How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Population Collapse

My son was born around three years ago, and one of the pleasant surprises we had was that roughly 7 minutes of driving from where we live was a new, large store with children’s products — strollers, car seats, toys, whatever you can think of. Yet after some time, maybe a year or two, when we drove there to buy something my wife insisted we desperately needed (and my protests were readily overturned), we immediately noticed that the business was probably not doing all that well — most of the goods were gone, stuff was being dismantled and packed into boxes, and the employee told us they were closing by the end of the month. The reason was simple: not enough babies were being born, and revenues had tanked.

My first son was born amid one of the largest fertility declines in modern Czech history, comparable to the one that followed the fall of communism. In 2021, the total fertility rate surpassed 1.8 per woman, the peak of the past 30 years and the culmination of a period of solid fertility, when around 110,000 children were born annually. The store was opened during this period, under the rather naive assumption that the numbers would remain steady. But in 2025, the number of births reached 77,500, and the fertility rate fell to 1.28 children per woman. A decline was always inevitable, simply because the large 1980s cohorts of women were aging out of childbearing age, and the much smaller 1990s cohorts were taking their place. But to be fair to the store owners — and not overly harsh about their business acumen or their failure to read demographic trends in an industry that depends so heavily on them — it’s true that the pace and scale of the decline outdid even the most pessimistic doomer scenarios. In the late 2010s, Poles often looked at Czechia and wondered how we managed to sustain relatively solid fertility while Poland was still hovering around 1.3 children per woman. A couple of years later, the difference had become much smaller.

While the decline in Czechia is one of the biggest in Europe and around the world, it is certainly not in any way unique — it is part of a truly global trend of roughly post-2020 fertility decline, and it is easier to find exceptions that were able to avoid it than to list all the regions hit by it. The COVID pandemic, or possibly the reactions of governments and societies to it, seems to have acted as a certain accelerator of a number of negative social trends, possibly connected mostly to the turbocharging of the digitalization of social relations across the board, even though the full scope of these changes is still to be properly examined with more historical hindsight. Regions struggling with very low fertility even before, such as Poland or East Asia, usually declined to even more dire levels, and even the countries often seen as being able to avoid the biggest fertility problems up to now, such as the USA or France, got close to the 1.5-children-per-woman mark.

Moreover, this decline has been taking place just as overall awareness of the issue of demographic decline has been increasing across the board. During my years of work on the topic of demographic crises, there has been a steady and notable change. While five or seven years ago the topic was still relatively obscure, and when it was discussed it was usually framed in the usual uninformed manner of “we just need to work on the availability of childcare” and so on, one can now read much better-researched and qualified opinions on the subject. Yet it seems increasingly clear that there is a broad gap between the salience of the subject and any change in people’s behavior. People will agree with you that it is a big problem, yet this recognition simply won’t change their personal behavior, which is constrained by a number of large socio-economic factors.

And when demographers are asked to judge the true and most important reason for this current development, the only honest answer is “we do not really know.” Many factors are brought up — the influence of social media and smartphones on younger generations’ social lives; mental health and aspirations; housing prices and size; the overperformance of women relative to men in education, and thus often also in the job market; the postponement of family formation due to career and lifestyle aspirations, leaving not enough time to have the desired number of children, or any children at all — the biggest contributing factor to post-1970s fertility decline is generally the increase in childlessness, as the number of children per mother has declined much less and is still over 2 children per woman in almost every country — the decline in religiosity; the general anxiety about the future among young people; and much more. The only honest answer to all of those factors is simply: yes. They all matter, and they are all mutually intermingled and co-influencing each other to a degree that makes it incredibly hard to clearly map out the direct causality and relative importance of each factor.

I have spent a lot of time trying to think about the fundamental reasons for the demographic decline and the best ways to try to counter it. Yet in the past year or so, I have essentially changed my perspective. I came to the conclusion that we, as societies, will not change the reality of low fertility, and that we must focus on adapting to its consequences. Demographers estimate that even well-designed, well-implemented, and generously funded pronatalist policies can move fertility up by roughly 0.2 children per woman, and often only temporarily, as people who planned to have a family anyway simply do it earlier to take advantage of government support — as illustrated by Hungary’s pro-family policies. It is legitimate to ask whether such policies, amounting to several percent of GDP every year, are sustainable and justified if their result after a decade or so is a fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman. Many models of pro-family policy that were, for a long time, considered functional and worth emulating — such as the Nordic model, which lets both parents share generous parental leave (with part of it reserved just for fathers), backs that up with affordable childcare so that mothers rarely need to step away from work for long, and taxes each parent as an individual rather than as a household, so there’s no financial reward for one of them — almost always the woman — to stay home — have also crumbled in the past several years, as Sweden’s fertility rate of 1.4 children per woman shows. The problem with this model, apart from even that not being able to withstand the current wave of decline, was always that, even though it seemed to work in Scandinavia for quite a long time, it was never something other societies could simply copy — especially ones with a very different, much less egalitarian history when it comes to the standing of women.

Georgia was hailed for its baby boom in the 2010s, caused, among other things, by the patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Ilia II, who enjoyed strong celebrity status in the country and pledged to personally baptize every third or further child born to married Georgian parents, thereby essentially lending his status to each family. While this led to a spike in the fertility rate for several years, pushing it above replacement level, it has once again been in freefall since 2019 and will probably fall under 1.5 children per woman for the first time soon. South Korea has been spending hundreds of billions of dollars to raise its fertility rate. While there has been an uptick in births this year, the fertility rate will likely still not even reach 1 child per woman, and it’s quite likely that much of the current rise is simply due to the strong 1990s cohorts being of childbearing age.

I will further illustrate my point using an analogy. One of the most fascinating phenomena I have noticed for a long time is the deep parallel between demographic crises and climate change. Now, for the purpose of this analogy, I will simply presume that the fundamental narrative around climate change — that it is, to a significant degree, influenced by human activities emitting CO2, and that it will have serious consequences — is simply correct. I know many dispute it, yet that is simply beyond my field of research, and I am not interested enough in climate change to devote the time needed to truly judge how accurate it is. So I will just assume it to be true. In that case, we are looking at two examples of what could be called “extremely slow-moving catastrophes.” What does that mean? Both are gradual processes that are the outcome of essentially uncoordinated decisions by human populations, and whose negative impacts do not arrive all at once but very gradually, over years, decades, and — who knows — possibly even centuries.

Demographic decline is the consequence of billions of individuals responding identically to a shared set of socio-cultural incentives — simply not having enough children to sustain the population size. Women from Brazil to Germany to Malaysia aren’t making life decisions with the goal of raising the median age, slowing growth, and tanking pension systems; those outcomes are mere by-products of individual choices. Climate change follows the same logic: billions of people striving to raise their consumption and living standards, which, at current technology levels, means emitting a lot of CO2. People across the developing world are moving from rural areas to cities, inevitably increasing their carbon footprint, without a thought for the rising oceans or future heatwaves that might result. And both processes are slow-moving. Neither is a hurricane wrecking the coast, a pandemic killing millions in real time, or a missile destroying a city. They work quietly — the population ages, consumes more and produces less, grows more risk-averse; heatwaves and unpredictable weather grow more frequent and severe, taking their toll year after year.

Another reason one can’t really escape this comparison is that the two phenomena tend to mirror each other. It is rather hard to find a person who is equally preoccupied with being a doomer about both climate change and the demographic crisis. These two slow-moving catastrophes possess a certain ideological quality that appeals to people with different values and ideological or political leanings. Moreover, the solutions to each often contradict each other in their nature — if climate change is humanity’s biggest worry, then adding more people to the planet, especially in the per-capita CO2-intensive developed countries, who will do all the nasty consumption burdening the environment — flying in planes, heating their homes, driving cars, wearing tons of cheap clothes, and consuming tons of goods all shipped in from China on massive container ships — is the worst thing one can do. Yet if one cares deeply about improving the demographic situation by doing the one thing that is in his control — having as large a family as he can — he inevitably does not want his kids to live in the carbon-free environment of premodern agricultural subsistence, but wants them to live prosperous lives in modern society. In doing so, he is further adding fuel to the climate-change fire.

The two groups of people fundamentally do not understand each other, since they seem to operate on completely different scales of loyalty and affection. As the famous study by Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues showed, there is a marked difference between conservatives and liberals in the breadth of their moral circles: conservatives tend to have narrower, tighter moral circles (centered on family, community, and nation), while liberals tend to have broader circles that extend to humanity as a whole and sometimes even beyond it. If you do not even plan to have children because you are so afraid of climate change, why are you even so worried about the future? Why is the future so important to you if it is the abstract future of humanity as a whole, not tied to your bloodline and kin? Mirroring this, the opposing view perceives humanity as more global in nature — we are not troglodytes preoccupied only with what immediately affects our family and immediate surroundings; we are humanity, and we should strive to deal with the problems that threaten our planet, because that is our shared heritage and we do not have any other planet — at least not so far.

It is a genuinely fascinating duality, since one person can look at you in complete disbelief that you seem to be so worked up about your nation having a couple million fewer people in 30 years — an issue they tend to see as something abstract and hardly catastrophic in its nature and consequences — while the other person remains completely unbothered by the notion that we will live in an uninhabitable environment, with drought and extreme heat, 30 years from now. And, of course, you can find proponents of degrowth on both sides. While people preoccupied with climate change will propose economic degrowth as a natural reaction to curtail destruction of the environment, many people who find this preposterous in the context of environmentalism will readily claim that, rather than undergo immigration motivated by the needs of a depleted labor market, we should accept population and economic decline. Both will tell you the same thing about the issue that does not bother them personally: we will figure it out somehow; it is not that big of an issue. And they are both right! They only need to make the mental leap to take the same position toward both issues.

Not that demographic collapse — happening most heavily in the technologically most productive and innovative areas of the planet — or climate change are not deeply serious issues. But the fundamental reality of both is that it is not in our power to change these developments. This is not fatalism, just an acknowledgment of observed reality. CO2 emissions continue to grow because people simply won’t curtail their living standards in the name of climate change — that’s an illusion in a bunch of Western European countries, and even there it is hitting the limits of popular willingness to endure the economic decline it leads to. Populous developing countries with fast-growing economies, like Vietnam, India, or Indonesia, have doubled their CO2 emissions in a decade or so, and they have no plans to stop. All the emissions reductions that the European Union has painfully inflicted on itself over the past decade have been compensated for several times over by the CO2 emissions increase that China has recorded over the same period. In a very similar manner, efforts to increase fertility rates have been a massive failure across the board.

One could argue that resources poured into figuring this out and shifting public opinion are meager compared to the attention given to climate change, and that more resources would yield better results. I agree it deserves more attention, but I’m skeptical it would fundamentally change the outcome. The core facts of modernity won’t change: children in modern urban civilization are almost pure economic cost, and our urge to procreate is weaker than we thought and easily overridden by outside incentives. Where fertility holds up better, it’s rarely the result of good policy but a by-product of cultural and economic circumstance. The US traditionally had higher fertility not because it pursued pronatalist policy, but because, among other things, it’s more religious and has bigger houses, thanks to lower population density and suburbs — it has the fertility because it has those traits, not the other way around. Israel’s hyper-specific mix — a religious, nationalist population and the siege mentality of a state in perpetual conflict — is equally hard to replicate; it can’t be manufactured in a population without those traits already ingrained. One could still argue on principle that we should lower emissions or raise fertility regardless of cost or proportionate results. But if lowering living standards in Europe to cut emissions is futile given the global scale of the problem, the same logic applies to fertility: pouring money into raising birth rates without the spending doing its job follows the same pattern.

We should, of course, try to nudge government policies in directions that have proven favorable in other comparable countries, and similarly, we should try to implement solutions reducing carbon emissions or improving the situation in other ways where it makes sense and does not involve trade-offs that the vast majority of people are simply not prepared to make. Ideological opposition based on principle is fundamentally stupid. But this should not be expected to deliver groundbreaking results. East Asian urbanism won’t be transformed from a prevalence of apartment towers into sprawling Americana suburbs. Deeply secularized populations won’t become more religious due to government efforts. Women won’t abandon their life aspirations to become housewives en masse anytime soon. It might happen through some self-perpetuating cultural forces in the future, sure. But those are, to a large extent, outside of our control. Our capacity for social engineering on such a scale, and with a phenomenon as complex as modern fertility, is deeply limited. In both climate change and demographic decline, we must adapt.

Cities might be redesigned to cope with heat and flooding — more shade, better drainage, AC becoming standard rather than being treated as a luxury. Farmers might switch to crops and irrigation methods suited to a hotter, drier climate. Health systems must prepare for heatwaves and maybe certain diseases spreading into places that never used to see them. Insurers will reprice risk, and, in the most extreme cases, people will simply move away from the areas hit hardest. None of this stops climate change — but then again, that was never really the point of adaptation. That is to adjust behavior to function in the changed conditions with the least possible amount of friction. And, of course, technological innovation — providing new and, hopefully, cleaner ways of producing — and economic growth — creating enough resources to invest in adaptation — are crucial.

And in a similar manner, demographic decline must be approached - if we can’t fundamentally change it, we must diminish its negative impacts where possible. Pension systems must be redesigned to rely less on pay-as-you-go transfers and more on funded, individual savings — raising retirement ages, tying them to life expectancy rather than a fixed retirement age. Labor markets must shift toward automation and robotics wherever possible, especially in elder care and manufacturing. Food and other deliveries might be brought by a drone rather than a guy on a scooter. Cars and public transport will hopefully drive themselves in the future. Immigration has already become a systematic part of the system, since there will be a permanent imbalance between the most economically productive areas of the planet and those with population surpluses. Yet it must be done in a way that is as sensitive as possible, and it must limit the possibility of long-term political rights and citizenship to only the most desirable, higher-skilled workers — this avoids permanently changing the ethnic balance of countries based on current labor-market needs that might shift completely within a decade due to new automation technologies and the like. In the most extreme cases, entire regions will simply empty out, with people concentrating in a shrinking number of economically viable hubs. In many areas of the world, such as Eastern or Southern Europe or East Asia, the rural fertility advantage is not large enough to offset the economic costs of funding public services for faltering rural populations; a better way forward is incentivizing suburbanization, which has a better fertility record.

The money saved in public budgets by decreasing spending on children, since there will be fewer of them, should be spent on investing in the education of those children who are born, rather than on expenses for the elderly, and so on. Maybe we will even see more innovative political approaches — for example, parents voting in elections on behalf of their children, which would somewhat rebalance the electoral advantage of the elderly, and so on. And, of course, technological innovation — automation replacing the hands that are missing — and productivity growth — generating enough output per worker to offset a shrinking workforce — are crucial. Whoever adapts best to the changes will succeed. Whoever is unable to do so will falter.

There is a famous quote ascribed to the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” There is profound wisdom in it, and it applies to the areas of demographic collapse and climate change. We are dealing with phenomena that are so complex and multifaceted, and caused by such profound social forces, that we probably do not even completely understand their causes in their entirety — and even if one thinks he does, he should have the humility to accept that we can’t change them on a fundamental level. Throughout the history of our species, our adaptability has been one of, if not the main, strength we possess. We have been able to overcome so many difficulties — infectious diseases, lack of food and clean water, and so much more — through our ingenuity and adaptability, and we must simply strive to do the same with the looming challenges of the 21st century. Will we succeed? Nobody knows, but one must trust that we will.

What really psychologically connects these phenomena is the underlying sense of dread about the future that becomes increasingly pervasive — climate change, demographic decline and replacement of the population, or AI-induced catastrophe of various kinds. One could go into some kind of Jungian territory and speculate about the collective unconscious of Westerners, but it is also entirely possible that it is simply the inherent human tendency to concentrate on the bad and threatening more than on the good, for evolutionary reasons, astroturfed by algorithms that thrive on this enormously. Yet one should try to resist. Doom is poison for the spirit, and there is no benefit to it. We are still living in one of the best timelines possible — appreciate simple things like children not dying of diarrhea because something called oral rehydration therapy was invented in the 20th century.

I will once again end on a personal note: in my personal experience — and I am generally a relatively neurotic person — having children reduces these sorts of abstract “doom” worries quite a lot. The future becomes much less abstract and “hidden in the mist of the unknown,” because it is suddenly personified in your child. He is the future now. If you hesitate to have children because of these abstract worries about the future being horrible, then do have them. If you remain childless, the future really will be that dark mystery of the unknown — if we won’t figure out the challenges ahead of us, they might. Give them a shot. And maybe save up for AC, because the heat in Europe we experienced this month was really unbearable. It is much easier to fight off doomer thoughts when one is not sweating like a pig all night.