The Great Depopulation - The Atlantic

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.<br>Why has the number of births declined everywhere, all at once?<br>Some blame technology, particularly smartphones and social media. Others blame a kind of 21st-century weltschmerz—a sadness about the state of the world and our uncertain future in it. A long essay in The New York Times by Anna Louie Sussman, titled “Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All,” argues that today’s generation is too anxious about the future to make the irreversible commitment of having a child.<br>So who is right? Is this about phones and technology, or is it a reflection of modern anxiety about the world? Or, perhaps, both?<br>Birth rates have been declining in developed countries for a long time, as child mortality has declined, as women’s education has increased, as female labor-force participation has soared, as contraception use has proliferated, and as modern notions of feminism have empowered women to take more control over their bodies and their economic futures. And birth rates have continued to decline as smartphone usage has surged, as housing prices have increased, as time spent at home on the internet has grown, and as socialization and coupling have declined.<br>The decline is accelerating faster than almost anybody predicted. As John Burn-Murdoch recently observed in the Financial Times, United Nations demographers predicted that there would be 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023; the real figure came in at 230,000. The total fertility rate has fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman in almost every country in North America, South America, Europe, and southern and eastern Asia.<br>“Only two things are important right now in life: fertility and deep learning,” the University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde said at the conclusion of a recent lecture. “Everything else is noise. Once you start thinking about these, it’s hard to start thinking about anything else.” I recently spoke with Fernández-Villaverde about why the birth rate is dropping, why it matters, and just how steep the decline is likely to get.<br>This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.<br>Derek Thompson: Why is fertility important?<br>Jesús Fernández-Villaverde: The number of children born today will determine how our society will look in 30 to 40 years. The year 2023 was a unique year in the history of humanity, because it’s the first time our total fertility rate as a planet fell below replacement rate. That has never happened before in 200,000 years. That means the world population will peak in another 30 years or so if the trend continues.<br>Thompson: Tell me what replacement level means and what total fertility rate means.<br>Fernández-Villaverde: Imagine you have a population of 1 million people. How many children need to be born for that population to be constant at 1 million in the long run? It turns out that for every woman in that population, you need 2.1 kids.<br>Why 2.1 and not 2.0? Two reasons. First, there are a little more boys born than girls, around 105 boys for every 100 girls, if you don’t do anything like selective abortions. Second, not all girls who are born will move on to become mothers themselves. They will die of accidents or other reasons before they enter their fertile ages. So you need every woman to have 2.1 kids on average to keep population constant. That’s the replacement rate.<br>The total fertility rate is an estimate of how many children women will have in a given population. When we look at the U.S. right now, the fertility rate is around 1.57. That means the average American woman is having 1.57 kids. Because the replacement rate is 2.1, a way to think about it is that we have a shortfall of slightly over 0.5 kids. There is a subtlety I want the audience to understand. The total fertility rate is an estimate. It’s slightly different from what we call “completed fertility.” Completed fertility is when I go back to women who are already 50 years old and see how many kids they actually had. The problem with completed fertility, which is what we really care about in the very long run, is that by definition it takes decades before we can compute it. So if we are going to make any forecast about the future, we cannot rely on completed fertility.<br>Marc Novicoff: The fertility crisis isn’t as bad as you’ve heard—it’s worse<br>Thompson: Given your educated estimate, what is the decade when the global population will start its structural decline?<br>Fernández-Villaverde: At this moment, I would say 2055. In 2055, the world population will start going down.<br>Thompson: If you go back to the 1960s and 1970s, it was common for public intellectuals to predict that the global population would rise and rise until the environment buckled and we suffered ecological disaster and widespread famine that wiped out billions of human souls. That has not...