We have a tendency to take any trend and extrapolate it far out in the future. This is done for both good and bad trends but bad trends tend to garner greater attention because they predict some kind of catastrophe.
One trend that is noteworthy is that of population growth. In my own lifetime I have seen fears about global populations reverse dramatically, from unchecked growth to problematic decline. In the 1970s, there were alarms that the runaway growth of population would result in a world where we would be crowded into a Soylent Green-like future with ever-smaller living spaces, where there was not enough food to feed everyone, leading to widespread violence and wars over access to scarce resources. One of the primary sources of these fears was the 1968 book The Population Bomb by Paul Erhlich, as recounted in an article by Gideon Lewis-Krauss.
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a lepidopterist, and his largely uncredited wife, Anne, published a best-seller called “The Population Bomb.” For centuries, economists had worried that the world’s food supply could not possibly be expected to keep pace with the growing mobs of people. Now there was no postponing our fate. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich wrote. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” This was the received wisdom of the era: a decade earlier, an only slightly flippant article in Science estimated that in November, 2026, the global population would approach infinity.
At that time, the population growth trend seemed inexorable and countries adopted drastic measures to try and curtail it.
“The Population Bomb” transformed regional unease into a global panic. India, in less than two years, subjected millions of citizens to compulsory sterilization. China rolled out a series of initiatives—culminating in the infamous one-child policy—that included punitive fines, obligatory IUD insertions, and unwanted abortions.
The irony is that Ehrlich’s book was published right at the time when the population growth rate had peaked and the trend was reversing. The fertility rates in many countries were dropping below the replacement rate of 2.1 where the population will be stable. As Victor Kumar writes:
In the mid-20th century, when my parents were born, India’s fertility rate was 6. It’s now 2.
India is a striking case, but fertility rates are declining everywhere. Between 1950 and 2021, the global fertility rate fell from 4.8 to 2.2. American women have an average of 1.6 children. Japan’s fertility rate is 1.2, South Korea’s a startling 0.75.
The global population is still growing, for now. But demographers project that humanity’s numbers will peak near the end of this century before beginning a steep decline.
Now alarm is about the decline in population and that we need to do something to bring it back up. It is possible that 2023 will be determined to be the year when the global fertility rate dropped below 2.1. But that does not mean the population will start dropping immediately if it does. The global population is still expected to grow for another fifty years only after which it will start to contract.
The article by Lewis-Krauss looks in detail at South Korea, which was in the vanguard of countries trying to curb population growth and was highly successful.
In the span of twenty years, Korea’s fertility rate went from six to replacement, a feat described by Asian demographers as “one of the most spectacular and fastest declines ever recorded.” A crucial part of this plan was the educational advancement of women, which the same demographers called “unprecedented in the recent history of the world.” Far fewer Koreans came into existence, but those who did enjoyed a similarly improbable rise in their standard of living. Parents who remembered hunger produced children who could afford cosmetic surgery.
But with that success came other problems, that due to the large fertility drop there, children are now scarce.
Portents of desolation are everywhere. Middle-aged Koreans remember a time when children were plentiful. In 1970, a million Korean babies were born. An average baby-boomer classroom had seventy or eighty pupils, and schools were forced to divide their students into morning and afternoon shifts. It is as though these people were residents of a different country. In 2023, the number of births was just two hundred and thirty thousand. A baby-formula brand has retooled itself to manufacture muscle-retention smoothies for the elderly. About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes, sometimes with the same directors, the same rubberized play floors, and the same crayons. A rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary.
…Outside of Seoul, children are largely phantom presences. There are a hundred and fifty-seven elementary schools that had no new enrollees scheduled for 2023. That year, the seaside village of Iwon-myeon recorded a single newborn. The entire town was garlanded with banners that congratulated the parents by name “on the birth of their lovely baby angel.” One village in Haenam, a county that encompasses the southern extremity of the Korean peninsula, last registered a birth during the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Haenam disappears into the sea at a windswept cape called Ttangkkeut, or “End of the World.” Not far away, there is a school that once had more than a thousand elementary-age students. When I visited, in November, it had five.
There are many reasons to be concerned about the drop in childbirths. In most societies, the young and middle aged largely make up the workforce and support the economies and the children and elderly. An age distribution that is skewed too heavily towards the elderly is seen as unsustainable economically since the tax base will shrink.
But there are also other less tangible costs when children become scarce.
To thrive, societies need young people. New generations drive economic growth, pioneer technologies, challenge outdated moral views, create art, and advance social change. They’re more likely to take risks, embrace new ideas, and imagine different futures. When we talk about population decline, what we’re really talking about is the gradual dissipation of this vital social force.
…Young people aren’t just members of society’s collective brain; they’re its most innovative neurons. Most breakthrough discoveries come from younger researchers and entrepreneurs. Social progress, similarly, depends on young people rejecting prevailing bigotry and replacing older generations.
…
The impact on creative activity will be no less profound. Young people have always been the main source of art, fashion, music, literature and film. As their numbers diminish, the future will become a cultural wasteland.
But not everyone shares in the dire view that declining birth rates, even below replacement levels, are bad. There are those who argue that the world is still too overpopulated, straining the available resources and that we need to drastically reduce birth rates and that deciding not to have children is a good thing. Some take this quite far. Shawn Hubler writes about the more extreme among the so-called new anti-natalists.
Online, however, anxieties including climate change and artificial intelligence have given it traction — as has the yearning for connection, even among people with antisocial tendencies. Scores of anti-natalist discussion boards, influencers and podcasts now debate whether all creatures should stop reproducing, or just humans.
The concepts have bled into pop culture. Thanos, the supervillain in two films from Marvel’s “Avengers” franchise, wants to eradicate half of the universe’s living beings because there are “too many mouths to feed.” The number of Americans who don’t want kids is rising, with many young people saying they don’t want to hurt the environment.
A few variants are even more extreme. An offshoot known as “efilists” — that’s “life” spelled backward — argues that DNA should also be destroyed. Pro-mortalism, the position Bartkus staked out, is less well defined. But it suggests that birth should be followed as soon as possible by a quick, consensual death.
The counter view promoting childbirth leads some to fear that it will stigmatize women who choose to be child-free and pressure them into making life-changing decisions they do not want.
Most left-leaning Americans are similarly distrustful of the pro-natalist discourse. Leigh Senderowicz, a feminist demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me, “There is fundamentally no way to do this that doesn’t end up treating women’s bodies as a tool.” According to the U.N., countries with pro-natalist policies tend to be less democratic. A baby-bonus initiative in Italy’s Piedmont region was given a name and logo that seemed an awful lot like an homage to Fascism. Eberstadt, the economist, told me, “In China, the mechanics are in place to say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Miss Wong, you can’t fly on airplanes anymore, because you’re unmarried.’ ” Local Party officials are already knocking on doors to track menstrual cycles. The Russian government recently passed a law that criminalizes “child-free propaganda,” potentially including the representation of a happily childless couple on television or social media.
Then there are those in the US whose fears about population decline is selective and pointed in a racist direction. They fear that fertility decline is largest among white people and if it continues, will result in the US dominated by people of color. Naturally, among this group are Trump and his Republican supporters.
Over the last several months, the Trump administration’s policies on immigration, families, and children have been pockmarked by all kinds of contradictions. The administration is reportedly considering numerous policies to convince people to have more children, such as “baby bonuses” of $5,000 or medals for mothers who have six or more kids. The Department of Transportation has issued a memo directing the agency to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”. And JD Vance has proclaimed: “I want more babies in the United States of America.”
These moves are, in part, fueled by the growing power of the pronatalism movement, which believes that the declining birthrate in the US is an existential threat to its workforce and its future.
Why, then, does the government want to exclude an estimated 150,000 babies born every year?
“It’s hard to look at any of these policies and not believe that they’re created for the purpose of satisfying a political base that was promised some sort of notions of recreating a nostalgia for a white Christian nationalist nation,” said P Deep Gulasekaram, a professor of immigration law at the University of Colorado Law School.
If the fate of the US workforce is really of concern, experts say immigration could help grow it – but the Trump administration has taken a hardline stance against immigrants from the Global South and their children. The administration has not only reportedly turned the refugee agency responsible for caring for children who arrive in the US alone into an arm of Ice, but also slashed funding for legal representation of children in immigration proceedings. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are trying to block parents who lack Social Security Numbers – such as undocumented people – from benefiting from the child tax credit, even in cases where their children are US citizens.
The idea that there is way to tune the population dial to arrive a some kind of magic, stable number of 2.1 fertility rate is likely a fantasy.
Countries have tried everything to reverse demographic collapse. In Hungary, women with four or more children gain a lifetime exemption from income tax. In Georgia, the Orthodox Patriarch offered to personally baptize any baby born to the parents of more than two children. Although some nations have stabilized at a low level, there is not a single modern example of one that has managed a sustained recovery from very low fertility to replacement. The world’s most lavishly pro-natalist governments spend a fortune on incentives and services, and have increased the fertility rate by approximately a fifth of a baby per woman. Some observers believe that subsidies could succeed, but they would have to be on the order of three hundred thousand dollars per child.
Some trends seems to be clear. As women get more equality and education and enter the workforce, they tend to have fewer children. As people become more affluent or aspire to a better lifestyle, they tend to have fewer children. So the fertility rate is likely to keep dropping but how far for each nation is not clear. The problem is that we do not know what the ideal population size should be (or even if that concept makes any sense) for any country or grouping, let alone the whole world. Hence we seem to be destined to have populations swing one way and then the other.
There is also a natural shift caused by health care. In the past and in areas with little or no good healthcare women had more children in the hopes that some would live to adulthood. The first generation that got good healthcare would see the number of young adults double or triple. Then population growth dropped back down as women had fewer children in the expectation that most would live to adulthood.
Experience around the globe shows that governments can be effective making people have fewer children but nobody has found a good formula for making women have more. Superficial encouragement with small cash payments and awards doesn’t help, nor does trying to force women into the role of child bearers.
Maybe the pro-natalist stuff would go further if they had more respect for women? Apparently Hungary has a child grant of ~5 years minimum wage, which given the parents are signing on for a job that takes at least 18 years seems to not be a great deal. Raising children is a lot of work, and people expect women to do it for free.
Also maybe teach men to be more use in families
Personally I don’t want to force all this bullshit on someone else and am happily sterile.
anti-natalist here, tho not a hard line one. i’m not very afraid of overpopulation, especially given the facts above, and the increasing odds environmental disaster and disease will reduce our numbers beyond most current predictions. i’ve just seen enough human misery to agree with those who say creating humans = creating suffering. i don’t like my position being mentioned in the same paragraphs as creepy death cult fuckoes, but then, i don’t like my atheism being mentioned in association with pretty much any famous atheist either, heh. glad to see the extreme of the pro-natalist position looks equally vile, just for balance.
Anti-natalism seems to have a huge range. Everything from “maybe dial down the pro-natalism a bit and let people choose for themselves” to “turn this planet into a beautiful dead rock”.
Another way to reduce population is murdering people you don’t like, or advocating for the organised murder of political opponents and actively and publicly supporting the release of people who have cold-bloodedly shot people you don’t like in the street.
I mean, that sounds stupid, right? Sounds like the worst nutjob rightwing fantasy world, for fans of animals like George Zimmerman, killer of Trayvon Martin. If *I* advocated such tactics I’d expect some pushback, up to and including being threatened with -- or more likely simply given without announcement -- a ban from posting here on the basis of being a horrible person. I’d expect to be accused of being a provocateur, or trying to attract security service attention and put people in this blog network at risk, getting them on a watchlist or similar.
Literally advocating shooting people seems the sort of thing you’d only be justified doing as part of a covert armed resistance to an invading army of foreigners, like for instance what the Dutch or the French got up to when the Germans settled in during the Second Minor Disagreement. It certainly seems over the top in a nation that does a good impression of being a democracy and which has NEVER been threatened with invasion in getting on for a quarter millenium.
And yet: https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/05/25/stop-punching-nazis/
This isn’t the blog network it used to be, it seems…
Being pregnant (constant doctor appointments during normal working hours, different clothes to accommodate a growing body, more food), having ($30k and up for an uncomplicated birth and the sky’s the limit for one with complications), and raising children is expensive--too expensive in a society that needs two (or more) full-time paychecks just to survive. That means the mother is the one working a full-time job while simultaneously being the caregiver to the children and also keeping the house and social engagements and family appointments. Being a mother is exhausting, particularly in a society with baked-in misogyny and unequal responsibilities expected of each parent. We saw the results in the Asian countries first--women choosing not to marry, and if they do, not to have children.
For now, women have the ability to use contraception to limit their families to what they consider manageable, and the backlash is the natalist movement. Conservative icon Phyllis Schafly--a working mother--made a career braying at women to not have a career. Consider “Dr.” (not a medical degree) Laura of the mid-1990s who insisted the only value a woman had was being “her kids’ mom”. Or the phony Duck Dynasty backwoods heroes who lectured men to marry very-young teen girls who had been badly educated, so they wouldn’t know to refuse the role of domestic slave/sex toy/babymaking machine. If the wife-bot breaks down, just get a new one. What we’re seeing now is just more of the same attitude.
Currently, under Republican laws, if a pregnant woman suffers a life-threatening complication of pregnancy, it’s a death sentence because doctors trained to save her life have either fled or are in fear of being stripped of their license and jailed.
Under these conditions, why would women want to have a truckload of kids, knowing each pregnancy was a roll of the dice as to whether it would kill her, and even if it doesn’t, she’ll never have a moment of her own for decades as she tries to balance four full-time jobs in a 24-hour day, often on little-to-no sleep? It’s against the Geneva Convention to torture soldiers by withholding sleep, yet mothers with children routinely endure it.
Hmm… what nation could you be referring to? Certainly can’t be the USA, unless you’ve been in a coma for the current calendar year.
On the current “We need more sotto voce: white babies” clamour, in order to fill all the jobs, you understand -- we’re simultaneously being told that “AI” is going to take all the jobs -- except, perhaps, those of the people telling us AI is going to take all the jobs. Another factor seldom considered is the possibility (I won’t try to assign a probability to it) that advances in medical sciece will significantly increase human lifespan* in the coming decades. That would further increase the proportion of older people, but more of them would presumably be able to work, and it would reinforce the trend for pension age to be increased.
*I don’t mean life expectancy -- which is still increasing quite rapidly in poorer countries, but only slowly if at all in rich ones. I mean signifcant slowing of the aging process, meaning most people live to 100 or more.
China may have some problems with their demographic structure as the population declines, yet they will be better off than India with a population that keeps growing while water resources clearly will not suffice!
Sonifrojblake @ 5
There is a difference between what we are willing to do and what we say in a moment of despair.
.
Myself I will not dignify the orange Mussolini imitator with a homicide, he ranks too low for being Abraham Lincolned. And his followers would make a martyr of him, like Horst Wessel.
However, when he is buried in a hopefully not too distant future -judging by his awful diet and lazy behaviour- I will cheerfully provide the flowers around his grave with plenty of nitrogen by watering it.
For further reference, listen to the Youtube discussion of Brit comedians about how to arrange Margaret Thatcher’s funeral.
Re. Myself @ 9 , and the British population dropping by one.
“Frankie Boyle on Thatcher’s Funeral”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=xmmomV-ax-s
From comments; “All of Ireland cried when they saw Thatcher’s grave and realised the dance floor wasn’t big enough for everyone”.
Instead of awarding cash and prizes to encourage a birthrate increase, there are better ways to go about this. You’d ideally try to do whatever it takes to ensure that young people can feel confident that they will have a decent future to look forward to. Societies or nations can do this by, at a minimum: 1. Don’t be racist fascists. 2. Don’t pollute the environment and overheat the planet. 3. Provide adequate employment/income and adequate healthcare. Easier said than done of course.
Why should economics be incompatible with more older people? Or put another way, why can’t economies be made that simply take more older people into account instead of doom and gloom about fewer young people? It seems to me that having different economies for different population structures should be possible.
Mano picks up the thread in the 1970’s, without mentioning that this is when the pill first becomes widely available. The only mention of birth control in this thread so far is in comment 6. It’s the original game-changer folks. Up to this point religions and social contracts created viable societies by trying to tightly guard young women, and then get them married off, because otherwise sex means pregnancies means children, and how are you going to take care of them? I don’t criticize that approach -- except for a few smaller and more isolated societies, it was the only viable approach. My generation (American, boomer) was the first to have a reliable alternative for sex without pregnancy. World-wide, we are still sorting that one out as societies. In the US, attacks on contraception, including abortion, are on the rise as the old order fights back. We have a weak cultural discussion on how we are restructuring relationships and families, because we don’t see the forest for the trees here. Part of that will eventually lead to an honest discussion of what families need (I hope). For starters in the US, compare what life-long services are traditionally provided for men who serve in the military versus women who bear children. Each is doing what we often consider the highest calling for their sex. Now add the overlay of funneling all the money to the billionaires, and we will have the interconnected significant pieces out in the open and we can talk.
They are correct. Human-caused environmental catastrophe scales with global population. If we don’t bring about negative growth the smart way, then a climate that is inimical to human life will accomplish the same thing with widespread suffering instead.
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite #12:
Because anything which one could come up with wouldn’t maximize profits for the wealthiest, so… unacceptable.
I don’t think they’ve noticed that the long-term demographic math doesn’t work out anyway. It takes 30 years to breed up another generation of 18-29 year olds. By that time, most of the Baby Boomers will be gone unless there’s been some major advances in life extension, and the old people will mainly be Generation X, who are the least populous generation -- so all those new young’uns wouldn’t be needed for the purpose they were birthed for. And if there are major advances in life extension by then, hopefully it would also be of the sort which would also make most old people functionally younger, in which case all those additional young people still wouldn’t be needed for eldercare.
@8 birgerjohansson
I’ve been looking at some UN fertility rate data and for a rather random sample of 15 countries, they all show a declining birthrate. India has dropped from 6 in 1665 to be teetering on ~2 (i.e. just about replacement value) in 2021 & 2022.
This does not cure the water problem but it does not look like there will be increased population pressure. From 1964 to 2022 de decrease in fertility rate is pretty much a straight line with r~ 0.99.
The USA graph is fascinating. Fertility rates seem to have dropped below replacement value starting in 1973 (± a bit), recovered back to roughly replacement value starting in 1990 and started dropping again in 2010.
@jrkrideau @16: the 1973 date in your last paragraph might be reflecting the widespread use of contraception--it was mostly restricted to married women when it first came out, but single women won the right to use it as time went on--and also the Baby Boomers finally aging out of bulk childbearing years. By 1990, Gen X is starting to start families, but not having the overwhelming mass of the Boomers, there simply aren’t as many women to have as many kids. There’s also the economic part of the puzzle: the 1970s were a bad time economically in the USA, and of course in the 1980s there was the Reagan recession and stock market crash that left people struggling with basic needs. By 1990 things had improved.
But having and raising kids is very expensive, and offering women a shiny pin to wear or even $5k is a slap in the face compared to the costs of having superfluous (white, of course) babies and raising them up to self-sufficiency. Affordable healthcare, affordable housing, confidence in employment, and a leader who’s not randomly assigning tariffs that change with the wind would go a long way to making women more confident about having more children--but that’s crazy-talk, it seems.
The larger question is whether we already have too many people. Anyone who was trying to travel over the holiday weekend will tell you that there are more than enough humans already here.
#5 sonof
Not much of a new development for him, just an iteration. He’s been an advocate for violence going back years now, buying into that internet warrior tough talk when ‘punch a nazi’ was trending among the progressive edgelords during Trump’s first go. When it was pointed out that even a single punch can occasionally be fatal, he and the other internet warriorz accepted this. The new development here is his encouragement to use a gun.
Not a trace of a hint that he’d do anything of the sort mind you, just encouragement for others to do it. Oh and bonus dishonesty points for comparing enduring Trump’s administration to World War II France.
We have plenty of people in the world, so much so that some build walls to keep them out, some send them away any way they can, some try to sink their boats, and others’ armies merely try to murder them all, with bonus points for dead or starving children. So what’s the problem? Oh we’re talking about the population decline of white people; as you were then.
Of course. The world is full of old men with beards exhorting young men (often with beards) to pick up guns and do the right thing. There’s always a terribly good reason why said old men can’t do it themselves, despite guns not being THAT heavy or in any way hard to get hold of in the sorts of #shitholecountry where this sort of thing originates.