Three-Quarters of Countries Face Below-Replacement Fertility by 2050 (nature.com) 243
Global fertility rates have fallen from five children per woman in the mid-twentieth century to 2.2 today, with approximately half of countries now below the 2.1 replacement threshold, according to data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
Mexico's rate dropped from seven children in 1970 to 1.6 in 2023. South Korea recorded 0.75 in 2024, down from 4.5 in 1970. The IHME projects over three-quarters of countries will fall below replacement level by 2050. A UN survey of 14,000 people across 14 countries found 39% cited financial limitations as a primary reason for not having children. China's population peaked around 2022 at 1.4 billion, while the U.S. Census Bureau predicts America's population will peak in 2080 at 370 million.
Mexico's rate dropped from seven children in 1970 to 1.6 in 2023. South Korea recorded 0.75 in 2024, down from 4.5 in 1970. The IHME projects over three-quarters of countries will fall below replacement level by 2050. A UN survey of 14,000 people across 14 countries found 39% cited financial limitations as a primary reason for not having children. China's population peaked around 2022 at 1.4 billion, while the U.S. Census Bureau predicts America's population will peak in 2080 at 370 million.
But by then (Score:4, Funny)
most people alive will be descendants of Elon Musk.
Give us a break (Score:3)
oh no (Score:2)
Who will work the field for the lord?
Re:oh no (Score:4, Funny)
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No wonder emergent techno-religious-political figures are strongly against birth control and women's rights and are already trying to erode both.
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Are you the man for the job?
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social media and the scrolling feature---tech savvy teens slowly winning the darwin award
Re:oh no (Score:5, Informative)
This is a result of many independent factors, though all of them are common to all countries in the developed world. I am not going to be able to list them all (nor even pretend to know them all) but I can give you some of the major ones.
1. In and earlier world, most people were farmers. Having children was a necessity: you needed to put those kids to work! This fueled and was fueled by a very pro-child culture and legal framework. All the dots connected. But now, children are a huge financial liability. Instead of helping produce income, they cost money (a whole lot of it for a very long time). So, the incentives are all wrong. People are just responding to those incentives.
2. There is no time to raise children. This is especially true since most families cannot afford to have a stay-at-home-parent to raise the kids. Both parents must work full time, and spend the money they earn on daycare, so someone else can raise their kids for them. Not only is this a barrier in-and-of-itself, but it reduces the expected emotional rewards of being part of a family.
3. High likelihood of divorce, terrible consequences to divorce. Back "in the day," divorces were extremely rare. People had very reasonable assurances that the partner they married would stick around and shoulder their share of the load until the kids were gone, and even stick around to face life's challenges together after that. These days, it's basically a coin flip, with no secret sauce that guarantees a lasting marriage. And when the split happens, the family's finances can be devastated and formerly-wealthy people are reduced to a poverty level existence, possibly for the rest of their lives. Regardless of the reasons why the laws are like this, the end result is clear: this legal environment is hostile to family.
4. Desirable alternatives. Working people have all kinds of ways to entertain themselves and self-actualize that weren't available to prior generations. The wealthier a country is, the more such opportunities there are. So, people have an easy choice: a difficult life of hardship and poverty with high risk of things ending badly (to have a kid), or, a life of luxury and self-actualization as a reword for a good job done. What are most people going to pick?
5. A romance-hostile culture. Especially this has been fueled by things like dating sites. People get wildly unrealistic expectations about what kind of a mate they merit, and refuse to settle, and much drama ensues. It produces a lot of single moms but not a lot of families. I will also add that our culturally-constructed ideal of marriage is one where two people fall in love, choose to marry each other, and live happily ever after. Once upon a time, in most places, marriages were arranged by the parents. That sounds ghastly to us now. "But what if I don't love the person I get stuck with????" Well, as unpopular a fact as this is, most people don't love the person they get stuck with because love is a temporary emotion most of the time. Even when it does endure through the years, its nature changes significantly. The difference is, you are stuck with a partner that you picked while young, stupid, and drunk on hormones. Whereas in the old day, your partner was chosen for you by people who were mature, wise, objective, and had your best interest at heart.
We can't turn back the clock. The entire interconnected set of cultural, legal, and religious values that produced a highly fertile world is simply gone. And much of it is gone for very good reasons that have nothing to do with fertility. But these consequences are here nonetheless. I personally think it is possible to forge a new path forward that applies the new cultural values in an intelligent and equal way, but, it will require that a lot of people overcome some very strong biases and pettiness, so I don't have my hopes up.
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When everybody lived on farms
You and the OP make it sound like urbanization is a recent thing. Urban dwellers still pop out kids, just not as many. The net result though, is that it doesn't take many other factors (most likely economic related) to push the birth rate below replacement.
Plus, if the economy got bad in ye olde farming days, you'd still need kids to work your farm. But if you're thinking your kid isn't going to be able to earn a decent living because all the housing in your area starts at a half million and AI is taking
Re:oh no (Score:5, Insightful)
When everybody lived on farms, you had several generations living in the same household, so you had someone to watch your kids while you were working. Since the marketing geniuses convinced us all to live in small "nuclear family" homes and put the old folk in nursing homes, we now have to choose between career and kids.
We're also waiting so long to have kids that grandparents are too old to help with grandkids. I'll be lucky to even live long enough to meet my grandkids.
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Old people are getting older as we are getting better at keeping people alive. Unfortunately we are not good at keeping brains healthy, so we now have an "epidemic" of dementia because Pele ate living long enough to get it. You can't like after someone like that yourself. At a certain point they need 24 how care. That's a job for the professionals.
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Good list. I'd also add the views on the chances of a global war affecting the first world also influence this. If you think it will happen, you might not want to bring kids into it. If you're of the opinion it won't happen, and to a point the fact that it hasn't happened since WWII, then that also reduces the need to have a larger number of children to defend your country or allies.
I'd also add availability of birth control and changing attitudes toward unexpected pregnancy have played a part.
Re:oh no (Score:4, Interesting)
In the ye olde days, there were not as many distractions after dusk. Some got bedtime action after candles were blown. Nothing else to do.
Child mortality has been reduced a lot. It was normal to aim for three or four kids, and one may die early. Nowadays you set for one, and most likely they will outlive you.
I know people that started working at the age of 14. Now it is normal not to start working before 25. It delays few things a lot, including the access to the vile money.
Having a local community makes it wonders to get alike mindsets. Having a car, or even forced to own a car, means things are not local anymore. Couples may come from different upbringing. Also, TV poisons the mind of the young, giving them bad ideas.
Force military service showed you a world without women around, at least in the past.
Healthy population means that people do less alcohol and fewer drugs.
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Malthus was wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Malthus was wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not if you just paid $3M for a 1ksqft box in the silicon valley, then it's really bad news.
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Because the country loses population equally?
Re:Malthus was wrong. (Score:4, Interesting)
I am more convinced with each passing year that the global population is much closer to peak than we think. In the 1990s, the peak was expected to be around 2080-2100. By 2010, the forecast moved to 2070-2080. More recent forecasts have suggested 2050-2060. I'm thinking that some of the more aggressive forecasts that see the global population peak before 2050 are right. After that -- and maybe before it, in some cases -- we're going to have to figure out how the new economy works, because expanding markets will become a thing of the past.
Re:Malthus was wrong. (Score:4, Interesting)
After that -- and maybe before it, in some cases -- we're going to have to figure out how the new economy works, because expanding markets will become a thing of the past.
It's possible immigration will sustain first world populations for a while after so while what you say is an inevitability it might be a ways beyond when we hit peak population that this becomes a first world problem. Particular since the first decade or so of global population decline really won't be that dramatic.
For the US this will largely depend on what the economic state of the Western hemisphere is.
One silver lining in all this is we'll have a few countries to learn from prior to experiencing this problem ourselves. Japan in particular is already in the early stages of dealing with population collapse and it doesn't look like they're going to do anything about it so we'll all get to see how they deal with it.
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Ah, right. Well they'll both make good case studies that we can hopefully learn from.
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So,,.why are people not fucking anymore?
Is it the rise of militant feminism?
Microplastics/hormones in the water/food?
Surely it didn't just quit being pleasurable to people?
As far as I know there's no proper answer for you on this front other then it's complicated and likely stems from a lot of stuff.
Personally I think it's two main things. The first is women being in the work place (which I do support) means less time for families.
The other thing I think is a big driver though is the range and abundance of entertainment we have available to us nowadays. Go back a hundred years and what the hell else were you going to do with your time besides have a family? I think about how
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Affordability. Housing is too expensive and renting does not provide stability. Children cost a lot of raise, especially educating them, and degrees are required for even lower mid level jobs these days.
Having children also damages women's careers, while giving men a slight bump (on average). You could argue it's a choice they make, but the reality is that men need there to be children, most of them want there to be children, but don't share the burden fairly.
Another factor is climate change. Young people s
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You're mostly rehashing incel talking points. The majority of the decline in the USA is from people who are having families, choosing to have smaller ones. If the average "traditional family" was popping out a Brady Bunch's worth of kids, that'd more than make up for all the incels, gooners, feminists, and LGBTQ+ folks who are typically scapegoated as the undoing of the human race.
Here's the thing: Ever play Oregon Trail? Accidents and disease used to wipe a lot of us out. You'd have a lot of kids beca
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"But we can feed up to 20 billion!" you say, and to that the factual rebuttal is, sure, but food isnt the only equation.. Humans are using too much of the total biomass, reducing biodiversity, we produce more waste per lbs of biomass than most other lifeforms on the planet, etc. We're a virus on this planet and everywhere we go, even with the best intentions, we ruin ecol
Re: Malthus was wrong. (Score:2)
You're dead on.
The simple reality is the entire western world is ALREADY below replacement fertility... And for most countries it is WAY below. China is also WAY below, and India is barely at replacement and declining rapidly. Almost all population growth is coming from Africa.. and as countries there develop, it's going away as well.
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In my macro economy classes, it has been repeatedly "proved" that having less population is beneficial for the wealthy. My inner conspiracy theorist is 100% sure that the whole LGBTOMGWTFBBQ propaganda is mostly there because THEY decided that promoting anything other than a traditional family, which known to be the most children-friendly, will make them richer in the end. My inner skeptic is unsure, but acknowledges that the conspiracy theorist has a point.
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Why on earth would less consumers be good for the wealthy?
Never mind your ridiculous gay people conspiracy.
Look at history... (Score:2)
Ever notice how they built all those big fancy palaces before the world's population hit a billion?
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Less consumers equals less economic activity which is bad for the people who own or have by far the most stock for most of our companies. This is regardless of the building activities of the incredibly few wealthy people (relative to population and today's number of wealthy) that existed a few hundred years ago.
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Rich people make their money by population too. People are customers, and the richest people generally sell to the most customers.
Mark Zuckerberg isn't rich by extracting a billion dollars from multiple billionaires, it's from extracting tens of dollars from billions of people.
This generally holds true for all sorts of rich people. There's absolutely money in luxury brands, but the really rich people generally get less money from more people.
Ferrari makes less money than Ford for example.
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Not if all the single family housing stock is being bought up by corporations to rent them out, since the surviving children will always take top dollar in cash (with no inspection) from a corporation rather than a mortgage from an actual family.
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I would argue that the argument that goes: western economies are built on growth models massively understates the problem.
There is an argument to be made that as population shrinks you loose enough people to fill the diversity specialty fields. This means that even if you had an economic system that was not growth dependent, you will go backwards in technology as you loose the diversity of specialization needed to maintain and advance.
There is also the question of supporting the elderly that can no longer
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The net result will probably be that real estate prices, based on supply and demand, stop going up 10% every year... isn't that a good thing?
They won't, because corporations will keep buying homes.
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That might hold for a bit but eventually they wont have enough people to rent to and then property becomes a pretty crappy investment.
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My guess is probably not; with no one to inherit houses, Blackstone probably keeps turning everything that should have been inherited into a rental, and the labor market gets tight so folks looking to retire in their homes end up with a lot of pressure to ... sell it off to Blackstone.
I'm doomsaying a little; stylistically I like post-apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi... but I am genuinely skeptical that the current housing problem is "too many people" rather than "too many rent-seekers."
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Need the last quarter (Score:2)
Now, if we can just get that last quarter down below replacement rate, we can finally start decreasing the population.
Honestly we probably have (Score:2)
So the population kept shrinking even though we were at replacement for some time. It turns out the replacement rate is 2.7 not 2.1. I haven't gotten deep into the studies to figure out why they were off by so much but that does appear to be the case and it's the explanation for rapidly declining populations.
Remember to that although a quarter of the planet has a net positive birth rate it immediately starts drop
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Do you know what also happened to Japan in the early 90s? The crash of the 80s bubble economy, and the resulting almost 40 years of stagflation.
When people have uncertain futures many will opt to not have children, or just one child.
Changing up society to not require both parents working which then complicates childcare would cause a major shit.
But expectations also have to change, you can't be leveraged out the wazoo and busy running little Timmy to sports ball 1, and then sports ball 2, then art class, sw
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I don't think blaming "uncertain futures" is quite it. The countries with the highest birthrates are those with the highest rates of poverty. Many people are having children they don't even know if they can feed, let alone house and educate. The reason is 1) they don't have easy access to birth control and, 2) they have not gone through the cultural shifts required to accept birth control and smaller families. But that's quickly changing in the developing world. Birth rates have been heading down in India a
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Switching from farming to an urban society and birth rates as a whole will drastically fall in a country.
But in the US during the Great Recession that began in 2008, birth rates were down for several years. After 2012-2016 when things recovered did people have kids.
Many people are also putting off having children until their mid 30s if not later which leads to greater risks of complications.
Yes there are people who want a large number of children who aren't discouraged and only end up with one. But many peo
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.......so....except for all the countries above the replacement rate, every country is at or below the replacement rate.
Thanks for that amazing insight, Dr. Watson.
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From the summary the current world wide fertility rate is 2.2 and falling, 2.1 is the rate required to maintain populations where literally on earth are you going to find more people if falls another 0.2?
https://ourworldindata.org/fer... [ourworldindata.org]
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Be careful what you wish for though. What this creates are further societal problems in the form of a geriatric-heavy population in the 75% of countries with a negative populati
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I'll be dead within six months to a year.
My interest in future societal problems is extraordinarily limited.
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Oceania? Papua New Guinea really pulling up the averages I guess.
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the bees... (Score:2)
The bees shall show the way.
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Good (Score:3)
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Not a bad thing but our capitalist overlords are worried since their profits are dependent on continuous growth.
Lower population is good for health and the environment but bad for big business.
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Many businesses operate with stable revenue, not growing.
There will probably be some discomfort as all the MBA's heads explode- but they'll figure it out quick.
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Not just the capitalists, our who societies have been built on that faulty assumption.
After WW2 there was a baby boom, and the policies were set based on the assumption that the population and economy would continue to grow. For example, there used to be a lot of really good pensions, and the UK state pension is locked in to better than average increases every year. Healthcare too. It was assumed we would keep expanding housing stocks, because NIMBYs were not really a thing back then.
In the 1950s there were
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Because who is going to change your diaper and feed you your applesauce when you can no longer do it yourself?
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A robot probably. But I doubt I will live long enough to decline that's much anyway.
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and yet (Score:2)
Re: and yet (Score:2)
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Money might contribute a bit but I don't buy it as a primary driver considering it's the poor in most societies that breed the fastest and it's some of the poorest nations that are still growing. This is why those countries that have gotten aggressive with their family aid, parental leave, and what not havent seen much in the way of results in terms of increasing their birth rates.
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Sometimes.
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immigrants
Illegals.
typical maga chud, anonymous and wrong. only due process can determine if laws have been broken.
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Past performance not indicative... (Score:4, Interesting)
Humans are really, really good at looking at long term slow problems and solving them. For this reason predictions based on past performance rarely turn out to be true. About the only real world one that looks to be coming true is global warming, and even there we have made significant progress. Renewable energy sources are thriving.
It's the stuff that happens fast/surprise etc. that really changes the world. Cell phones, AI, etc.
The reason why we have not fixed the slowing population growth is that it has not yet hit us at all. Our population is still growing in most countries, particularly the US due to immigration.
The main country that has a real, current problem, is South Korea.
And we know the issues with South Korea - mainly the corporate culture. When you are expected to spend Friday night getting drunk with your BOSS rather than at a bar picking up woman, and also are expected to work more overtime than in the US, it becomes hard to meet someone, get married, and raise a child.
The truth is South Korea knows how to fix their problem, they just don't want to yet. Here is what they could do:
1) Ban the sale of Alcohol from 5 PM till 8 PM on Friday night. Nobody is going to stick around with a sober boss for 3 hours.
2) Change their 90 day maternity leave (with 120 if twins), to 120 day PARENTAL leave. Letting both parents off for 4 months evens the playing field so women would be more likely to do it.
3) Lower the attendance requirement from 80% to 75% for parents of children under the age of 16.
If you do these things, then you get rid of the main issues that have caused the problems with S Korean birth rate. I.E. let people date rather than require them to drink with a bitter old man that does not want to go home to his wife, put the woman on equal footing with the men so they do not feel they are losing out their carreer, and admit that children require more time off.
Re:Past performance not indicative... (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans are really, really good at looking at long term slow problems and solving them. For this reason predictions based on past performance rarely turn out to be true. About the only real world one that looks to be coming true is global warming, and even there we have made significant progress. Renewable energy sources are thriving.
What? Humans are awful at that and global warming is a great way to illustrate. As a planet we've know about it for several decades and did largely nothing about it for the first few. Then when we started seeing vague symptoms we actually started doing something about the problem. We are now WELL behind where most of the world would have liked to be, limiting the temp change to 1.5C is impossible at this point.
We haven't even halted the increase in global warming emissions yet let alone started decreasing them and all we're doing right now is going after the easy stuff we actually know how to do. We are not doing well at solving this problem.
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Like I said Global warming is the one exception we have not solved yet worldwide.
Here are things that humans have turned around, mostly in my life span.
1) Lead poisoning
2) CFCs
3) Asbestos
All of these things we had major problems and now they are mostly gone.
There are a whole bunch of stuff that the US has turned around, even if the rest of the world has not (coal use, extinction rates, renewable energy use up)
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Those things all catch up to a person in a few decades, they aren't what I would call "long term" problems at all. We didn't even solve them all that quickly either, plenty of people died before we accepted the science and stopped letting companies profit from shit that they new was killing people.
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CFCs and Acid Rain are two from my lifetime that seems to have been fixed/reversed before they had much real world impact.
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Now those are two good counter examples as I completely agree that we solved both of those fairly quickly after acknowledging the problem. I remember the extrapolation of the problem of acid rain in cyberpunk books I used to read when I was a kid, none of that came to pass.
I'm not saying it's impossible for humanity to solve long term problems in a timely manner though, I'm just saying we're bad at it and the above's examples work well to support my point.
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Humans are really, really good at looking at long term slow problems and solving them.
Technically true. But humans are also just very bad about caring about it, generally speaking.
The reason why we have not fixed the slowing population growth is that it has not yet hit us at all
Right, we're waiting for it to happen fast / surprise us because we are not sufficiently motivated.
This is a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Endless growth is impossible, we need steady state sustainability
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You need a cooperative society for that (Score:2)
We are going to have tens of millions of people who simply are not able to generate enough wealth and productivity for the corporate class to justify their continued existence past the age of 60. In other words they aren't going to have enough money save
Re:This is a good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
100%. The world was fine in, pick a year say 1990 with around 5 billion people. If the world were to move the needle back to 5 billion it would be such a more pleasant place. The tech for renewable energy would easily support that population, so energy costs much lower. The earth as a biosphere would be able to (eventually) heal to also a level able to support people and a natural environment. As others have pointed out it's the socio-economic contract that needs to start changing. The 1930's version we have in the US today will not carry us beyond the 2030's. Nor will the idea of spending beyond our means just for the sake of spending.
The doomers are as best I can tell, worried about who will take care of them. Which is ironic since many of them have spent the latter part of their lives doing all the bad stuff that will require long term care...e.g terrible diets, pathetic lack of physical fitness, crapping on the immigrants most likely to take that bedpan job, and so forth. Not everyone of course, but as a block pretty accurate. I mean go to any Senior Assisted Living place in middle America and you will see what I mean (I have and do)
Side note...the idea that Musk and that Durov character are spreading their 'seed' to ensure...I dunno what is hilariously naïve to anyone who actually parents a child to maturity. Especially as their offspring veer from their biologicals father's intentions. Nuture over nature. You have to put in the time (years of time) to get the results you want.
It's weird reading old sci-fi (Score:2)
I just saw a video about Logan's run where people commit suicide at 30 (21 in the book). And it's just kind of silly and pointless.
From what I've read the average woman wants 2.6 kids and replacement rate is 2.7. meaning that when you ta
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Amnesty Now! (Score:2)
Stop pining for only white babies, you bigoted zealots!
Give it a rest (Score:2, Informative)
1. Nobody's "pining for only white babies", well except perhaps for the bigots at Planned Parenthood, which was founded by infamous eugenics freak and fave KKK guest speaker Margaret Sanger (who wanted to reduce the number of brown people by aborting them). The "pro life" folks in the US have been for halting abortions, which would necessarily INCREASE the proportion of black and brown children in the country. Hint: even noticed which communities have historically been home to most abortion facilities? Your
We passed peak total world IQ a long time ago (Score:2)
Hopefully total world IQ will drop more slowly than total world population.
Meanwhile, all those ecosystems we've been pillaging to provide food, clean water, energy, waste disposal, etc. for a growing population can start recovering, if we manage to avoid hitting a tipping point in the meantime.
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Good (Score:2)
Unlimited growth on a finite planet is stupid.
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And where do we stand in regards to Zanzibar?
And? (Score:4, Interesting)
Great news for home buyers (Score:2)
Gen Alpha (2013-2024) and Gen Beta (2025-2039) may have a real shot at home ownership when Boomers and half of Gen X are gone and there's fewer Gen Beta to replace them.
Gen Gamma, assuming humanity makes it that far, will perhaps see an era of change for humanity. I think we could either be enslaved by AI, or starting settlements on other planet. Perhaps even planning generation ships to colonize planets beyond our Solar system. Actually finishing and launching them will take decades if not a full century,
And thats important why...? (Score:2)
Defuising the Population boom (Score:2)
I am firmly in the camp that considers this good news.
While we have enoughr resources to keep everyone sheltered, feed and healthy, that is what we do to pets.
For humans we have to strive to go beyond, to allow every single human on earth to achive his/her true potential, and we do not have enough resources for that...
So better we reduce the population until the number of humans is such that each human can achieve his/her full potential.
JM2C, YMMV
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Long run (Score:2)
In the long run, this is good news for the planet. There will be a fair bit of medium-term economic pain, though.
They finally realized that breeding like rats (Score:2)
Only ensures a lack of resources and continual poverty.
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Additional bonus is that all the kids look very similar to the chiropractic and he is quite handsome..
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This is funny. Not because of the pseudoscience, but because you missed the fundamental understanding of what fertility rates in a population are. It is NOT the ability to conceive and give birth to a child - it's the count of actual children born. And more of that has to do with personal choices, like not being able to afford to have children.
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