The U.S. fertility rate has now hit an all time low of 1.6 children per woman, as of new data released this week. This follows a pattern of birthrates declining to below replacement levels in both the developed and developing world.
The United States is now at approximately the same level as Western European countries that are more stereotypically perceived as small-family countries.
I have eight children, and the worldwide decline of children and kin terrifies me. My wife and I didn’t choose to have a large family for patriotic or civic reasons, but because family connections are a priority in our lives.
While the absolute number of children has increased because the number of women going through their childbearing years has increased, there are many reasons to believe that people’s collective decision to drastically reduce childbearing will have catastrophic effects across nations.
If this trend continues, my great-grandchildren will inherit a world vastly different from the one I was born into, one for which economic growth was taken as a given.
Currently, there are towns, schools and cities that are brimming with life, along with some money to invest, build, retire and enjoy life with (for some people), whereas in the future there simply won’t be much if anything left over for the workers after the older people who can’t work are taken care of.
It is true that we have our own problems in the here and now, and that economic gains have not been felt across the board. But whatever the concerns are with poverty now, a cratering birthrate means they will become worse.
While having and raising children has never been easy, for my children and grandchildren it will be even harder, as much of their work will need to be siphoned off to support retirees. If some communities around the world continue their birthrate trajectory, they will be positioning themselves to crater like in a zombie apocalypse movie, with abandoned, decaying villages and cities while “survivors” cling to outposts of civilization. This might seem like a hyperbolic exaggeration, but a little math bears this out.
Women need to have 2.1 children or more for a developed, physically healthy country to replace themselves. In South Korea, women are having about ¾ of a child (specifically .75), with no signs of any kind of real rebound. That means every generation will be about 36% the size of the previous generation. So if we start with 100 people in the first generation that means there will be 36 people in the next, 13 in the next, and about 5 in the next.
This bears repeating, in three generations 100 people will leave 13 descendants. That is 13 people supporting 100 grandparents. If there was a disease that destroyed all but 13% of a community across several lifetimes, eviscerating the younger generations but leaving older generations alone, it would be a five-alarm fire that would merit all of our resources. Yet this depopulation into oblivion is meriting at most a handful of expressions of concern and the occasional limited baby bonus.
Perhaps some of this is because demographic factors have a delayed response, so we as a society won’t see the nuclear-level implications of our lack of having children for a while. At the current rates, world population will continue to increase for several decades. But like a hurricane gradually creeping toward the shore in a weather forecast, the current trends don’t bode well for what is coming — which will be just as impossible to reverse once it hits.
Some of this strange lack of concern is political. Now that controversial political figures on the right, like Elon Musk, have started talking about depopulation it has become “right-coded” —meaning, “that’s of concern to those people on the right, but not to the rest of us.”
But a problem like this is a problem no matter who happens to agree with you or whether you pull the D or R lever.
And some of this, I suspect, is also because for years it was a truism that population explosion was the problem. That kind of cultural and bureaucratic inertia doesn’t change on a dime. One of my favorite shows growing up was Captain Planet which, in addition to having some good messages, encouraged its young audience to have few children. To this we can add famous science films such as Soylent Green, or even landmark novels such as Ender’s Game where it was taken for granted that the future was a dystopian world with too many people to support.
Of course many breathed a sigh of relief as the sky high fertility rates plummeted — but then they kept plummeting, and plummeting, and there’s no end in sight.
Occasionally the decline will pause, or researchers will find evidence that some of the decline was due to people having children at older ages more than people not having as many children at all. Sometimes people will point out very slight increases, ostensibly due to some new government program or another, that you can see when you squint. But these are relative blips in the data grasped at by overeager analysts. The big story is the overall decline across countries and contexts.
And it is across countries and contexts. One of the common rejoinders to depopulation anxiety is that it is developed, largely white countries that are disappearing, and if we just take off our racist blinders and accept immigrants from other countries then population decline is solved.
It is, admittedly, true that there are cases where there is something to this argument as a stopgap measure. For example, if Japan were to loosen up immigration and accept young workers and families from Southeast Asian countries, it would go a long way to solving their aging population issue right now.
It is also true that I intentionally picked South Korea above as one of the worst case scenarios. Yet, even Thailand, for example, is not much better, with women having about one child on average, halving the population from generation to generation.
As Japan’s TFR is around the same (1.15), Thailand just won’t have the population to save Japan from societal collapse. The premise that it’s only developed, largely white countries that aren’t replacing themselves just isn’t true.
The fact is the traditional sources of immigrants are drying up as their fertility rates are also falling off cliffs. Some in the U.S. assume there will always be a mass of willing and young Mexican workers ready to come to the United States. But this is just false, as Mexican women — who in the past had many more children than U.S. women — are now having about as many babies.
Chilean women are also now giving birth to about one child per woman, halving the size of each subsequent generation. This storm is hitting almost everywhere. According to the Population Reference Bureau, European women are having an average of 1.4 children; North, Central and South American women are having 1.7; Asian women are having 1.8. The only continent that is still replacing itself is Africa, where the average woman has four children.
Decreasing birth rates — like NGOs and governments did in the 1970s and 1980s — is relatively easy; it’s not hard to convince people to spend less resources on other people. But increasing them by convincing people to spend time and money on others is far more difficult.
It’s true that young people from, say, Colombia (where future generations will be about half the size of their parent generation), could still come to the U.S., but they would be leaving their own grandparents without as much support when they reach the point where they are unable to work.
It is worth noting that in less economically developed societies without reliable government pension systems, old people are typically cared for by descendants. So without them and without government support in some cases, older people unable to work won’t have much to live on.
While it is true that there are a shrinking handful of African countries that are still producing a lot of children, those numbers are also falling fast. According to some estimates, the world is already not producing enough children to replace itself. So even assuming an extremely liberal immigration regimen, there simply won’t be enough third or fourth children from Chad and Mali to populate the overgrown ghost towns in Russia.
Of course, when depopulation is invoked, some still envision a future where everybody has their own grand beachside estates — since there are fewer people eating up finite natural resources. But who’s going to build such estates? Who is going to come up with the ideas that generate money and advance society? The fact is that the innovation, dynamism, risk-taking and construction that economies and societies are built on is largely a young person’s game, and the economic consensus is that top-heavy population pyramids soak up resources that could be spent innovating, building, and investing in the future.
These are just the economic arguments. At current trajectories of depopulation, South Korean culture will contract considerably in the foreseeable future. The millenia-old society that gave us world-class scientific discoveries, popular music, cinema and cuisine will end, not in a genocide or some grand, cataclysmal war — but in a whimper, as men and women simply stop pairing up and having children.
Repeat this for a variety of societies and cultures worldwide. This is not saying that Korean culture is better than, say, Somali culture, which is doing an admirable job of regenerating itself. but rather that the whole world is impoverished as major pieces of its rich tapestry of cultures are consigned to oblivion.
In another Deseret News article on this, Mariya Manzhos quoted UPenn economics Professor Fernández-Villaverde that “Once you start thinking about these issues, it’s hard to think about anything else.”
I’ve felt for myself how easy it can be to become a fatalistic doomer, but perhaps in the ashes of declining worlds, groups of people who intentionally want children and kin from generation to generation will “inherit the earth.” Hyper-individualism, rooted in largely secular environments, has been shown to be a dead-end, decadent ideology incapable of creating new humanity.
But there are other ideologies and communities that have chosen life that can still rise up to take their place.