I don’t buy the panic around population decline. Japan has had this decline for decades and its GDP per capita has steadily increased.
A falling population means less pressure on schools, less pressure on public services, less pressure on transport infrastructure. It means finding a seat when you’re on a train and being able to drive on a motorway without 5 hour traffic jams. It means downward pressure on property prices and a host of other asset classes, all of which is beneficial for ordinary working people.
The UK, in contrast, which we are told “needs migration more than ever” has had a GDP per capita decrease over the same period. Wage growth has been far below asset price inflation for close to 20 years (ie we’ve become poorer).
It’s impossible to find a seat on a train.
It’s common to find 30 somethings sharing a house with 4 other people just so they, as qualified, highly trained professionals, can afford to save something, anything, by month-end.
Quality of life has fallen in the UK versus many countries with such feared “demographic implosions”.
There is also productivity to consider. Flooding the market with cheap labour reduces long term productivity because companies have less financial incentive to invest in new rounds of mechanisation. In the long run, therefore, mass migration reduces productivity.
This is one possible explanation for worker productivity in the UK being neck and neck with Japan since 2007, even when Japan’s work force has been ageing significantly over that period.
The world continues to automate. There will be less and less need for jobs that are low skill and monotonous.
With a falling population, there is less migrationary pressure placed on neighbouring countries. Illegal migration is not coming from places with “demographic collapse” but from those where population growth significantly exceeds GDP growth.
And this is the thing that bothers me about this article: How can a discussion about population leave out Africa? It will add 3 billion new people to the planet by 2100. In fact, every land mass outside of Africa will be stable or declining by 2050-2060 except for Africa, which alone will account for all population growth this century.
What does that mean in reality? Nigeria, the size of Texas, as one example, will have close to 1 billion people by 2100. Opinion polls regularly show that more than 50% of Nigerians want to migrate to Europe or America.
So, quite apart from worrying about demographic collapse, what we should be worrying about is mass migration from countries undergoing demographic explosions in central Africa, and how the inevitable migration from these few countries will affect geopolitics globally.
Migrant crossings from Africa to Europe, for example, are accelerating, not abating, and driving enormous changes in culture and politics in Europe and elsewhere.
Many illegal migrants are unskilled and will either halt the productivity growth of the countries they flood (by providing shadow-market labour at low cost), or end up as an underclass that is both unemployed and unemployable and, therefore, exert a huge drain on the states that house them.
How this is handled between now and 2100 is the real story. And it is one that very few will talk about.

When you impose the costs of having a family on individuals but socialise the benefits of having those children, by their labour funding everyone else’s welfare in retirement, the results are unsurprising. It’s a tragedy of the commons. Everyone is entitled to receive a share of a child’s economic output but, for obvious reasons, cannot be compelled to have children themselves.

This leads to a situation where, as the article points out, individuals choose to preserve their relative wealth by forgoing having children, safe in the knowledge that their welfare in old age does not depend on a family, only it does, just it’s someone else’s family who picks up the bill.

This system was fine when the population was still growing and of course we shouldn’t punish those who don’t have children, but the current system clearly incentivises lower rates of family formation.

Both in our childhoods and our old age, we require the care and economic support of the wider community. Why then as a society do we sufficiently fund the latter but not the former?

Interesting article. In China the one child policy has also a serious social cost:the distruction of the family as we have known it. After a generation of such imposed rule the following phenomenon is happening: there is only a child who has his parents and grandparents. Gone are the following figures: brother or sister, uncle or aunt, cousins, brother and sister in law etc.There are grave social consequences to such developments

Surely there’s an upside to this situation. Global population can’t increase forever, and countries shouldn’t base their future prosperity on endless growth and consumption.
As described in another Unherd article, Japan dealt with demographic decline by outsourcing much of its manufacturing to poorer countries. China and India can do the same over time. But the goal shouldn’t be endless growth. Stabilizing global population by increasing productivity seems a better path and, yes, we should all learn to gradually reduce our material expectations.
When a former colleague had a three-day weekend, he’d fly from California to Europe on Friday night, rush around his chosen city over the weekend, then fly back on Monday, all courtesy of the combination of ultra cheap flights, cheap hotels, and caffeine pills. Perhaps it’s better to return to the days when foreign vacations were a luxury and were carefully planned and savored. I don’t subscribe to the WEF’s “you’ll own nothing and be happy” philosophy, but a return to a simpler and less cluttered lifestyle wouldn’t hurt, imo.

In 2021, Twitter removed a post uploaded by the Chinese Embassy in the US. It directly quoted a study about the effects of ‘deprogramming’ Uighur women in Xinjiang. The quote was as follows:

“Study shows that in the process of eradicating extremism, the minds of Uygur women in Xinjiang were emancipated and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines. They are more confident and independent.”

Not long after this, the CCP began asking its people to have 3 children in order to reverse the effects of the One-Child policy. The public response was along the lines of ‘they can’t tell us what to do with our bodies’. The CCP had forgotten that they had already deprogrammed their own population before starting on the Uighurs.

One Child, One Belt, One Road, One China, One Health – and Zero Covid. It’s all part of the same thing. All of them coercive, pseudoscientific policies imposed by megalomaniac, overwhelmingly male, control freaks with strong psychopathic, anthrophobic tendencies who think they know what’s best for everyone. How to keep them safe, and sterile. They detest the chaotic beauty of the fertile woman who has a power to spawn a joyful new life that, for all of their armies, robots, and machines, they may never possess. Aging communists motivated by jealousy, resentment, and fear, as they always are.

And the West has bought it. Bought in to an anti-human pandemic treaty that will enshrine “One Health” as a guiding principle. A stepping stone, in the utopian vision of its zealous adherents, on the way to the industrialisation of transhuman reproduction and lives, if you can even call them that, lived entirely outside of a dirty, chaotic, unsafe, inequitable natural environment in which there are limits, there are unchosen obligations, there are innate biological and symbolic differences and boundaries between men and women (and between adults and children). The communists understand the appeal of “no limits” and “equality” to coddled Western narcissists with little regard for, or even knowledge of, their own distinctly Judeo-Christian cultural heritage, who want all of their cakes and to eat them over and over again, and who share their delusion of perpetual economic growth in a world of limited resources and a slowing rate of technological progress. And, boy don’t they exploit them.

Time to wake up and smell the coffee, before it’s too late.

There are two long-trend simultaneous playouts (and by long-trend I mean centuries), both feeding into each other, but both somewhat out of sync with each other in terms of timing. That slight mistiming is going to result in an extremely difficult and painful landscape globally over the next two or three decades, because both are accelerating and because we are literally, living through the inflection point as those trends change profile and crossover in some chaotic way. The two playouts are: human population demographics, and the rise of algorithmic and gene editing technologies.

Global population has ramped over the last three centuries, and literally vertically since around 1900, as a knock-on of technological advance, resulting from initially the mass adoption of mechanisation (in effect a one dimensional precursor to algorithmic technologies). Simultaneously, the same forces drove mass urbanisation, which in the first instance hit a sweet spot where populations could still increase, because although the number of children per woman dropped very rapidly, this was more than offset by ramping health and mortality outcomes improving dramatically. However, once algorithmic technologies started coming on stream (starting around the mid 1960s but at scale from the late 1980s) they changed the demographic balance towards in effect depopulation in urbanised human societies. Algorithmic technologies put huge (but pernicious) pressure on human earning power at the individual level in developed economies. I point to the aftermath of the 2008 crash as proof. There was no ‘traditional’ recovery after this crash but instead wages remained static, because companies often chose IT spend and automation when they started growing again instead of employing more people, which is in effect meant falling steadily behind in earnings real terms. The effects remained masked for a long time because of fast developing nations, primarily China, exporting deflation on an unprecedented scale. But that party is now over.

Algorithmic technologies in effect allow unbounded migration of human processes and human decision making, out of human scale physical domains and into virtual abstract domains where human scale limits no longer apply. Human level processes can be endlessly modelled and then altered to taste. Human decision making can be replicated as algorithms, which can then be endlessly cloned, transmitted at near instantaneous speeds, and altered to achieve orders of magnitude improved outcomes. I know many people disagree with me but the long term effect of algorithmic technologies is very very obvious: mass scale job loss, ‘first slowly then all at once’ (my long term prediction has been and remains circa 2025 as the tipping point when the world creates fewer jobs than are lost to automation, then perhaps a couple of decades before half of all jobs have disappeared and we have a massive ‘useless class’).

So regarding those two playouts, we are in a race between depopulation caused by demographic collapse, and Malthusian outcomes caused by mass scale livelihood loss. It is possible because of a slight mistiming between the playouts, that we get both: a ‘useless class’ and Malthusian outcomes as well as human population collapse – or we could get lucky, the stars align, and depopulation cancels out the effects of loss of livelihoods, and we escape relatively pain free.

And this all sets the backdrop for the rise of the bio-edit and bio-alter technologies.

Declining birth and fertility rates should be a cause for celebration in principle, considering the gigantic increase in the human population from WW2 to 2023 (c.2.2 billion to over 8 billion today). It is human over-population that causes or is linked to many of the Earth’s environmental problems: pollution, deforestation, species extinction, global warming, etc.
But the United Nations celebrated the fact the the human population surpassed 8 billion recently! What an utterly useless organisation!
For as long as it remains politically incorrect to address human over-population, because it occurs chiefly in the ‘developing world (Africa chiefly), we will be in trouble. Are there any leaders out there who have the courage and foresight to take action in this critical area? I doubt it.

I think blaming the falling birth rates compared to their grandparents on having higher expectations is slightly incorrect. Firstly their grandparents had no access to birth control, and secondly having larger families was a bonus for rural poor families as it meant more hands to earn a wage and more people to look after them in old age, whereas having children for the young now is prohibitively expensive. I don’t think it’s to do with the young having an entitled attitude

Is this man serious? This is really good news for the planet and he calls it a crisis? Without fossil fuel there is no way we can support the present population so for it to fall relatively slowly is surely good news?

“Towns like Dongbei…”
TOWNS? Dongbei literally means ‘the north east’ and in China refers to the three northern provinces also known as Manchuria.

What sort of town did this guy think was being referred to in the linked article that said “Dongbei’s GDP as a percentage of the national total has plummeted from 14% to 6.8%”? 7% of China’s wealth in one town?

He’s right about the big picture for China, but it’s wrong to blame it on the one child policy. Like many staples of geography textbooks the world over, it wasn’t actually very significant (or interesting). Cf. South Korea’s demographics – very very similar despite no equivalent to the one-child policy but equally breakneck urbanisation.

This article doesn’t mention that parts of India have male:female ratios worse than China’s.

“What has really changed is not economics, but expectations.”

My question is when will wealth and comfort create a culture in China where the people stop being such a bunch of quiescent malleable pussies?

I’m always a little confused by the ultimate argument of these population-decline panic pieces, which are now starting to outnumber the old population-growth panic pieces.
What is the eventual scenario for this promotion of infinite human population growth? On a simply mathematical basis, the author must surely spot a slight problem coming in the future. I can only assume that space colonisation is the unspoken plan- and even this assumes that space really is literally infinite, which actually doesn’t seem to be the case.

The issue, in so many ways, is about propping up the capitalist system. All of the other problems inherent in population decline can be dealt with, but without perpetual growth our economic system will fail. Since such systems; capitalism, feudalism, etc, each came about organically through a chain of individual actions, over many generations, none of us can predict what will come next.
Of course, humans being the foolish creatures they are, there will be many attempts to impose a new system that some half-baked egotist cooked up in his head; stalinism and maoism come to mind. The opportunity to repeat history and get millions of people killed might just be too tempting for such a muddle-headed species.

There seems to be an assumption that growth and progress are inextricably linked with population growth . This surely must be untrue if for no other reason that what really matters is GDP/capita, not outright GDP, and that the technological progress that has been raising productivity for the past few centuries hasn’t stopped.

The global trend for population growth shows it levelling out in about 2075 or so, which is generally seen as a good thing given the constant carping about saving the planet. It deos depend though on everyone being wealthy enough that the birthrate slows down, so the problem we’re describing is where ten billion humans are all much wealthier than now and aren’t having squads of kids.

Good problem to have?

This is an incredibly shortsighted statement: “if our species is to continue thriving, it must find a way to combine modernity with a pro-natal attitude”.

No! Can you not see that our “pro-natal” species is exponentially exhausting the earth? Do you want us to remain on the perpetual treadmill of more children therefore more old people who require even more children? That’s ridiculous.

Instead, if our species is to continue thriving we need to spread the benefits of automation and higher productivity to all and find innovative ways to support ourselves without always growing the demographic debt of future generations.

When you live on a farm, children are free labor almost as soon as they can toddle. In a city, they are simply an expense. In the US, in suburbs at least, you can tell the kids to go outside to play. Where are they to go to play in an anonymous huge apartment block in the middle of a thronging city? And apartments considerably smaller than we are used to in the US. Prior to reliable birth control, it was hard to avoid getting pregnant in any way other than abstinence. My OB/GYN had a name for those who relied on the rhythm method … mothers.
Many European countries are looking at demographics not much different than China’s. Germany’s is the worst. Though several have already started trying to encourage more births, so far the only difference has been when the babies are born, not the number of them. Sad to say, but in a way, the Ukraine war may turn out to be a blessing for many western European countries. The refugees are mainly women and children. If the war lasts as long as it looks like it might, many of those young women and children, the population segments most needed, will set down roots in the countries they have fled to and they will not have as much trouble fitting into the societies of another European country as other, non-European refugees have.

Much depends upon how we define human flourishing. Classically it has been defined by fecundity. From the view of evolution, success is defined by the number of offspring surviving to reproduce. Classically, flourishing was defined by having a large family of children who lived to maturity and then had children of their own. If they liked you or they ‘actualized their potential’ that was nice; but the real test was whether they survived, were able to support themselves, and had children of their own. The high value often placed on male children was in part due to the larger number of offspring they could produce compared to female children. Material wealth, in such a value system, was defined primarily in terms of its ability to foster the production and survival of children.
In modern times, we measure our flourishing not in terms of reproduction, but in terms of the pleasures we enjoy during our personal lifetime. How much we own, how comfortably we live, how widely we travel, how much we see and do, the prestige we enjoy, the trophies we win, how well we eat, how fast we drive, how great our self-esteem, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In this view, flourishing is almost synonymous with happiness, which is itself almost synonymous with pleasure.
When flourishing was defined by reproductive success this enterprise was supported by relatively limited forms of primary pleasure for the individual parent. Although conception undoubtedly entailed some immediate pleasure, from that point on each child demanded a great deal of effort, sacrifice, and risk from both parents. At the same time, there was not a great deal of immediate and direct pleasure. However, the enterprise was often supported by tribal, religious, social, and cultural reward structures that helped to sustain the inherent drive to reproduce. At the same time, other sources of primary pleasure (e.g., sex, food, physical comfort, etc.) were less plentiful, harder to come by, and access was often restricted by group prohibitions (e.g., the labelling of gluttony, lust, and sloth as sins).
The immense material success of the modern world reverses this relationship in an unprecedented fashion and makes the rewards of childrearing – particularly having children in large numbers – pale in comparison to pleasures that are readily available. It is these pleasures which complete with the enterprise of successfully bringing offspring to fecundity. This can be easily understood by listening to people of childbearing years discuss the prospect of parenthood and their perceptions of the pros and cons it will entail. Listen to what they dwell on as they contemplate the ‘sacrifices’ that marriage and family will require and the rewards that they anticipate from having and raising children.
Of course, there is more to it than that; but this seems to me to lie at the heart of the decline in the childbearing rate among wealthier societies. As the immediately accessible pleasures (i.e., fun) of life grow and expand, the subtler and more delayed gratifications of childrearing decline. As the view of human flourishing evolves away from ‘how can I promote my family/people into the future?’ and towards ‘what feels good now?’ the reasons for any individual to want to do the things that successful childrearing requires become fewer and more narrowly defined. In this context, the reason to have more than one or two children steadily fades from sight, and the reasons to avoid childrearing altogether become more prominent in the worldview of the increasingly educated middle class.
This is not just selfishness and immorality (although it has elements of both) but mostly it is human beings succumbing to those things to which they are heir, and which the intellectual and material success of modern times makes possible. What we fundamentally are, and how good we are it it, in many ways seems to contain the seeds of our eventual demise.