The world is experiencing a crisis that might already have gotten to the point where it’s too late to reverse.
It’s not climate change, the crisis that might come to mind for most people. It’s population.
Fears of a global “baby bust” are apparently becoming reality.
“The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened,” The Wall Street Journal reported last week.
Wouldn’t this be a positive development, considering that other crisis – climate change? Fewer people, fewer carbon emissions, slower global warming.
Perhaps. But many leaders in countries around the world see the “baby bust” as just as much of an urgent problem, the Journal said.
“They worry about shrinking workforces, slowing economic growth and underfunded pensions; and the vitality of a society with ever-fewer children,” said the newspaper. “Smaller populations come with diminished global clout, raising questions in the U.S., China, and Russia about their long-term standings as superpowers.”
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, for example, declared last year that the collapse of the country’s birth rate left it “standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”
Pope’s worry
Pope Francis, one of the world’s leading voices warning about climate change, is also very concerned about falling birth rates – so much so that for the past four years, he has taken part in the “General States of Natality,” a forum aimed at finding solutions to the demographic winter in Italy supported by the government and numerous companies. The average age in Italy is 47, and the fertility rate, which has been falling steadily in recent years and is one of the lowest in the world, was estimated in 2024 to be 1.26 children born per woman.
“At the root of pollution and world hunger are not children being born, but the choices of those who think only of themselves,” the Pope said at this year’s General States of Natality event, held May 10 in Rome. “The delirium of an unbridled, blind, and rampant materialism, of a consumerism that, like an evil virus, erodes at the root the existence of people and society.”
“Selfishness makes one deaf to the voice of God […] homes become filled with objects and emptied of children, becoming very sad places,” he continued.
The Pontiff then added spontaneously, there is “no shortage of doggies and kitties” but there is a “shortage of children.”
Efforts to reverse decline
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist specializing in demographics at the University of Pennsylvania, has examined the actual reporting by various countries of their annual births and has determined that the time when the global birth rate falls to or below the replacement rate of 2.2 is coming sooner than expected. National birth registries are typically reporting births 10% to 20% below what the U.N. projected, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“Fernández-Villaverde estimates global fertility fell to between 2.1 and 2.2 last year, which he said would be below global replacement for the first time in human history,” said the Journal.
Italy’s birth rate, cited above, while low, is actually pretty good compared with some countries: South Korea’s is 0.72.
Even Sub-Saharan Africa has shown a decline. The Journal noted that the share of all women of reproductive age using modern contraception methods in the region grew from 17% in 2012 to 23% in 2022.
Can it be fixed?
Efforts around the world to counter the falling birth rates have had mixed results. Even Hungary’s expansion of tax benefits for mothers – which includes a life exemption from personal income tax for women under the age of 30 who have a child – has yielded only a slight increase in fertility, according to the Vienna Institute of Demography.
As for the United States, the Journal said:
In the U.S., while state and federal legislators have pushed to expand child-care subsidies and parental leave, they have generally not set a higher birthrate as an explicit goal. Some Republicans, though, are leaning in that direction. Last year, Trump said he backed paying out “baby bonuses” to prop up U.S. births, and GOP Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake recently endorsed the idea.
Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio said falling fertility matters beyond the economic pressures of a smaller labor force and unfunded Social Security. “Do you live in communities where there are smiling happy children, or where people are just aging?” he said in an interview. Lack of siblings and cousins, he said, contributes to children’s social isolation.
He’s studied potential solutions, in particular Hungary’s approach, but hasn’t seen proof of anything that works over the long term.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found little evidence that pronatalist policies lead to sustained rebounds in fertility. A woman may get pregnant sooner to capture a baby bonus, researchers say, but likely won’t have more kids over the course of her lifetime.
The urgency, though, will become more widespread when the baby bust gives birth to worsening economies. As the Journal points out, an ever-shrinking pool of young workers means fewer people to pay for the healthcare and retirement of our older citizens.
As Pope Francis said at the General States of Natality forum earlier this month, “The number of births is the first indicator of a population’s hope. Without children and youth, a country loses its desire for the future.”
And today we celebrate...