Why is Global Fertility Crashing?
A story a bit deeper than millennials and avocado toast
We are in the midst of an unprecedented collapse in global fertility.
We are used to thinking about fertility as being low in rich countries and high in poor countries, but this is no longer the case. Take a look at the global fertility rate up to 2021:
As of the most recent data, global fertility was just 2.3 children per woman worldwide. Above the replacement rate (2.1), but barely! It has surely fallen since 2021. Looking at the global map, we find some surprising results.
Although the rich world, including Europe, North America, and the wealthiest parts of Asia, is in deep sub-replacement territory, it may surprise some to see that most of South America, Turkey, Iran, the Philippines, and Vietnam are also below replacement. Most startlingly, giants like India and Indonesia are on the cusp of falling below replacement. Eyeballing the map, just Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, bits of central and southeast Asia, and a smattering of countries in Latin America are now replacing themselves. Almost no “economically successful” countries are now capable of sustaining their populations.
If we restrict the sample to just countries with TFR of 2.15 or greater and order by GDP per capita, the top 20 wealthiest countries are:
It’s a pretty strange list. Within the top 10, Saudi, Oman, Libya, Guyana, and Kazakhstan are wealthy from oil (AKA: lucky), Panama and Seychelles are tax havens and Israel is sort of historical exception. Israel has attracted some attention for its relatively high GDP per capita that is not extraction-based (they actually innovate) while maintaining a fertility rate well above replacement, but their trick may not be broadly generalizable.
And remember, these are the richest of the countries that are above replacement-level fertility. All others are even less economically successful.
Bear in mind that the effects of this low fertility are delayed by the structure of the population pyramid. A country can have zero immigration and fall below 2.1 TFR and still be growing in population for some time if there are relatively few old people. Take Colombia, for example. It has a TFR of 1.75, yet its population is still growing at about 1% per year. Generationally, the country is not replacing itself, but the bulk of its population is still below 50, so deaths will not surpass births for some time.
In other places, deaths already surpass births. Where I live in British Colombia, Canada, deaths surpassed births in 2021 and they have been diverging since. An enormous immigration boom since then has caused the population to surge at the fastest rate since the 1950s, but that is another story.
So, what is going on?
Do People Not Want Children?
Maybe people just don’t want as many kids as they did before. There is certainly some evidence for this. According to Gallup, the proportion of Americans who view the ideal family size as having 3 children is down from around 70% in the 1960s to nearer to 40% today.
Since the 1970s, we see that the reported ideal family size has been remarkably stable even as fertility has swung around.
In Canada, the personal ideal has also been headed south, and is now just at the replacement level, which is above both the intention and the reality.
Perhaps this is unsurprising. People are having fewer kids, and it must ultimately be a choice. The question is—why?
Causes of the Fertility Crash
There seems to be a relationship between wealth or income and fertility. Richer countries tend to have fewer children, and over time, as incomes have risen, fertility has declined. So, income and fertility are negatively correlated both cross-sectionally (across countries) and longitudinally (within countries). One theory is that the opportunity costs of having children rise as incomes rise. When one lives in poverty, having children can be beneficial (more hands), whereas when one has a high income, reproducing means giving up income, spending money, and sacrificing time and freedom that could be spent very productively or pleasurably.
But surely more money, all else equal, helps people reproduce? Sometimes, we see a “U-shape” in the relationship between fertility and income. People with very low incomes and very high incomes have high fertility, while those in the middle have lower fertility.
Incidentally, we see the same thing with education levels, where bachelor’s degree holders have the lowest fertility rates, lower than both those with high school or less and those with master’s degrees or above. This could indicate a relationship where, as incomes rise, the costs of reproducing rise faster than the benefits until a certain income level, where the benefits begin to rise faster than costs.
All these things are incredibly confounded, however. Incomes have historically moved alongside increasing cultural liberalism and improved access to reproductive technology. While in the past, births were often accidental, technology like the pill and abortion means that this is rare now. At the same time, marriage rates have fallen as changes such as no-fault divorce were implemented, and the social importance of marriage has fallen. There is little stigma now to remaining unmarried, even if it is perhaps not ideal.
Solutions: From the Left
The political left does not always want to discuss this issue as it is perceived as being too close to nationalism, traditionalism, heteronormativity, or even racism. Sometimes, those on the left will argue that a decline in fertility is an inevitable or desirable consequence of female or LGBTQ+ liberation. It is sometimes argued that having fewer people is good for the environment. Others say that immigration can solve low fertility, although this is surely untrue in poorer countries that are unable to attract large numbers of immigrants (indeed, immigration is a net population cost for most medium-income countries as their best and brightest head to the rich world).
One left-leaning commentator who takes the issue a little bit more seriously is Noah Smith, an economist. He points to two policies that have some evidence of raising fertility: universal childcare and paid parental leave. However, he points out that these policies are only capable of bumping the fertility rate up a few points, so cannot reverse a severe collapse.
Otherwise, he sees social engineering as a potential solution, such as in the Japanese city of Nagi, where above-replacement fertility is achieved by fostering a very pro-child culture (Israel may be another example). Finally… womb tanks. This would presumably lower the physical costs of bearing children for women.
Solutions: From the Right (Aporia Magazine)
While some on the right see high immigration as a potential cause of low fertility, this seems unlikely due to the geographically broad nature of the fertility crisis. Japan has almost no immigration and yet has had such low fertility that it is currently shrinking. Although it seems like Japan is beginning to open up on immigration, its fertility crisis clearly cannot be laid at the feet of migrants.
An interesting recent piece from Aporia Magazine examines the post-WWII Baby Boom and its causes as a basis for understanding our current fertility crunch. First, although total fertility declined from the mid-19th century, the number of children per woman that survived past infancy (net fertility), was surprisingly constant until around the First World War. The baby boom temporarily brought net fertility back to the pre-WWI level, before fertility declined sharply in the 60s to below replacement, remaining there ever since.
The piece argues that the Baby Boom was equivalent to a marriage boom. Fertility within marriage did not meaningfully change on average across Boom countries—in short, it was not married couples having more children, it was more couples getting married in the first place that caused a boom in births.
What caused the marriage boom? This piece argues it was driven by a rise in male status relative to females; male labor force participation and education both surged after WWII relative to women. The theory goes that since women tend to prefer marrying partners with equal or higher social status (and rarely marry men of lower perceived status than their own), an increase in average male status relative to women increases the number of feasible marriage pairs in a society.
Since the fertility rate of married people is much higher than non-married people, a marriage boom (more and younger marriages) will statistically lead to a baby boom.
The article then argues that the subsequent decline in fertility was due to a decline in marriage.
The piece argues that the decline in marriage was driven by liberal policy changes which began in the 1960s, for example, “no-fault divorce, normalization of premarital sex, delegitimization of marriage as the normative form of the family.” More broadly, the decline in male status relative to females has made it statistically more difficult for women to find “marriage material” partners, reducing the marriage rate and, therefore, the fertility rate.
Policies intended to raise female economic and social status have the unintended consequence, therefore, of lowering fertility. Such policies include affirmative action, progressive taxation, the rise in HR and other regulatory professions have raised female status relative to men, making marriage less likely.
Conclusion
Although we are experiencing an unprecedented global fertility crisis, we are not yet feeling its full effects. These effects are delayed but certain due to the inevitability of demographics. The 30-year-olds of 2053 are 1-year-olds today—there will be no more! This means that this issue will not be avoided… the only way out is through. Japan is the medium-term fate of most countries.
The causes of this crisis, whatever they are, are formidable. We know this because there are almost no global exceptions. In surveys, people report a relatively low desire to have children. In surveying the proposed solutions, the large segments of the political left still do not recognize the problem. Solutions are ill-formed, insufficient (university daycare and parental leave), or involve hand-waving (womb-tanks, some form of social engineering). On the right, proposed solutions are again either unpersuasive (ending immigration), insufficient (tax subsidies for births as in Hungary), or involve essentially a complete ideological regime change, abandoning core values like equality of the sexes, liberalism, or modernity itself. Even if we wished to make such reforms, it would require an enormous political revolution of some kind.
While poor countries, such as most of Africa, do not face a fertility crisis and will grow rapidly for the foreseeable future, rich countries will be able to forestall the problem through immigration, but likely at the price of rapid cultural change. This cultural change will potentially undermine the cultural values and institutions that made these countries wealthy to begin with. Medium-income countries are likely to decline rapidly in the medium-term, without immigration available as a relief valve. Indeed, migration is likely to be a net negative in terms of population.
The future is hard to predict, and the fertility crisis may be resolved by causes as unexpected as those that caused it. In the meantime, we must get used to living in a much grayer world.
It is worth mentioning that the replacement fertility rate is not a constant but a variable. It is usually said to be 2.1 in industrialized nations (mostly due to more boys being born than girls). But in poorer countries like Afghanistan and parts of Africa it can be upwards of 3 (mostly due to high infant mortality rate).
I have not been able to find a current value for the global replacement fertility rate but according to a research paper (https://sci-hub.se/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/B:POPU.0000020882.29684.8e) it was 2.33 in 2003. Most probably it is somewhat lower today. But it is still eerily close to the actual global fertility rate meaning that sometime very close to now the global population will actually stop reproducing itself fully.