RIP Richard Easterlin
Richard A. Easterlin, a trailblazing economist whose insights reshaped our postwar baby boom, died at his home in Pasadena, California, on December 16. He was 98. The University of Southern California, where he was an emeritus professor, confirmed his death.
Though best known for the Easterlin paradox—the provocative argument that rising income levels don’t necessarily lead to greater happiness—his lesser-known but perhaps more consequential work tackled a far weightier question: why societies boom and bust in matters of birth. Easterlin’s baby boom hypothesis wasn’t a polite academic theory; it was a bold assertion that jobs for young men—good, stable jobs—are the essential fuel for fertility. In an age obsessed with GDP and growth-at-any-cost economics, Easterlin had the audacity to challenge conventional wisdom: prosperity isn’t about numbers—it’s about real jobs and real lives. If you want more babies, you need more jobs.
The Easterlin Effect: Prosperity and Progeny
Easterlin’s baby boom hypothesis, later dubbed the Easterlin effect, hinges on a simple but profound insight: give young men decent jobs, and they’ll marry early and have kids. Fail to do so, and they won’t. Men without jobs or prospects do not make for attractive potential husbands and may choose to delay marriage until they can offer a better version of themselves.
In other words, it wasn’t some nebulous sociological trend or cultural zeitgeist that drove the mid-century baby boom. It took more than just soldiers and sailers and airmen returning from the war. Sparking the baby boom required a boom in economic opportunity, pure and simple.
Consider postwar America: returning soldiers walked into an economy flush with high-paying industrial jobs, union strength, and upward mobility. Young men with steady paychecks became young husbands and fathers. Easterlin pointed out that this economic golden age set off the demographic explosion we now call the baby boom.
By the late 1960s, however, the tide turned. Economic growth slowed, inflation reared its ugly head, and jobs for young men dried up. The fertility rate plummeted, and with it, the dream of large families. Easterlin didn’t mince words: the baby bust wasn’t a mystery—it was a direct consequence of shrinking economic prospects.
Prior to the baby boom, many social scientists and public intellectuals assumed that the pre-war decline in fertility was permanent and irreversible. The conventional wisdom of the time was that modern societies, once on a path of falling birth rates, would never return to high fertility. The baby boom shattered this assumption. Easterlin argued that it wasn’t fate or some cultural anomaly that reversed the trend—it was economic conditions.
In today’s world, the chorus of doomsayers insists that declining fertility is an irreversible consequence of modernity. Easterlin would have none of it. He believed that fertility could bounce back—but only if societies created the right economic environment. His work stands as a rebuke to those who treat demographic decline as destiny: it’s not inevitable. It’s a choice.
Build the Wall to Bring Forth More Babies
Easterlin didn’t shy away from controversial conclusions. One of his more contentious assertions was that replicating the baby boom would require not just job creation but a serious rethink of immigration policy. His logic was blunt: if you flood the labor market with cheap competition, wages stagnate, and job opportunities for native-born young men diminish. Without decent wages, early marriage and high fertility become pipe dreams.
More precisely, a hot economy with lots of job prospects for young men would act as a magnet for foreign workers. These newly arrived workers would often be competing for exactly the same jobs as young Americans. In order to improve the prospects of younger Americans enough to raise fertility, the number of new workers coming across the border would need to be strictly limited.
Easterlin knew this wouldn’t be popular in elite circles, but he was never one to court favor. He wasn’t arguing for nativism. He was pointing out a basic economic truth: if you want young people to build families, they need the means to do so and the hope that their future will be bright. Endless immigration might enrich corporate balance sheets, but it does little for the working class trying to start a family.
Skewering Conventional Wisdom
Throughout his career, Easterlin took perverse delight 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, comes from more than just a fat wallet—it’s rooted in jobs, health, and family.
Easterlin earned his PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1953 and spent more than 30 years teaching there before moving to the University of Southern California (USC) in 1982. Even in his later years, Easterlin remained an intellectual firebrand, unafraid to challenge both academic orthodoxy and political dogma.
Easterlin leaves behind more than a body of scholarly work—he leaves behind a call to rethink what truly matters in economic policy. As birth rates plummet in developed nations and debates over immigration rage on, Easterlin’s insights are a stark reminder that prosperity isn’t about abstract numbers. It’s about real jobs for real people.
He is survived by his wife, Eileen Crimmins, a 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 illuminated a truth that policymakers too often overlook: the wealth of a nation is measured not by its GDP, but by the lives its people are able to build.
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