Here are the key points of a Lancet study on global fertility. Global Fertility rates will continue to collapse even if all countries adopt the current best pro-baby policies (childcare subsidies, extended parental leave, insurance coverage expansion for infertility treatment). Future fertility rates were would drop to a global TFR (total fertility rate) of 1·83 (1·59–2·08) in 2050 and 1·59 (1·25–1·96).
China is currently at TFR 1.08. A women will on average have half of one daughter. If China fully commits to increasing babies, then the Lancet projection is they claw their way back to about 1.3 TFR (about the level of Japan). This will mean in 2100, China will have about 27% of the number of fertile women as there are today assuming they get back to 1.3 TFR. IF China goes to South Korea Seoul levels of 0.8 TFR then by 2100, there will be about 8% of the fertile women as there are today. If the TFR of below 1.0 lasted for 200 years, then by 2200 there would be less than 1% of the number of fertile women as there are today. The current best policies move TFR by 0.2. This means the world would still be well below replacement. The population would never stabilize. There would be extinction in a few hundred years. As this happened, the financial markets would collapse. Real estate prices would crater as there would be no demand growth and then no demand.
The Journal Lancet has published a study looking at the global population collapse. By 2100, they project 198 out of 204 countries will not be replacing their population. This means women will average less than 2.08 children. The mother will have less than one daughter on average.
During the period from 1950 to 2021, global TFR more than halved, from 4·84 to 2·23. Global annual livebirths peaked in 2016 at 142 million declining to 129 million in 2021. Fertility rates declined in all countries and territories since 1950, with TFR remaining above 2·1—canonically considered replacement-level fertility—in 94 countries and territories in 2021. Future fertility rates were projected to continue to decline worldwide, reaching a global TFR of 1·83 (1·59–2·08) in 2050 and 1·59 (1·25–1·96) in 2100 under the reference scenario. This was the middle scenario. India would drop from 1.9 (10% below replacement today) to 1.29 in 2050.
A richer and more educated world that met UN SDG targets for education and contraceptive and also had pro-natal (pro-baby policies), would have even lower fertility in 2050 TFRs of 1·65 (1·40–1·92) but might partially rebound to 1·62 (1·35–1·95) in 2100.
The study used estimates of female educational attainment, contraceptive availability, estimates of under-5 mortality and population density in habitable areas.
Current Pro-Natal Policies Will Fail. They are NOT Enough
In the pro-natal scenario, they assumed a country will introduce pro-natal policies, such as childcare subsidies, extended parental leave, insurance coverage expansion for infertility treatment, and other forms of support for parents to afford high-quality child-care services, once TFR decreases to less than 1·75. They then made three assumptions on the effects of such policies. First, we assumed the full effect of pro-natal policies will be to increase TFR by 0·2. Second, it will take 5 years after the policy is introduced for the full increase in TFR to occur, and TFR will rise linearly over that time span. Last, we assumed that both the policies and the increase in TFR by 0·2 will endure for the remainder of the century.
Reference TFR values in Bangladesh and India are projected to decline below the 1·75 threshold by 2026 and 2027, respectively. TFR in Bangladesh in the reference scenario is projected to be 1·20 (95% UI 0·84–1·54) by 2050 and 0·97 (0·57–1·37) by 2100. Similarly, reference scenario TFR in India will reach 1·29 (0·97–1·62) and 1·04 (0·67–1·42) by 2050 and 2100.
Mexico, Russia, the USA, and China already experienced TFR values below 1·75 in 2021.
The Lancet researchers assume that the full effect of the pro-natal scenario will occur in 2026 in these countries. For instance, under the pro-natal scenario, we project TFR values in Mexico to be 1·59 (95% UI 1·39–1·82) in 2050 and 1·35 (1·11–1·61) in 2100. Across all four countries, mean TFR values in the reference scenario values range from 1·14 to 1·52 in 2050 and 1·15 to 1·45 in 2100; mean TFR values in the education scenario range from 1·12 to 1·51 in 2050 and 1·14 to 1·44 in 2100; mean TFR values in the met need scenario range from 1·14 to 1·46 in 2050 and 1·15 to 1·39 in 2100; and mean TFR values in the combined scenario also range from 1·31 to 1·65 in 2050 and 1·34 to 1·58 in 2100.
Nextbigfuture has covered the global decline in birth rates.
Treating the Global Infertility Problem Just Slows the Collapse
Infertility in India affects roughly 10-14 per cent of Indian couples, and 17% of couples living in cities are seeking help with conceiving. Couples are turning to methods such as surrogacy, egg donations and IVF to tackle the issue. This is despite the cultural stigma of infertility.
Globally there are 60-70 million infertile couple and up to 20 million of these couples are from India alone. Secondary infertility (having trouble having the second child) now impacts around 30% of Indian couples.
IVF (invitro fertilization) is now about a $1 billion industry in India and is projected to be $3.7 billion in 2030. IVF costs start at $1200 in India. India’s government is looking to step in and increase IVF clinics and financial support. However, there is a corruption problem for some of the IVF clinics.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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What about having babies outside of human bodies ? if that happens the population can and will explode again
That’s what happens when you need two wages in the West to survive or flourish.
Allowing mortgages to go on two names instead of just one is at the root of a lot of the damage done.
The research paper analyzes based upon four things that were correctly backtested against the last 50 years of data.
Four covariates variously consisting of female educational attainment, contraceptive met need, population density in habitable areas (how urbanized), and under-5 mortality (new babies and young children being saved from dying). It does not talk about mortgages – although that is a secondary effect of educated women and families in cities.
To forecast future fertility up to 2100, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) forecasting model was based on projections of completed cohort fertility at age 50 years
Partially.
You are On The Money though. I would say that in addition, the abandonment of the Nuclear Family as a “life ideal” is really centrally at issue. Today, many (the majority?) of women WANT to have productive careers, to fulfill a sense of socially optimal purpose.
In “The Day” not so long back (say for argument, 1954 or 70 years ago), women were proud to achieve a High School education (unlike many of their Moms); the jingles of the 45 singles records industry were pumping out love songs, life happily ever after, a passel of kids in a station wagon with Dad smoking a silly pipe and cooking inscrutable hot-dogs on a flimsy BBQ. The Jetsons were part of the ideal. Spindly everything, and a space-craft and robot coming to a town near you!!! For Reals!!!
No one really talked much about the dichotomy though: the split between “working hard enough to get through High School” and the ideal of “staying home to make a sweet family life for kids and hubby”. Simpler minds might conclude that the High School diploma was a bit of an overkill. Hardly needed for the life path. But none-the-less, back then (and frankly up until and including the present) having a higher-education degree kind of shook out all the suitors from all the suitable darlings. For both sexes.
For this reason alone, women weren’t dissuaded from choosing “remarkably unemployable” high school tracks, or even College degrees. The Humanities rejoiced at have gazillions of really smart chicks focussing their boundless energies on Humanities majors. Life was good. Those ladies who either chose, or were chosen to follow career paths inevitably DID find relatively solid, relatively decent paying work with their skills. Thus, it all kind of worked.
Today however, we don’t have these sentiments. Rightly or wrongly! In fact it has become remarkably abstract, the whole social dynamic of What is My Purpose in Life. We’ve pushed, pushed, pushed that everyone even modestly able to Go To College ought to do so. We’ve (rather well) funded females to go to colleges, to take all nature of degrees, especially since there’s no intrinsic limitation on them achieving the highest attainment in ANY field. There simply are no “men’s” and “women’s” particular fields. So…
Soooo… we have an abundance of very well educated people of both sexes now. However, given the work that it takes (what, 16 to 18 years?), “at the other end” the graduates are loathe NOT to deploy their hard-won skills into the career marketplace. Gone are the days of getting Art majors and going home to raise a happy family with a decent man. Gone. Our newly minted overachieving ladies are more-than-willing to put in long hours, hard work, to advance their careers. Once the hook is set, they by their own inclination, almost always want to follow it, to see how far it goes.
Unfortunately, Mother Nature has decreed that there are only about 20 to 25 years after College graduation for a woman to take the career-detour of having (and competently raising) a pair or trio of kids. In a remarkably short period of subjective time, women are approaching their 40s. Their careers however, are humming along, their societally chosen “purpose” is fulfilled. Things look up — just as they do for men of the same age — career wise. So… the kids aren’t pursued. Demographics be dâhmned. Careers rule!
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If one goes very far down this line of reasoning, its almost certain that the (naïve) conclusion is ginned up … maybe women shouldn’t be so career oriented? Well … for demographic reasons, of course so! By comparison, all the social “emergency engineering” principles mentioned by the Author … of funding stay-at-home moms, funding kids, funding funding funding, is not a bad idea, but patently silly. Finding — especially in the medium term — finding ways to lionize Motherhood, and Family-hood, is about the only lasting solution. And it is a bit of a bitter pill.
VERY probably, there is no pragmatic solution to this that is socially acceptable. Seriously, the pretty picture of women “barefoot and pregnant” in the house … isn’t pretty at all to many of our newly awakened young women. Abhorrent! You’ve gotta be kidding me!!! That’s ALL our lives are for? Away with you, CAVE man!!!
Mmmm, hmmm…
We’re all heading to the Japan not-so-ideal. Teeny-tiny houses (no one needs a McMansion), teeny tiny cars, living in ultra-dense city centers cheek-to-jowl packed into prim little pods. The cost of living becomes jaw-dropping-inexpensive … but like the Japanese, the price of those pod-housing dormitories on a square-meter basis … SKYrockets. Absurdism takes hold. Justification of million dollar glorified potties without room for clothing.
Could well spell the future. It certainly is for many, many Japanese, Koreans, others close by.
And — were we to be really, REALLY honest — perhaps it is also the solution to the Global Warming by way of CO₂ emissions problem. Go micro-sized. Lop off having kids. Have fast-paced, city-centric lives with 2 incomes, endless paper maché degrees and rules, rules, rules, and more rules.
Then the population seriously drops. And — when I’m being really honest — this outcome has a strong social responsibility dynamic that almost certainly lays strong pavement for broad societal acceptance. No one need have McMansions, McTanks for cars, and live 2 hours into “the burbs” to burn packages of hot-dogs on flimsy BBQ sets.
Man. Smell the roses already. This is depressing.
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅
A real estate collapse is probably good for replacement numbers because housing is one of the main obstacles for young people. Property bubbles create no real value anyway.
Another cheap and quick thing to do is to skew the ratio of born female/male children by artificial means. When IVF can do that routinely, there can be incentives put in place to encourage families to breed girls.
The eco-systems on Earth will be grateful for a smaller human population. We cause a huge amount of problems and mass extinction of species by not integrating ourselves with the eco-systems in a sustainable way. Instead we use technology to speed up everything much faster than natural evolution can keep up.
20 weeks…that’s about all the time artificial gestation needs to bridge between the time it’s already possible to grow a human embryo in a Petri dish to nurturing a premature baby in an incubator. As medical science closes that 20 week gap, operations on either end that it’s already possible to do, will get even better, cheaper, and more reliable.
Since my last article on artificial wombs is already a few years out of date, here’s a newer one from MIT: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/29/1080538/everything-you-need-to-know-about-artificial-wombs/
They say the goal is to save premies, not replace the uterus but since the denial of reproductive and other rights to half the population would be both unpalatable and undesirable since we need women to help fill the labor force IF jobs in the future go unfilled – a big IF since there’s still more people than jobs to employ them, even in Japan, and AI, robots, automation and other productivity enhancers will only decrease the need for workers in the lower population future – some regime will start producing babies without mothers, just their harvested eggs, which young desirable women will be well paid for. I expect this to happen in China or a similar communist country first, where the state takes priority over the individual. At about the same time, genetic engineering will allow for tweaking fully controlled gestating fetus’s to gain higher IQ, greater disease resistance, taller, stronger bodies. Racism may creep in there too, but if it’s China doing this, there’s no reason to expect preference for blue-eyed, blond, white babies.
Is the future Gattaca: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca?
Maybe something like that, but at least humanity will survive, and I expect thrive once all those smarter, stronger, maybe artificially augmented people start becoming the majority. Smart, healthy people have always led society and always will, though the have-nots can disrupt society through wars and revolutions too.
Something MUST be done to steer socioeconomic rewards from rent-seekers too, or else the declining and aging billionaires will just keep all the wealth for themselves, setting up militarized “families” to hold off the demanding hordes of serfs (called “waste” in the graphic novel series: Lazarus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_(comics). I’m surprised this dystopian series hasn’t made it to the big screen. Well, there’s still time, since AI will make creating major movies possible with 1/10th the personnel needed today to make CGI intensive movies).
It won’t be a world of scarcity, it’ll be a world of abundance. The rate of population growth is totally abnormal historically. There’s never been a generation of humans who lived to see population double in their lifetimes, even triple for the oldest living generation, or quadruple for centenarians – the fastest growing population. Our technological advancements are not coming close to keeping up with the pollution (WHO says less than 10 countries have clean enough air now), food production – famine is rising again, partly due to wars, which are also a product of over-population. Wars are still fought with “excess” people; 100s of 1000s have already been killed in the Russia-Ukraine war and somehow that’s considered only a regional problem, at least for now.
We are a long way from appreciating every life as needed, valuable, and worth bringing to its fullest potential.
Just make birth control and abortion capital crimes. Oh, would that be unpopular? Not as unpopular with men as filling population vacuums with Saharan Africans. Oh, woman would object? Remove their franchise. Oh, is that a violation of “human rights”? If there ain’t no humans there ain’t no human rights.
Well put
“Currently people struggle to find meaningful careers and see liberties being stripped away so having kids who can keep struggling just to get kicked around at an expense they can’t afford is not likely to appeal to people in the near future.”
What happens when robotics/AI do most of the production/distribution? How would that effect the cost of having kids when food/housing/energy becomes dirt cheap? Simply move into a ready made pre-fab house (or move into one abandoned by a deceased elderly person) Cheap vat grown food cheap energy rejuvenation technology lots of free time and open spaces (because of the population collapse) many unoccupied homes etc. Lot of free time a (newly) “young” population little else to do except…get to know each other better & repopulate the world. Aided by assorted (robotic) nannies/teachers/diaper changers etc.
Brian, I agree these scenarios are very gloom (but so were the population explosion scenarios which we had just 40 years ago, where Japan was projecting Arcologies, to house over 1 million people, possibly over sea as there would be no land for them. And we are not predicting exactly the opposite.
These population collapse models don´t seem to take into account longevity expansion and even less mortality.
They don´t seem to take into account AGI taking millions or billions of jobs, and at the same time MAYBE or POSSIBLY a post-scarcity economy.
I also think that human fertility is quite dependent of what is happening. We are at 8 billion people.
We know for a fact fertility levels have always seemed to explode after the largest wars, when millions die.
But I agree it’s something to be careful about.
On the other hand, the study you posted, seems to present no solution. It says it will keep going that way no matter the policies.
I still do not understand why these arguments for population collapse fail to take into account a post scarcity world. What else to do but love love love when this happens? If we solve the longevity thing, bam, I can enjoy a romp and a kid several times over. Lets argue these possible paths. They solve this problem as well as many others.
I look at what it takes technology wise to make a big impact.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/03/would-artificial-wombs-solve-the-depopulation-crisis.html
We haven’t really seen how ugly things can get.
The upcoming depopulation is looking as to be worse than WW2, worse than the black plague.
It will signal the probable end of the civilization as we know it, which comes as result of the enlightenment, secularism and rationalism. With their fruits turning up to be more lethal than the worse wars and diseases we have ever seen. Making many wish we just reversed everything we have done in the last couple centuries, and such a fate might also come to us regardless, from the simple collapse of economy and society, and the ensuring mass chaos.
For me, there is little option: we either find a way to make and care for new humans without human intervention, Star Wars clone army style, or we will face a future we really, really won’t like.
Regardless, I can’t shake the lingering feeling of some conservative voices saying “told you so”.
The “current best pro-baby policies” all involve taking money from people who might want to have kids one day and giving it to the few who have already decided to have kids now. Effectively that’s a sanction against fertility but good luck with that anyway.
When I was born the population was less than half what it is now. I didn’t realize how close to extinction 3.7 billion was. Fertility rates were considered dangerously high at the time and even if that wasn’t true it goes to show how fast fertility rates can change when conditions change.
Currently people struggle to find meaningful careers and see liberties being stripped away so having kids who can keep struggling just to get kicked around at an expense they can’t afford is not likely to appeal to people in the near future. Eventually the civilization that inflicts this on people will either reform or collapse and people will want kids again. No extinction.
For me the biggest factor is not lacking incentives or other government handouts. It’s the shared, pervasive awareness of the risks of motherhood for the mother, and the widespread fear mongering about life wrecking risks related to child raising, under superficial, fashionable criteria like “quality of life”.
Every story of how awful the ravages of pregnancy on the body are, or of parents tied to disabled kids forever, shared on social networks is another nail in a massive coffin.
Despite the incentives, people simply don’t want to have kids because it’s hard, and this comes from mere awareness of how much it well, sucks under some superficial criteria, or how wrecked you life can get when it goes wrong.
People in the past simply weren’t aware, or were raised under a philosophy of doing it because they were raised like that and expected to do so. No hedonist life long styles nor quests for experiences, career and/or lack of responsibility on your 30s and 40s.
The biggest change probably came when the Boomers started educating their gen-X and Millennial kids to delay having child, because they had a life and career to make and they had all time in the world. Guess what? we don’t. Having kids is better done while young and reckless, if you think it too much or have too much experience beforehand, you don’t do it (as often) and that’s the problem.