#WTH Where have all the people gone?

Eberstadt on global depopulation

Nick Eberstadt is one of our rock-star colleagues at AEI. Indeed, in the nerd-dom that we inhabit, he is nerd royalty. For decades, he has laid bare the terrible realities of China’s evil one-child policy; helped us understand why first the Soviets and then the Russians have declining life expectancy (booze, “accidents,” and now war); explained the growing phenomenon of American men who do no work; bemoaned the uninterest of American criminal justice reformers in the fate of the nation’s millions of ex-felons; and now flagged the impending depopulation of the world, the first time in recorded human history that we are tipping towards fewer and not more inhabitants on planet earth… by choice. Nick writes that 70% of humanity now lives in countries with below-replacement fertility rates.

Many who spend precious little time thinking about demography and economics are quick to leap to a Malthusian response — fewer people is better! More food for the rest of us! More housing! More lebensraum. Don’t be so quick to rejoice. As Nick tells us, the scenario of depopulation has been most interestingly explored not by social scientists, but by science fiction writers. Nor is America, which has always been immune to population busts à la Europe and Asia, far behind. Nick writes:

The United States remains the main outlier among developed countries, resisting the trend of depopulation. With relatively high fertility levels for a rich country (although far below replacement—just over 1.6 births per woman in 2023) and steady inflows of immigrants, the United States has exhibited what I termed in these pages in 2019 “American demographic exceptionalism.” But even in the United States, depopulation is no longer unthinkable. Last year, the Census Bureau projected that the U.S. population would peak around 2080 and head into a continuous decline thereafter.

Think about the challenge this way: Most developed societies are constructed based on a model of continuous growth. Today’s workers pay for today’s retirees, today’s young people generate the innovations that propel economic growth, and right now in America, the heavy burden of graying populations is borne by a thick layer of young people and young immigrants. That won’t be the case in the future. The social safety nets the Left adores will be unsustainable, and the increasingly insolvent U.S. social security system will collapse.

Then think more about the health burden of a society weighted towards the elderly who live longer and longer. Or don’t think about it — just look at China. While we shouldn’t confuse cause and effect, it’s not crazy to think about the impact of China’s shrinking youth demographic. In China, of course, decades of forced abortion to enable the one-child policy also means fewer women to marry as well. What is a society like with an overwhelming number of unattached men? Likely not a peaceful society.

Here’s another question that we’ve posed before as well: Who makes up the military in such countries? How do parents with one child (increasingly common) feel about losing their only child to war? You can be sure that countries where forced conscription is the norm will have an edge over nations with all volunteer militaries. What will that mean? Not less war; just less victories for the forces of freedom.

The prime driver of lower birth rates is, Nick explains, what women want. And increasingly, women don’t want children. Why? It’s not entirely clear. What is clear is that pro-natalist policies (in China, France, etc) don’t work. Cash rewards seem to have little relationship to choices about whether to have children, and threats don’t work either.

It’s also fascinating that there are almost no exceptions to this phenomenon. Calcutta and Calais are experiencing the same population implosion. So are Muslims and Christians. The only place that is above replacement right now is sub-Saharan Africa, and Nick says that’s not far behind. Does that mean that the future of the world is dominated by Africa? Probably not. Here’s how he explains that:

My two theories about this, for what they’re worth, are that optimism about the future has always been a key to American birth rates. As Gen Z grows ever more morose about their nation and their own future, Greta Thunberg style, the decision not to have children seems natural. And globally, though this is almost impossible to measure, the one thing we see clearly is that phones are increasingly a substitute for human relationships. All these factors, and more, point towards a more dystopian future, which is nothing to celebrate.

HIGHLIGHTS

You have written that not only is the world about to depopulate for the first time since the Black Death in the 1300s, but it is also the first time humans will depopulate by choice. Why is that so significant?

NE: Well, know that human numbers in total have dropped before in the past, but within historical memory it's always been due to calamity. It's been due to mortality crises, either caused by famines or the rest of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

What's on the horizon now is a first for our species, which would be a long-term shrinking of human numbers in a non-catastrophic fashion, not caused by mortality crises. We expect that orderly material advance is going to be continuing, health is going to be continuing to improve. It's because of choices that people all over the world are making about their family size, choosing to have such a small number of children that population wouldn't replace itself.

Why is this era of depopulation happening now and is this unexpected?

NE: The obviously good news is that all around the planet, life expectancy is getting longer and longer. Death rates are getting lower and lower. Health is getting better and better. The life expectancy at birth has more than doubled since the beginning of the 20th century, and there's no sign that that trend is going to stop.

What's astonishing is the rapid spread of what might call sub-replacement fertility of childbearing patterns, let's say, two or fewer children becoming kind of the norm in places you just wouldn't have expected. And you don't hear much about it because this isn't like an asteroid strike. This isn't like sudden news. It's quiet, and it's on the basis of hundreds of millions of decisions that prospective parents or parents are making.

Just to give you an example, Calcutta, which I first visited about 50 years ago, Calcutta now is a place where an average of one birth per woman per lifetime prevails. It's lower than Europe, it's lower than North America, it's even lower than Japan. Or you go to Bogota, less than one birth per woman per lifetime. Mexico City is now reporting less than one birth per woman per lifetime. Mexico's birth level last year was lower than the US birth level, for the first time since people have started collecting these numbers.

You see this pattern not just in East Asia, but in South Asia, Southeast Asia, strangely in parts of the Umma in the Middle East as well, throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, in places that account for 2/3 or 3/4 of the world's population today.

DP: I want to follow up about this because I understand this as a First World phenomenon. You understand why the wokerati of America don't want to burden the climate any further, and ditto for Europe. You can see the arguments there and you can also see the rise of a welfare state that creates dependencies that preclude having children and certainly preclude having children at a young age.

What I don't understand is the other places you mentioned, right, Calcutta. But if you remember years back, we talked also about the precipitous fall in birth rates in Tehran, in Iran. In Iran, people are not worried about burdening the climate. They're not Harry and Meghan Markle saying they'll only have two children to virtue signal. How do you explain the regional anomalies?

NE: It's happening in all sorts of places that have no apparent connection to each other. All sorts of places that are not OECD rich, affluent democracies.

The extreme cases are in a way the most fascinating. So Nepal and Burma, Myanmar, are both on the UN's list of least developed countries, on the fragile states, impoverished populations. Widespread illiteracy. Rural life for many. They're also both now sub-replacement fertility countries. They both are places where the average level of childbearing isn't high enough to sustain long-term population stability.

So whatever is going on is coming in a lot of different varieties in different places in the world, that it seems to be encouraging local parents to embrace radically different ideas about family life from the ones that their parents had or their grandparents or previous traditions. But it's happening almost everywhere at the moment. Except in the sub-Sahara and a few Muslim-majority countries.

Is this age of depopulation coming in part because of a rise in global prosperity?

NE: Well, Marc, you're surely right that the world is richer than it's ever been. It's healthier than it's ever been before. It's more educated than it's ever been before. It's more urban than it's ever been before. And all of those tendencies we associate with smaller family size. So to the extent that those drivers are affecting taste for children, let's say, desire for children. We've got pressures that would be bringing lower family size as a norm all around the world.

But the fascinating thing here though is the exceptions. At the same time that the world is getting richer, better educated, better fed, the threshold for below replacement childbearing patterns is dropping all around the world. We're seeing new examples of low-income countries, countries where education hasn't made much inroads, with a fair amount of illiteracy, rural populations, impoverished populations, where birth rates are dropping or plummeting as well.

And this takes us back to the very beginning of what became the march to below replacement fertility around the world. The non-catastrophic drops in birth rates began in Europe in the 18th century, but they didn't start in England. They did not start in the most advanced, developed country in Europe. They started in France, which was a lot poorer than the UK, less educated, more rural, impoverished, and not to find a point on it, Catholic. So even from the very beginning, whatever it was that was driving this march to smaller families, was in effect.

You mentioned that some Muslim-majority countries are bucking the trend, how do Muslims in Europe and Muslim-majority countries compare to Western nations?

NE: The fastest drops in birth rates in the post-war era have mainly been in Muslim-majority countries. And that's not because they're socioeconomic modernizers like Taiwan, something else is happening. And in Europe it's a very mixed bag, Marc. The immigrants from Muslim majority countries who seem to be assimilating the best, and I'm thinking of people like from Indonesia in the Netherlands. Their birth levels are indistinguishable from native Hollanders. In places where they're not fitting in as well and I'm thinking of people like from Pakistan and the UK, there's still big differences in birth rates.

Is the rise of the smartphone and the global addiction to your smartphone contributing to peoples’ choice not to have kids?

NE: I cannot prove this, but I wonder exactly the same thing because if you look at the spread of the smartphones around the world, and they are almost everywhere now. The overwhelming majority of adults on this planet have got some version of a smartphone. If you look at the saturation, it's got a really fascinating correspondence to this acceleration of the drop in the birthrate. And it makes me wonder whether we aren't seeing some sort of strange new version of the Narcissus gaze looking through the other side of the screen. And I can't prove it, but I can tell you we've never had as many people in the world and there's so much loneliness. And I think the smartphone is part of this loneliness epidemic too.

How will depopulation change the global economy?

NE: Everything is going to change. All of the things that are familiar to us about social arrangements and economic arrangements, maybe even political arrangements, kind of presuppose as elevator music. The idea that there could be more of us and within lifetimes, within existing lifetimes, that's all going to flip around. And so there's going to have to be a massive relearning and an absolutely pervasive set of adaptations to a new world where smaller and older is the new norm. Now I'm not as frightened about this as some who described this prospect. I lived through the population explosion and the things that people wrote, the apocalyptic things that people wrote about what was going to happen as human beings kind of like locust the world, wildly off the mark. And one of the great doomsayers was a professor at Stanford named Paul Ehrlich. I mean, he's a tenured professor in population biology, so you'd think he might know what he was talking about, and he did.

But what he knew about was the biology of insects. I mean, if we were insects, his prophecies would've come true. But we're humans and humans are the most inventive and adaptable of the species on the planet, which is why I tolerably confident that we're going to be able to adapt to this too. We won't be able to keep the pay-as-you-go welfare state. That's going to be a doom loop when there are fewer earners than recipients. But as long as we continue to increase our productivity, our health, our knowledge, I think we're going to be able to maintain and improve wealth and prosperity even in a shrinking aging world.

Why do you caution readers to not mistake the continuing population rise in sub-Saharan Africa for an “African Century”?

NE: What's happening in Africa is what's happening everywhere else. It's just a little bit more delayed. We now see Republic of South Africa down to replacement level. It looks like it's on a path to be the first continental Sub-Saharan replacement country. There are places like Cape Verde and Mauritius off the coast, which are already below replacement. It looks as if the rest of the subcontinent is on the same path. It's just going to get there after some of the other parts of the world. And what that may mean is that their population may double between now and when this starts to happen.

What is shocking to read about in the studies that people have done on international standardized test scores is how very low and very consistently low the level of knowledge and skills is for young people in the Sub-Saharan. One of our sometime AEI colleagues, Stanford professor Eric Hanushek, did a study earlier this year looking at the global patterns. He and his colleagues say that almost 95% of young people in the Sub-Saharan do not meet even level one out of five of basic skills. I mean, in other words, can't tell time looking at a non-digital clock, can't add three columns.

It's not just Sub-Saharan. There's a lot of that in India, Pakistan, some other places in the world as well. But as long as that is the case, the economic potential of the region isn't going to be achieved. I mean, you can make the argument that the most important thing one might do for the planet's prosperity would be to kind of encourage knowledge and skills in the Sub-Saharan. You can't do that with a magic wand. You need governance, you need institutions. But it's a big important part of the human deficit at the moment.

Why have pro-natalist policies around the world failed?

NE: It's possible to force people to have fewer children with bayonets and police power. I don't think we've figured out how to force them to have more children with bayonets and police power. And we haven't figured out how to bribe them into having more kids than they want to have either, maybe because we're not willing to offer 50% of the GDP as opportunity cost or whatever. What we've seen pretty much everywhere that baby bonuses or baby bribes have been tried, is that there's a temporary small increase in births. And it turns out that this is just basically kind of a timing thing, that people who were kind of on the fence about having a second or third kid take the money and run, and that after that the birth rate drops down to below where it was before.

How will America fare in the fight for immigrants as the world begins to depopulate?

NE: One of the problems that we've seen over the last four years is that the Biden administration couldn't have done much more than it brilliantly devised to undermine popular support for immigration to the United States through the crisis on the southern border. And in a way, the longest term threat to America's demographic basis for success, the undermining, the support for legal migration. We have had in the past a near cease on migration to the US, we have that after World War I. So it's not like this can't happen here. And I think that people who are concerned with the success of our society, our economy, and our project for the future should be very intent upon making a success of legal migration to America.

What is the main problem humans will face as depopulation begins? Why is this a bad thing?

NE: The problem is that we're not robots, is that we're human beings, and we're a social animal that needs other people and needs other relationships. The toughest part, I think of a world of continuing depopulation will be what happens within family units, which has been the basis of our organization forever.

With increasing numbers of people who are childless or a very few children, and an ever more gray world. The fraying of the family network is going to be, I think, a metaphysical problem for humans in the future. Now, I've said we're the most adaptable animal, and I think we are the most adaptable animal. Are we going to be able to figure out a hack for lack of families? Maybe. But it's not obvious to me what that is.

How is the rise in secularization contributing to depopulation?

NE: In our country and maybe in Europe, it's quite clear that today people who are having relatively more kids tend to be more involved in religion. They tend to be more optimistic. They also tend to be more patriotic. They tend to be proud of their country. We've seen a, it's no secret that we've seen a big drop-off in all of those things in the United States over the last decade and a half. You can time it roughly from the financial crisis of 08 or the election of Obama, whichever you prefer. But we've been in sub replacement world since then, and we've been going further into it with each rising cohort of young prospective parents.

I don't know that it has to be that way everywhere, but it is the way that we see it. So we think of this as the norm. It happens that sub replacement patterns in the United States are associated with a tangle of attitudes and mores, that seem pretty problematic for a healthy society. It's the pessimism, it's the triumph of irony. It's the lack of confidence in your country or in pretty much any other institutions in your society. I don't think that below replacement fertility requires that. But in the real existing world where we are in Europe and North America, that's what we're seeing now.

What are the national security ramifications of your findings?

NE: I don't know what you call them, the legion of super villains or the alignment of access or whatever, Iran, North Korea, Russia, China are all below replacement countries. Two of them we know are already shrinking. North Korea may well be shrinking as well. The demographic winds are not in their sales. Now, it's true that a country like North Korea, which has a GDP of approximately zero can cause a lot of trouble. We've seen that for a long time. So a shrinking, aging China, which has the second-largest economy in the world, run by revisionist regime can be a lot of trouble. But I don't think that this means it's going to be a China, Russia, Iran, North Korea future.

One thing which we don't know about yet, and this is still in part of the science fiction portion of the program, is what the casualty tolerance is going to be in places like China in the future. We've got two below replacement countries slugging it out on the edge of Europe with Ukraine and Russia, and both the dictatorship and the democracy seem to be willing to suffer grievous casualties. So I don't know if this is the generalization or the exception for the future, but we're going to have a people's liberation army made up of only children, basically, in the not too distant future. And what the casualty tolerance will be for that project in relation to foreign expeditions is going to be a terribly important question.

Read the transcript here.

SHOWNOTES

The global fertility crisis is worse than you think (Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, The Spectator, Aug 17, 2024)

Fertility declines, tapering populations, soaring life expectancies: What the U.N. population report shows about us and our future on this planet (Denise Chow, Joe Murphy and Jiachuan Wu, NBC, July 11, 2024)

Global fertility rates to plunge in decades ahead, new report says (Mira Cheng, CNN, March 21, 2024)

The Age of Depopulation (Nicholas Eberstadt, Foreign Affairs, Oct 10, 2024)

Our incredible shrinking planet (Nicholas Eberstadt, George W. Bush Institute, Fall 2024)

Birthrates are plummeting worldwide. Can governments turn the tide? (Tory Shepherd, The Guardian, Aug 10, 2024)

The fertility crisis is here and it will permanently alter the economy (Nicole Goodkind, CNN, June 25, 2024)

Finland: A Culture That Values Work Over Babies Will Have Too Few Babies (Timothy P. Carney, Washington Examiner, Jan 29, 2024)

The Long-Term Decline in Fertility—and What It Means for State Budgets (Jeff Chapman, Pew Trusts, Dec 5, 2022)

Falling US birth rate imperils welfare programmes (Jennifer Bissell-Linsk, Financial Times, May 17, 2018)