The Case for Chilling Out About Birth Rates - The AtlanticEven if the fertility decline doesn’t reverse itself anytime soon, the consequences are unlikely to be apocalyptic. " data-next-head=""/>Even if the fertility decline doesn’t reverse itself anytime soon, the consequences are unlikely to be apocalyptic. " data-next-head=""/>Even if the fertility decline doesn’t reverse itself anytime soon, the consequences are unlikely to be apocalyptic. " data-next-head=""/>

Listen−1.0x+<br>Seek<br>0:0013:27

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.<br>Was there ever a time when people were not panicking about population? In 1798, the English economist Thomas Malthus wrote that “the power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.” Humanity, then just 1 billion strong, did not fall into the Malthusian trap. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, it instead underwent a huge expansion in both size and living standards.<br>More than a century later, when the world population stood at more than 2 billion, the new concern was impending shrinkage. In 1938, Joseph Spengler, an American economist, confidently predicted that “within the next quarter-century true depopulation—a persistent long-run excess of deaths over births—will manifest itself in nearly all the countries of Europe.” By the time Spengler’s deadline had passed, the postwar Baby Boom was in full swing and population concerns had reverted to Malthusianism. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a population biologist at Stanford, argued in The Population Bomb that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” and, regrettably, humanity had lost. In the next two decades, he warned, “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Instead, the world population went from 3.5 billion to more than 5 billion, living standards increased, and child mortality fell.<br>Today, as humanity numbers just over 8 billion, the concerns have reversed polarity once more. Right around the time of Ehrlich’s doomsday prediction, global fertility rates began a decline that has not stopped. In the United States, Europe, and even India, births are now below the replacement rate of 2.1 per woman. In 2024, South Korea reached a “total fertility rate”—a measure of how many children the average woman will have over her life—of just 0.75, which if held constant would mean that 100 Koreans should expect to have 14 grandchildren and only five great-grandchildren. (The country’s total fertility rate appears to have ticked up slightly since then.) Very few countries outside Africa are above replacement levels. On current trends, the global population may peak in the 2050s at 9 billion, at which point it would start shrinking—for the first time since the bubonic plague of the 14th century.<br>Marc Novicoff: Are men to blame for the birth-rate collapse?<br>Now the French worry about dénatalité; Hungarians talk about nemzethalál, national death; the Serbs call the baby bust bela kuga, “the white plague.” For prominent figures in the global New Right, depopulation is seen as a threat to civilization. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, has warned that without bold action, her country could be “destined to disappear.” Elon Musk regularly calls low birth rates the greatest threat to civilization. But this population panic may age just as poorly as the prior ones. Even if the fertility decline doesn’t reverse itself anytime soon, the consequences are unlikely to be apocalyptic.<br>All of these dire projections have relied on a simple mathematical construct: the exponential curve. When you extrapolate an exponential curve with a positive growth rate far out to the future, it ascends toward infinity. One with a negative growth rate descends toward zero. Ehrlich, for example, wrote that if the growth rates of the 1960s continued “for about 900 years, there would be some 60,000,000,000,000,000 people on the face of the earth.” (That’s 60 quadrillion.) Today, long-run predictions look equally dire in the other direction: Newspapers in South Korea warn about “extinction” by 2750; Japan has a running clock, a bit like America’s national-debt counter, ticking down the seconds until the country has only one child left—expected around August 2644.<br>The problem with these terrifying models is not the mathematics—a population that halves in size every generation will indeed eventually go extinct, just as one that doubles will eventually overrun the planet—but the assumptions. For such projections to be accurate, people would have to resolutely continue to have a certain number of children for centuries, up to the point of planetary exhaustion or human disappearance. They would have to stay the course even as this demographic decline transformed family structures, housing prices, labor markets, and the workings of the welfare state. Yet...