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Strap in, folks, cause this is a dark one. But it gets better at the end.
“C'est long temps la fin du monde,” says a character in the dark, fantastical desert survival story Sirat. The end of the world takes a long time.
I’ve been obsessed with the future as long as I can remember. I’ve pursued that interest by covering technology and climate change and youth extensively. I also read palms and Tarot as a hobby (find me here at the monthly Saturday jam).
Another powerful way of peering into the future is by tracking birthrates. As the University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde told Derek Thompson recently:
“Demographics is destiny. The number of children born today will determine how our society will look in 30 to 40 years.”
I’m fascinated by this. I plan to be alive in 30 to 40 years, and my kids, I pray, will be in the prime of their lives. So what is the shape of that destiny?
Not rosy. In the last decade in particular, birthrates around the world have crashed. This development took social scientists by surprise, especially since it has happened in poor and rich countries alike.
Fernández-Villaverde:
The year 2023 was a unique year in the history of humanity, because it’s the first time our total fertility rate as a planet fell below replacement rate.
That has never happened before in 200,000 years. That means the world population will peak in another 30 years or so if the trend continues.
In more than two-thirds of the world’s 195 countries, the average number of children born to each woman has fallen below the “replacement rate” of 2.1
…Just five years ago the UN predicted there would be 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023. That was a 50 per cent overestimate: the real figure was 230,000.
Fernández-Villaverde puts the global population peak at or about 2055.
There’s a lot of talk lately about this startling development, which people tend to look at through their pre-existing worldviews. There are two sharply diverging camps. The louder voices are the right-wing pronatalists, the Christian evangelical Quiverfulls, the white-supremacist “great replacement theory” extremists. For these people, many of whom are in or allied with the Trump administration, the so-called “underbabied” they are worried about, are primarily white women. Their desired remedy, as articulated by the Heritage Foundation, is to force young women into early marriage and economic dependence, depriving them of education, contraception, and general life opportunities.
Progressives are more gingerly broaching what this trend might mean. We believe in reproductive justice, gender equality, and personal freedom, so the Quiverfull model is off the table.
There are those who advocate for more family-friendly social policies like universal childcare and paid family leave. (Appreciate the work of Elliot Haspel, Elissa Strauss, and Joe Waters on this).
Others point out that the problem could be addressed in part with a cultural and political shift, namely if men stepped up to do more caregiving work. The current patriarchal, heterosexual family formation tends to benefit men over women, as it has for centuries, as Ned Resnikoff argued recently:
Men think they are happier and wealthier married—and they’re right. Women think they are happier and wealthier alone—and they’re right. The bargain is not good for women, and more and more we are declining to make it.
There’s limited evidence from Brazil that housing subsidies, in particular, can increase birthrates. And progressive social policies are no-regrets. They are the right thing to do and they improve lives and prospects for the children, women, and families who are here.
But the fact remains that birthrates are falling in countries no matter how generous their social policies are, or how equal their social norms (although there isn’t a country on earth that I’m aware of where men share equally in taking care of children).
The other big thing that’s happening right now that is clearly unprecedented in the history of humanity, of course, is the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But there’s not a lot of writing or scholarship that I can find—and please enlighten me in the comments—that clearly tries to grapple with what it could look like as these two trend lines extend forward and intersect.
What I’ve found is that birthrate people don’t talk that much about climate change, and climate change people don’t talk that much about birthrates. Or as one researcher put it: “Population dynamics have not been integrated systematically into climate change science.” So this essay is a sketch based on limited information.
Relatively recently it’s been argued that lower birthrates could be a climate solution. When the Drawdown survey of climate change solutions was published in 2017, “girls education and family planning” particularly in the developing world, was listed as one of the top solutions.
While these are laudable goals in themselves, I don’t think it’s gonna work. The climate is warming too quickly for these trends to save us from catastrophe. A working paper from last year crunched the numbers for various demographic patterns and concluded:
Although these paths differ by billions of people in 2200, we find that the implied temperatures differ by less than one tenth of a degree C. Timing drives this result. Fertility shifts take generations to meaningfully change population size…
The flip side is that the climate crisis is probably already driving down births, and this trend may accelerate.
First of all, climate anxiety, or what I would broaden out to polycrisis anxiety, is widespread among young people and is frequently cited as a reason for foregoing children. As the Financial Times (not exactly a bleeding-heart rag) recently reported:
the more worried a prospective young mother is, the fewer children she intends to have…
…Between climate change, rising housing costs, political instability, AI, inflation chaos, doomscrolling, and declining social trust, today’s generation is too anxious about the future to make the irreversible commitment of having a child.
Second, hotter temperatures directly reduce conception rates, as a 2015 paper calculated:
additional days above 80°F cause a large decline in birth rates approximately 8 to 10 months later.
Hotter summers mean more babies are conceived in the cooler months, which ironically means more babies born in hotter seasons, which in turn reduces the babies’ chances of survival. The authors conclude:
…increased temperatures due to climate change may reduce population growth rates in the coming century. As an added cost, climate change will shift even more births to the summer months when third trimester exposure to dangerously high temperatures increases.
And then there's the relationship between environmental contamination and falling sperm count.
Let’s not forget, of all the ways to reduce population, reduction through women having fewer children is the easiest, gentlest path. There is another possibility for how the climate can impact the number of people on the planet, one that previous generations have experienced.
While we may not have been in an era of sustained falling birthrates before, humans have been through other population crashes. Scientists are able to track this kind of stuff through genetic markers. The most extreme bottleneck occurred about 70,000 years ago. By some accounts, there were as few as 2000 individuals left alive at that point.
We can’t know exactly what caused that one. But, a 2011 paper in Global Ecology and Biogeography surveyed every known population collapse in the Northern Hemisphere between 800 and 1900. The researchers concluded that nearly 90% of the crashes they looked at happened in periods of climate deterioration, which lowered the carrying capacity of the land. Famines, wars and epidemics, which were all downstream of climate disturbance, were the dominant triggers.
The mind boggles. Truly. But I’m not a human-extinction doomer. It’s possible, surely. It’s just that I prefer thinking about the future with a little more subtlety.
Before the population starts dropping in earnest, we’re gonna get older. “Between 2015 and 2050, the proportion of the world’s population over 60 years will nearly double from 12 percent to 22 percent.”
Has humanity ever been so gray, in 200,000 years? I can’t imagine that it has.
This trend is often looked at in terms of burden. And that’s fair. Older populations mean slower economic growth. That means fewer resources, and fewer hands, to put up solar panels and zero-carbon apartment blocks. Then there are social factors. Adapting to climate change is an unprecedented infrastructure and way-of-life challenge and old people, stereotypically, don’t like change. Lloyd Alter has written about how the “demographic time bomb” can result in aging Boomers with plenty of spare time using it to fight zoning changes or investments in public transit and walkable neighborhoods, occupying overlarge, outdated and inefficient houses, and requiring new hospitals, care homes and people to staff them just as we start running out of working people and money to invest.
I am haunted by a recent piece from Sara Ramsey about living in an aging rural Iowa town blighted by unlivable, unsellable houses that no one has the money or cares enough to repair. I think of a growing number of folks stranded in disaster zones, immobile in mobile homes, unable to evacuate, oxygen tanks blinking out in blackouts. I think of how extreme heat can drive up dementia rates. I think of my parents, of course, in New Orleans.
But the graying of the world has potential advantages for the greening of the world as well. We see with groups like Bill McKibben’s Third Act and attendance trends at No Kings rallies, that older people are capable of inspiring leadership on climate and other progressive causes.
Countries with more senior citizens are less warlike. They have fewer people of fighting age. Plus, of necessity, they have to devote more resources to caregiving and social safety nets, and less to the military. Women live longer than men, so an older society will probably have more women. Women generally care more about climate change and are more invested in solutions.
Older people also consume less. They work fewer hours. They are on average happier, in large part because they are aware of their finite time left on the planet, so they focus more on experiences and relationships and less on achieving and getting. They need more care, and they also offer care to others. Maternal grandmothers in particular can improve child wellbeing even in very difficult circumstances.
These are generalizations, of course; they obviously don’t describe our current gerontocrats.
I was texting recently about the birthrate collapse with my group chat of awesome women writers (thank you!) and I said “I don’t think of it as a problem because I don’t think there is a solution. It’s mostly people making mostly rational choices that they believe will benefit them. I think of it as a way the world is changing…I don’t think human flourishing necessarily means more and more and more humans on the planet year after year forever.”
The most hopeful future I can imagine for humanity on a finite planet isn’t a population graph that goes up and to the right forever. I don’t dream of my grandkids, if there are any, crowding in with 15 billion others. There’s nothing inherently good about growth.
Instead, I want to be part of turning this big ship toward a livable planet with unprecedented levels of equality: where we share what we have with each other and with the other creatures who are here, where we rediscover the meaning of enough, both as pertains to the number of people who are here and in lots of other ways too.
As laid out recently by the Global Justice Project (thanks to my friend Kathy Lawson for the link), this vision of the path to what they call “sufficiency” includes a reduction in paid working hours, compression of economic inequality, increased gender equality across paid and unpaid labor, and a “dematerialization” of the economy, with a shift toward healthcare, education, and culture and away from production of stuff. Plus swift decarbonization, regenerative approaches to food-growing, and reforestation.
Achieving this utopian vision would seem to require some kind of complete overhaul of human nature. But maybe it’s better looked at a natural evolution of priorities, much like many individuals experience if they’re lucky enough to live a longer life.
The Population Bomb was one of the wrongest books ever published. It was a global bestseller, predicting worldwide famine within a decade or two due to overpopulation. But it came out in 1968, at the end of the baby boom, eight years after the introduction of the pill, and in the middle of some big advances in agriculture. The population did double, just as predicted, but the global death rate actually fell at the same time. Malthus was cheated once again.
I thought of that when I read the prediction that if current demographic trends hold, Thailand would go from 63 million people today, to just 2 million in 200 years.
I definitely believe we’re in the midst of some massive changes. And one thing I know from reading Tarot is that predicting the future is one important way to change it.
Here’s the thing. Even now, there’s some evidence that people are having fewer babies than they really want to: “nearly 40 percent of Americans over 50 without children say they wanted them at some point,” and, “Most young men and women still report wanting around two children — even in South Korea where most women now have zero.”
The desire to nurture is very difficult to snuff out. The main development that I could see, maybe, stabilizing the global population in the future, even at a lower level, is a real turn toward global justice, one that eases younger people’s anxiety and also improves their material circumstances. Less grind, less grasp, more caring. We also must restore a better relationship between human impacts and the carrying capacity of the planet, such that there is actually space for our descendants to grow food and water for them to drink, and space for the nonhuman earthlings as well, and that we're no longer shrinking the inhabitable regions of the earth.
And who’s going to spearhead all that? Most likely me and the other grandmas-to-be. It’s the work of a lifetime.
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