find itself caught in a self-reinforcing demographic trap.
Such a trap would carry substantial risks, including high age-dependency ratios and low GDP growth, with far more elderly requiring care, placing a strain on younger generations. Subsequent economic pressures would likely create high inflation, high debt, and frequent recessions, further stressing families.
Projections also indicate that Social Security may undergo a 23% benefit cut by 2033. But if the federal government decides to not cut Social Security, taxes on younger workers will increase, resulting in less take-home pay and more financial constraints on younger families.
On a more immediate level, these problems mean that families cannot have the number of children they desire. According to the American Compass Home Building Survey, 45% of married women report unmet fertility goals. Women have on average fully one child fewer than they desire. When asked why, affordability ranks among the top limiting factors.
Thus, the solution to this problem does not require social intervention. U.S. families already say they want to have 2.6 children on average, which shouldn’t surprise us because marriage and children are statistically the greatest predictors of happiness.
Marriage is “by far the most important factor in shaping fertility” in the United States, according to the Institute for Family Studies. Married couples have very stable, high fertility rates relative to unmarried or cohabiting couples. The average birth rate for married women aged 15 to 50 sums to four to five children, while unmarried women have an average birth rate of one.
Fertility decline is instead primarily due to a “relationship recession.” Families and relationships are simply not forming. The increasing share of unmarried individuals in the United States accounts for almost 75% of the fall in fertility. If the married share of the population remained at 2007 levels, the U.S.’s total expected fertility rate would still be above replacement rate. Reversing the marriage decline appears to be the most important metric in improving fertility.
So why are fewer Americans getting married? Recent work by demographer Lyman Stone points to economic factors that affect the desirability of male partners. His research contends that male economic underperformance is one of the greatest predictors of low fertility rates because it decreases the “marriageability” of younger men, which delays marriage and narrows the window for childbearing.
Income is the primary factor in marriageability. While subjective measures like status and attractiveness also play a role, income is a statistically demonstrated component of male marital eligibility. Data indicate that women generally look for a partner who can ensure the standard of living in which they grew up, meaning they hope to marry someone in the same social class with similar levels of ambition and education in addition to income. On the male side of the equation, quasi-experimental studies show that men who win the lottery—a sudden increase in income—often get married. Increasing men’s income both directly increases the intention to have a first child and indirectly increases it through stabler and more satisfactory relationships.
Yet young men’s incomes have been stagnant or negative over the past 20 years, and when some men finally achieve marriageable levels of income, they often marry too late for children; fertility drops off significantly for both men and women after the age of 30. The median age of first marriage in the United States stands at 28.6 for women and 30.5 for men, and is steadily rising. Meanwhile, lifetime incomes are in decline. Income marriageability comes later in life for many men, if it comes at all.
The Trends Eroding Incomes
What happened over the past several decades that eroded young, male, and working-class incomes? The answer is that good, working-class jobs disappeared through globalization, deindustrialization, and high levels of immigration.
The loss of “good jobs,” defined as those paying greater than $60,000 a year with benefits and stable hours, can explain almost 80% of the divide between the marriage rates of college-educated and working-class families. Family formation rates among non-college-educated men aged 25-54 plummeted from 59% in 1980 to 34% in 2021.
As family formation began to decline, trade shocks were devastating incomes in the U.S. From 1999 to 2011, the “China Shock” led to the destruction of an estimated 2.4 million jobs, including over 900,000 manufacturing jobs that were shipped overseas. The resulting “replacement” jobs were mostly lower-wage service-sector jobs better suited to a different pool of workers. Contrary to the expectations of mainstream economists, workers who lost their jobs often struggled to adjust, and many dropped out of the labor force altogether. Others experienced significant cuts to their lifetime earnings. The U.S. regions most exposed to Chinese imports suffered greater opioid addiction. As idleness and fatalities in these areas increased—reflected in the 8.5-year gap in life expectancy between college and non-college graduates—family formation and fertility declined significantly.
Today, 14% of prime-age males are out of the labor force, versus just 7% during the Baby Boomer generation. Participation among Americans aged 16-24 dropped from 77.5% in 1989 to 60.4% in 2024, and the decline was even more pronounced among young men.
There’s an underappreciated yet controversial factor helping drive this decline.
Lower labor force participation and wages, especially for younger and non-college-educated Americans, have been exacerbated by higher levels of immigration. In January 2025, the Center for Immigration Studies estimated that 15.8% of the U.S. population was foreign born—the highest percentage in U.S. history. Of that population, at least 15.4 million, or 29%, were in the U.S. illegally. According to a study by Harvard economist George Borjas, from 1990 to 2010, immigration supply shocks reduced wages of the least-skilled workers by 6.3% in the short term and 3.1% in the long term. For every 10% increase in the supply of a skill group’s labor pool, there is a corresponding 3-4% decrease in wages. Historically, young male workers are the biggest losers from immigration, experiencing the largest income and opportunity losses.
Deindustrialization and the U.S. transition toward a service-based economy further worsened the outlook. Manufacturing workers earn on average 13% more in pay and benefits than service sector workers. Furthermore, lower-credentialed service industries like hospitality and food service are culturally the least hospitable work to family formation, offering lower and less consistent pay and work hours. These factors make it more difficult for employees to establish the kind of economic stability that fosters marriages. Unstable work schedules may further contribute to conflict between work and family priorities, and have even been shown to have negative behavioral outcomes for children.
Industrial Renewal and Marriageable Men
There are a few natural places to address this decline.
For 30 years, the United States allowed its trade deficit to balloon, exporting jobs and factories overseas to countries that suppressed wages, stole our technology, and engaged in manipulative trade practices. Rebalancing global trade and maintaining trade protections for critical industries will help provide solid jobs for young men without college degrees.
Directing investment toward capital-intensive industry can also create high-productivity, high-wage jobs. American Affairs editor Julius Krein argues that a U.S. sovereign wealth fund could steer finance towards industrial development. With a principal of only $50 billion, this fund could draw in “hundreds of billions of dollars of private-sector financing,” he notes. Agencies like the Office of Strategic Capital, which recently received an effective issuance cap of $200 billion, and the Department of Energy’s Loans Program Office are similarly positioned to generate investment in major productive sectors, creating a new wave of high-quality jobs.
This industrial development should be paired with local workforce programs that equip young Americans with new skills. Local workforce consortiums could partner with large and small businesses to provide a steady flow of trained, young, talented workers. Men enrolled in vocational school already earn $8,000 a year more at age 28 than their peers in higher education. While their counterparts overtake them by age 40, frontloading wages is significantly more desirable for achieving early marriageability. A revitalized labor movement, liberated from extraneous political concerns and focused primarily on workers’ conditions, can provide both solidarity and a mechanism for protecting just wages for blue collar workers.
Lastly, securing the border, limiting low-skill immigration, and strengthening enforcement through E-Verify will reduce the supply of foreign labor driving down U.S. wages in entry-level and lower-skilled jobs. This may mean companies will have to innovate to generate higher-productivity, higher-wage jobs with better working conditions to better suit native workers seeking to get on the marriage track.
The Material Base for Strong Families
Deindustrialization has eroded working-class incomes broadly and male marriageability specifically. Forestalling the fertility crisis will require policy interventions that address these core causes. Protecting and directing investment in capital-intensive industries will create new, high-productivity, high-wage jobs, forming the material basis for strong families.
Workforce development holds similar potential to boost young men’s incomes and marriageability. Reducing immigration may further improve wages for blue collar and entry-level workers while creating the conditions for new, high-productivity jobs. To truly protect the future of our nation, policymakers should strive to create a market that supports families, fosters their formation, and protects their flourishing.
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This is all fairly sound, and captures an emerging consensus on both right and left regarding the diagnosis of mens' contemporary struggles (economic issues -> relationship recession -> declining fertility and further male failure). But the prescription for change is highly selective. The article points out that stable hours and benefits are huge factor, and then proposes that modest increases in manufacturing employment will magically fix this, rather than suggesting (1) any kind of regulatory intervention (restrictions on clopening, just in time scheduling, micro shifts, or different rules for benefits entitlement, etc.) to improve the quality of service sector jobs; or (2) any support for private sector unions, which were of course central to the stability and high wages of manufacturing employment in the past. A simple look at history and developing countries (and even different regions in the US) shows very well that manufacturing employment without robust regulation and organized labor is no guarantee of high wages, stable hours, or good benefits. Don't let ideological blinkers get in the way of critical policy interventions to support American men and families.
Restriction on immigration is also a fine policy, but will not magically lead to better jobs. Farms, meatpackers and non-union builders will need to pay a bit more to attract native workers, but schedules and benefits won't improve much without organization and agitation, which is unions. Moreover, since these are already low margin industries, increased wages will be passed as a cost to consumers, which leads to a relative decline in income due to reduced purchasing power. So by all means restrict immigration, but don't expect a panacea.
As to more investment and vocational training, yes, 100% - and incentivize private capital and companies to get involved too.