The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

In 1798 a British clergyman named Thomas Malthus argued that human population growth would exceed the world’s ability to feed this growth in population.  Calamity and massive suffering and starvation were inevitable.  Robert McNamara in 1968, as president of the World Bank, spoke of “the mushrooming cloud of population explosion.”  Paul Ehrlich, about the same time, published a book, The Population Bomb, in which he argued that we must “have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”  The Club of Rome issued its famous report in the 1970s on the “Limits of Growth.”  Such doomsday speculations produced the following:

• In China it led to forced abortions and a birth rate wildly skewed against baby girls.
• In India in the mid-1970s, it led to a mass campaign of assembly-line sterilizations.
• In South Africa and Namibia, it led to policies that appeared to target the part of the population least able to defend itself—young black women were given contraceptive injections without their consent.

In 2023, few are making such dire predictions and no country is pursing such draconian policies to limit population growth.  In a recent series of articles in The Economist, the consequences of the remarkable decline in global fertility caught my interest.  The issue began with this observation:  “In the roughly 250 years since the Industrial Revolution the world’s population, like its wealth, has exploded. Before the end of this century, however, the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death. The root cause is not a surge in deaths, but a slump in births. Across much of the world the fertility rate, the average number of births per woman, is collapsing. Although the trend may be familiar, its extent and its consequences are not. Even as artificial intelligence (ai) leads to surging optimism in some quarters, the baby bust hangs over the future of the world economy.  In 2000 the world’s fertility rate was 2.7 births per woman, comfortably above the “replacement rate” of 2.1, at which a population is stable. Today it is 2.3 and falling. The largest 15 countries by gdp all have a fertility rate below the replacement rate. That includes America and much of the rich world, but also China and India, neither of which is rich but which together account for more than a third of the global population.  The result is that in much of the world the patter of tiny feet is being drowned out by the clatter of walking sticks. The prime examples of ageing countries are no longer just Japan and Italy but also include Brazil, Mexico and Thailand. By 2030 more than half the inhabitants of East and South-East Asia will be over 40. As the old die and are not fully replaced, populations are likely to shrink. Outside Africa, the world’s population is forecast to peak in the 2050s and end the century smaller than it is today. Even in Africa, the fertility rate is falling fast.

Whatever some environmentalists say, a shrinking population creates problems. The world is not close to full and the economic difficulties resulting from fewer young people are many. The obvious one is that it is getting harder to support the world’s pensioners. Retired folk draw on the output of the working-aged, either through the state, which levies taxes on workers to pay public pensions, or by cashing in savings to buy goods and services or because relatives provide care unpaid. But whereas the rich world currently has around three people between 20 and 64 years old for everyone over 65, by 2050 it will have less than two. The implications are higher taxes, later retirements, lower real returns for savers and, possibly, government budget crises.”

What are some of the consequences of this astounding development?

• The important “replacement rate” is in jeopardy in a growing number of countries.  The number of children a typical woman will have over her lifetime should not fall below 2.1.  If the rate falls below 2.1, the number of births versus the number of deaths is not stable.  The result is a declining population.  In 2010 98 countries and territories recorded fertility rates below 2.1.  By 2021 the number had grown to 124, more than half of the places for which the UN collects data.  By 2030 it expects the tally to reach 136.  “Low fertility rates have spread from rich countries such as Italy and Japan to middle-income ones such as Thailand (1.3) and Brazil (1.6).  Even more notably, India’s fertility rate recently fell below 2.1 and is expected to keep falling . . . The 15 biggest economies in the world, including Brazil, China, India and Mexico, all have fertility rates below 2.1.”
• “Instead of a population structure shaped like a pyramid, with each new generation bigger than the one that precede it . . . these countries will become inverted pyramids, with older generations replaced by smaller and smaller cohorts.  In parts of the world this has already happened:  the number of Chinese aged between 21 and 30 has already fallen from 232 million at its peak in 2012 to 181 million in 2021.”    The obvious way to compensate for this is immigration, which is on the rise in many of the rich nations of the world—but this creates political tension, which obviously is evident in the US.
• Several very specific consequences are also evident:

1. An ever greyer population will mean higher spending on public pensions and health care, but there will be fewer people of working age to pay the required taxes to support the pensions and health care.  “The rich world currently has around three people between 20 and 64 years for every one over 65.  By 2050 this ratio will shrink to less than two to one.  That will necessitate later retirement ages, higher taxes or both.”
2. An ageing population will reduce both savings and investment, but economists disagree about which one will decline more rapidly.
3. In the area of productivity demographic decline will have the most troubling effect.  “Younger people have more of what psychologists call ‘fluid intelligence,’ meaning the ability to solve new problems and engage with new ideas.  Older people have ‘crystalized intelligence’—a stock of knowledge about how things work built up over time.  There are no precise cut-offs, but most studies suggest that fluid intelligence tends to peak in early adulthood and to being to decline in people’s 30s.  Both types of intelligence are useful: companies, industries and economies need both youngsters able to respond to new challenges and seasoned veterans with a detailed understanding of their trade.”  The argument goes with the observation that “innovation raises productivity.  Improvements to existing processes and the invention of entirely new ways of doing things enable more to be produced with the same amount of labor and capital . . . Even a fractionally lower rate of productivity will compound over the years to make an economy significantly smaller.”
4. Governments are largely powerless to reverse declining birth rates.  Attempts in various countries to prod women to have more children have typically yield meager results.  For example, Singapore offers lavish grants, tax rebates and child-care subsidies—but has a fertility rate of 1.0.

The postmodern pursuit of personal autonomy, modern birth control methods and abortion have made it easier for women to avoid having children.  The result is the diminishing importance of children in terms of personal fulfillment and the additional consequence of the diminishing importance of the family as a viable and robust institution of Western Civilization.  This Perspective has pointed out the economic, financial and productivity consequences as well.  How a society treats children is a vital sign of its health. Do we desire them? Welcome them? Do we honor parents and champion their vocations as the primary caregivers, teachers, and mentors of children? Are the basic institutions of our society, including corporations and other places of employment, properly attentive to the care of children and the flourishing of family life? Are government policies oriented to the wellbeing of children? Do our churches support marriage? Are we clear and persistent in our proclamation of the Bible’s sexual norms affirming the fruitfulness of the conjugal union and the joy and responsibilities of family life?  Declining rates of global fertility reveal a deep-seated spiritual problem that reflects viewing children and families differently that the way God views them.

See The Economist (3 June 2023), pp. 9, 14-16; William McGurn in Imprimis (March 2011).