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I actually don't believe this proves much as the number would imply. Yes, TFR was 2.1, but the country was also far more rural at the time and mechanization hadn't quite replaced the child as unit of labor on farms yet.
If you assume rural families (50% of the country at the time) were still having 3.0 kids for that reason, that necessarily means urban areas were at 1.0, which is above modern South Korea but below the rest of the modern West.
Are you sure about the 50% figure?
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Also infant mortality was higher then, so TFR 2.1 was sub-replacement. I can't find the source now, but someone published estimates of infant-mortality-adjusted TFR for the US going back as long as the data existed and, assuming their numbers were correct, adjusted TFR was higher during the post-WW2 baby boom that at any other time in history.
"What caused the Baby Boom?" seems to be an under-asked question among people who care about fertility.
Like @hydroacetylene says it was a big expansion in male earnings and rapid improvements in quality of life, but that’s not the whole story. Quality of life and male earnings increased rapidly in countries like Saudi Arabia and Vietnam while birth rates collapsed, for example. Eastern European countries saw small bumps in some cases as the post-1990s recovery went on, but rarely anything spectacular.
I suspect it was in large part suburbanization and pent-up demand. The former had both push and pull factors (like white flight in the former case) but also meant large numbers of white people - especially’ the US where the boom was most pronounced - left fertility shredder cities and moved back out to lower density housing. If going from rural low density environments to squalid tenements kills tfr, then it stands to reason a partial reversal might temporarily boost it. In addition, labor saving devices made domestic work far easier than it had been.
As for pent-up demand, it is an interesting fact that when people from many very poor countries move as refugees / migrants to the West, their fertility rate briefly spikes. For a time (I haven’t checked recently) first generation Libyans, Bangladeshis and other groups actually had higher birth rates in Britain (even adjusted for age of migrants) than in their home countries. These usually come back down in the second generation but there is a built up demand unfulfilled out of extreme poverty that expands into the available prosperity of the new host country, welfare etc.
The move to the suburbs and higher incomes provided this during the baby boom. People who had only two kids in the urban tenements suddenly had three or four because they had the space or money. When their children went back to having two kids, it was cultural, not financial. Either the unfulfilled demand wasn’t the same, or standards had increased. Imagine if everyone in the middle class suddenly attained the material living standard that, say, a successful surgeon has today, and got a big new cheap house. That might cause a tfr rise.
Thats why there aren’t any easy lessons from the baby boom, other than maybe that if every American could afford a 6,000 square foot McMansion, a robot nanny and butler, and could make the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $500k a year forever, they would have more kids. And indeed the higher birth rates we’ve seen among those making more than $800k a year in recent years largely prove this true. When you reduce the lifestyle impact of children to basically frictionless status, people are willing to have unlimited kids. Elon Musk kind of shows this too.
I've definitely seen the argument that the Baby Boom isn't a real high-fertility period, just catch-up from delayed fertility during the Depression and WW2, with the high measured TFR coming from overlapping generations having kids at the same time. (Because of the way TFR is measured, this leads to a measured TFR that is higher than the experienced fertility of either cohort).
I thought Elon only had two children per woman, which is not going to solve anyone's fertility problems.
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Very large expansion in specifically male earnings coupled with selective weakening of sexual norms and strong social pressure to marry at all costs.
This is the highest tfr of any self supporting stratum in an industrial society, ever. Modern high fertility minorities are at about the same TFR.
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