In recent years, the subject of population decline has started bubbling up from the depths of our social consciousness. The first stirrings of depopulation began quietly in the east with falling birthrates and shrinking populations in Japan, China, and Korea. As of 2025, China's population has fallen for 3 years straight. Japan, on the other hand, has been shrinking for 15 years, and it's been called a 'silent emergency.' At first, this might just seem like an Asian problem, and some could write it off as a quirk of foreign cultures.
The reality is that fertility is falling all over the world, everywhere. Western countries aren't as far along on the curve as the countries mentioned above, but it seems that we're all going to the same place. Africa and a few other scattered places still have relatively high fertility rates, but they will soon begin to fall as well. The global total fertility rate peaked in 1963 at 5.3 births per woman, and since then it has steadily fallen each year, down to 2.2 births per woman today. The United States is below the global average with a rate of 1.6, which is below replacement rate: 2.1 births per woman. Without immigration, the population of the United States would already be shrinking.
This trend has also begun to take hold in my home state of Utah, which used to be the second-most fertile state in the United States. Despite its religious commitment to natalism, the fertility rate declined the fastest out of any state in 2023, falling to the eighth most fertile state.
Globally, it is apparent that the total human population on Earth will peak and begin to decline relatively soon, before the century's end.
Population decline generally leads to economic instability. A shrinking population means less people are working, spending, and paying taxes. The population begins to age as birthrates decline, and the growing elderly population becomes a greater and greater economic burden on working age people. It may in fact cause a fertility 'tailspin,' where young people respond to hard times with less children, which leads to less workers, which leads to more economic instability, thus the cycle continues.
Political ideologues have thought of many bad ideas to counter the fertility decline, which range from the ineffectual strategy of paying people to have kids, to stalling by importing immigrants en-masse, to authoritarian forced-procreation schemes. I doubt any of these 'solutions' will have much success in the coming years.
To understand what's going on, we need to take a brief look at history. For most of human history, the human population grew almost imperceptibly slowly. It was only at the beginning of the industrial revolution that population began to increase rapidly. Medical innovations ensured that less mothers, children, and babies succumbed to disease, reducing deaths. Industrial agriculture and the mass production of goods made the necessities of life cheaper, allowing families to support more children and increasing births. What's changed since then?
The most commonly cited reason I hear online for the fertility decline places the blame squarely on women. Access to birth control, abortion, education, and women's rights more generally are diagnosed as the underlying problem. This idea is obviously useful for culture warriors but I doubt that it is the root cause. Culture generally lies downhill from economic and material factors. People are indeed choosing to have less children, but we should ask why they are making that choice, instead of laying the blame on the brute fact that they can make that choice.
Besides all of the celebrated technical, medical, and productive advancements of the industrial revolution, there was another, quieter shift in human society that often goes unnoticed. For most of human history prior to the industrial revolution, the majority of the population lived in isolated farmsteads and small villages. For the people who lived in these rural areas, the center of economic activity was not the business or corporation. It was the household. Each household was a small family enterprise, and there was no difference between 'work life' and 'family life.' As a result, having a large number of children was not just emotionally fulfilling or a religious obligation. It was also an economic advantage and a matter of survival. In a household economy, your children are your workforce, your lovable employees. Furthermore, before the age of steel, engines, and coal, there was a much greater need for manual labor in the home and in the economy at large.
With the industrial revolution, that relationship began to change. As a result of factory production, economic activity began to centralize in industrial centers in cities, and the household morphed into a place for consumption, not production. The family lost its central role in the economy, replaced with impersonal transactional relationships between employers and a faceless, replaceable mob of employees. This change was gradual, not instant, and it was faster in some parts of society than in others. The mechanization of agriculture took longer than other industries, so rural life managed to hold out a more family-centered mode of production for a little while longer. But the machine was relentless, and today a vast majority of agricultural land is owned by huge agribusiness, not by family farmers.
In this new state of affairs at the height of industrialism, it is no longer economically advantageous to have lots of children. Life is divided into the 'work life' or career, and 'family life' or home life, and often these two aspects of life operate in opposition to each other. Another child isn't another pair of hands to work the land, it's another mouth to feed, another insurance bill to pay, another college tuition, a bigger house, a bigger car, etc. Other factors at play include the unique circumstances of industrial life. The peak of fertility for young couples happens to coincide with important education and career decisions, leading couples to delay childbearing until later.
Economic pressure has driven the single-income family to the brink of extinction, making it harder for potential mothers to have time for child-rearing and for families to juggle career and familial responsibilities. When children are a luxury rather than a necessity, people will generally choose to have fewer of them. It's simple math, really.
Some might object to my argument, pointing out that I am essentially arguing that industrialization is responsible for the population boom and bust simultaneously. This is where culture comes in. It takes a while for cultural momentum to be beat down by a new economic reality. The children of the pre-industrial age who have just moved into a city and gained industrial employment are going to see the large families they were from as the norm, and will act accordingly. However, over time, the culture loses force and each generation will have less and less children as they gradually adjust to industrial realities.
In short, the population boom is caused by a holdout pre-industrial culture within an industrial society. But this must give way to an industrial culture, which then leads to the population bust. I believe this is clearly borne out when looking at the map of fertility decline. The countries with the highest fertility are the least industrialized, and the countries with the lowest fertility are the farthest along the curve of industrial development. The Amish, who spurn industrial life within their insular culture, have a birthrate nearly four times the average in the United States. Industrial civilization is not just ecologically unsustainable, it is also sociologically unsustainable.
I do not believe that there is a viable remedy to this problem on a societal scale, because the problem goes much deeper than government, politics, or culture. Even if a natalist government were to put a blanket ban on contraceptives and abortion, people would find other ways (both legal and illegal) to prevent pregnancy as long as the incentives remained, and the birthrate would still inevitably decline. A 'War on Contraception' would end up exactly as effective as the War on Drugs has been. Governments are not omnipotent. In the end, you can't force people to do anything, especially something as personal as bearing children. In a society that had already divorced family life from economic life, the sexual revolution was an inescapable conclusion.
People often hearken back to the rosy sitcom image of the 50s family as a solution. In my opinion, the stereotypical family of the postwar period is not the legitimate traditional family. It is a modern invention, a re-enactment of something that is long dead. It is preferable to the current state of affairs only in the way that a cold corpse is preferable to a rotting one. Authentic family-centered life does not resemble the fairytale of 50s consumerism. It is something quieter, closer, and deeper. We should look toward the Amish, the Pioneers, the Native Americans, and the multi-generational homes of rural Latin America for inspiration.
The fertility collapse is inevitable, and also the least terrible way that the population boom of the industrial age could end. The population simply cannot grow forever on a finite planet, so the boom had to end sooner or later. Not long ago during the rapid population increases of the 80s and 90s, we had Malthusians warning us about a coming 'population bomb' which would exhaust natural resources and end in mass starvation. Instead, people are just quietly choosing to have less children. I am sure that after many years of decline, the population will become stable, the industrial age will burn out, and the world will settle into a new normal where the family recovers its venerable role.
Now that I've gotten through all the doom and gloom, what's left for us to do?
Even though I believe that there is no way to restore society at large to family-centeredness, I still think that it is possible to shift our priorities as individuals and families toward living family-centered lives. Doing this necessarily goes against the grain of culture and mass society, and is very difficult. Most people will simply follow the route of least resistance. But if small, insular groups (whether religious, racial, or cultural) can find a foothold, they will have the long-term advantage.
As individuals and communities, can we reverse the general trend toward fertility decline? No, and that's okay. Because we can create pockets of family-centeredness, oases of meaning and tenderness in the desert of nihilism and selfishness. And that is worth the effort.
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