Richard Easterlin
Richard A. Easterlin, a pioneering economist whose ideas reshaped our post-war baby boomdied at his home in Pasadena, California on December 16. He was 98 years old. The University of Southern California, where he was professor emeritus, confirmed his death.
Although best known for Easterlin paradox– the provocative argument that increasing income levels do not necessarily lead to greater happiness – his lesser known but perhaps more consequential work addressed a much more important question: why societies boom and bust in matters of birth. Easterlin’s baby boom hypothesis was not a polished academic theory; it was a bold assertion that jobs for young men – good, stable jobs – are the essential fuel for fertility. In an era obsessed with GDP and economic growth at all costs, Easterlin had the audacity to challenge conventional wisdom: prosperity is not about numbers, but about real jobs and real lives. If you want more babies, you need more jobs.
The Easterlin effect: prosperity and offspring
Easterlin’s baby boom hypothesis, later dubbed the Easterlin effect, is based on a simple but profound idea: give young men decent jobs, they will marry early and have children. If you don’t do it, they won’t. Men without jobs or prospects do not make attractive potential husbands and may choose to delay marriage until they can offer a better version of themselves.
In other words, it was not some nebulous sociological trend or cultural zeitgeist that led to the mid-century baby boom. It took more than soldiers, sailors and airmen returning from war. Sparks the baby boom necessitated a boom in economic opportunitypure and simple.
Consider postwar America: Returning soldiers entered an economy rich in well-paying industrial jobs, union strength, and upward mobility. Young men with stable salaries became young husbands and fathers.. Easterlin pointed out that this economic golden age sparked the population explosion we now call the baby boom.
But at the end of the 1960s, the tide turned. Economic growth slowed, inflation took hold, and jobs for young men dried up. The fertility rate is collapsing, and with it, the dream of large families. Easterlin didn’t mince his words: baby’s bust This was no mystery: it was a direct consequence of the diminishing economic outlook.
Before the baby boom, many social scientists and public intellectuals believed that the decline in fertility before the war was permanent and irreversible. The conventional wisdom of the time was that modern societies, once on a path of declining birth rates, would never return to high fertility. The baby boom shattered this assumption. Easterlin argued that it was not fate or a cultural anomaly that turned the tide, but rather economic conditions.
In today’s world, the chorus of doomsayers insists that the decline in fertility is an irreversible consequence of modernity. Easterlin wanted none of that. He believed that fertility could rebound, but only if societies created the right economic environment. His work constitutes a reproach to those who consider demographic decline to be inevitable: it is not inevitable. It’s a choice.
Build the wall to give birth to more babies
Easterlin did not shy away from controversial conclusions. One of his most controversial assertions was that reproducing the baby boom would require not only job creation but also a serious overhaul of immigration policy. His logic was brutal: if you flood the job market with cheap competitionwages are stagnating and job opportunities for young, native-born men are dwindling. Without decent wages, early marriage and high fertility become pipe dreams.
Specifically, a booming economy with ample job prospects for young men would act as a magnet for foreign workers. These newly arrived workers often competed for exactly the same jobs as younger Americans. To improve the prospects of young Americans enough to increase fertility, the number of new workers crossing the border should be strictly limited.
Easterlin knew it would not be popular in elite circlesbut he was never one to court favors. He was not advocating nativism. He underlined a fundamental economic truth: if young people are to start families, they need the means to do so and the hope of a bright future. Endless immigration might enrich corporate balance sheets, but it does little for the working class trying to start families.
Confusing Conventional Wisdom
Throughout his career, Easterlin took perverse pleasure in skewering the sacred cows of conventional economics. He was skeptical of GDP as the ultimate measure of progress and doubted that endless growth was the path to human flourishing. Happiness, he insisted, does not come just from a fat wallet: it is rooted in work, health and family.
Easterlin received his doctorate in economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1953 and spent more than 30 years teaching there before joining the University of Southern California (USC) in 1982. Even in his later years, Easterlin remained an intellectual firebrandunafraid to challenge academic orthodoxy and political dogma.
Easterlin leaves behind much more than a body of scientific work: he leaves behind a call to rethink what really matters in economic policy. As birth rates fall in developed countries and debates over immigration rage, Easterlin’s ideas are a stark reminder that prosperity is not about abstract numbers. These are real jobs for real people.
He is survived by his wife, Eileen Crimmins, professor of gerontology at USC; his children John, Nancy, Susan, Andrew, Matthew and Molly Easterlin; and eight grandchildren. His first wife, Jacqueline Miller, predeceased him.
Easterlin’s work highlighted a truth that policymakers too often overlook: the wealth of a nation is not measured by its GDP, but by the life that its inhabitants are capable of building.
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