Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin on Birth Rates, Women and US Government Data
The Harvard economic historian finds that differences in fertility rates in rich countries reflect the persistence of traditional gender roles.
Claudia Goldin has been talking about babies a lot during the past year.
The 79-year-old Harvard University professor, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2023 for research on the history of women in labor markets, has recently been investigating birth rates. The topic has been an area of focus for the Trump administration and billionaire Elon Musk, who point to the drop in the US birth rate as a threat to economic growth, while they push against immigration that could offset it. “The decline in almost all developed countries today has been going on for about 40 to 50 years,” Goldin says over Zoom from her office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in early July. “So why are we just talking about it now?”