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Posted on 05/18/2026 2:29:11 PM PDT by EnderWiggin1970
Why has the number of births declined everywhere, all at once?
This was the subject of last week’s Plain English episode and a new blockbuster report from the Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch. In fact it feels like just about everybody has been taking a crack at this question recently.
Some blame it on technology. One week ago, my feed was flooded with a viral video of Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, speaking about the sterilizing effects of modern technology. Among his friends, “no one’s having kids,” said Leahy, who was 30 at the time. “Do you know how hard you need to abuse a mammal to make them not have children?” If you asked Leahy what the explanation was, “my answer is technology,” he said. “My answer is social media. My answer is AI.”
Others blame a kind of 21st century weltschmerz—a world sadness about the state of the world and our uncertain future in it. A long essay in the New York Times by Anna Louie Sussman, entitled “Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All,” an excerpt from her forthcoming book Inconceivable, argued that we have “overlooked” the pervasive sense of existential uncertainty among young adults. 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at derekthompson.org ...
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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.
The decline is accelerating faster than almost anybody predicted. As Burn-Murdoch reported, UN demographers predicted that there would be 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023; the real figure came in at 230,000—a whopping 50 percent miss.
according to the China General Social Survey, the share of young women with “no desire for children” increased from approximately 5 percent in 2012 to 47 percent in 2023.
I think a lot of people believe falling fertility is mostly a rich country phenomenon. But you point out that’s a misconception. Total fertility rate is lower than the U.S. in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Thailand.
...now coming to the U.S. The fertility rate of African Americans fell in 2024 below the fertility rate of non-Hispanic whites for the first time since the creation of the Republic... Who is having kids in the US? Rich white suburban families. Who is not having kids in the US? Poor African American urban families.
The second region in the world where fertility is collapsing incredibly fast is North Africa and the Middle East. Morocco is already below replacement rate. Tunisia is very low. Egypt is falling incredibly fast. All across the Middle East, fertility is falling very, very fast.
1.6 USA
I thought that the fertility crisis was only in prosperous,civilized countries....e.g., Japan and Italy vs Uganda and Somalia.
Hmmmmmmm
What happened in the prior year 2022?
Something about a Experimental Gene Therapy shot.
As people live longer, we don’t NEED to produce so many babies in order to keep the population stable.
Explain how that conspiracy notion explains the first chart in the article.
Not any more. At most some countries are just a few years behind the rest, but following the same trajectory. Well, except Israel.
My answer is that working fits a woman’s psychology to be ruled by a dominant male, because they have to do what their boss says. So, women transfer their dependency on a man on their boss and away from their husband.
These countries have citizens with an IQ of over 70. Now do those countries below 70..... I’ll hang up and listen...
1. Inflation everywhere raising the cost if having children
2. Decades long drumbeat of global warming gloom and doom
… leading to belief there is no future worth living.
Somalia is going to win the world demographic game.
They are being supported by others and can just pop out babies.
It's interesting how this (or variations of it) are so commonly given as a reason for not having children. This makes no sense to me. The fundamental fact is that we are dramatically more productive in 2026 than in generations past. We can build larger houses, produce more food, and consume more amenities and luxuries than ever before - and by a huge margin.
So how is it that people living in ways that would make an 18th century king drool, insist that they can't afford to have children? While a woman with no education and barely any income in a 3rd world country happily has a half dozen? This is not a reality thing, it is a perception thing - or more specifically, these are not reasons. They are excuses. Which takes us back to asking what are the REAL reasons people are not having children? They have never been more affordable in all human history.
Excuses? Reality is that these western countries have been conquered by debt. Someone in the United States is born approximately $250k in debt.
It's not just that people are surprised that a tax and debt slave doesn't want to bring children into such slavery, it's that others standing right next to them REFUSE to recognize such tax and debt slavery.
So to claim that people can't have children because of how money is arranged and distributed, in an environment where even the poorest are wildly better off than people were a few centuries ago, strikes me as false. I expect the problem of population collapse to get worse (lower and lower TFRs) because I keep getting this same sort of response when the topic comes up. It's a tragedy-of-the-commons problem: everyone can see the problem, and they just hope someone else will fix it. So barring the events of Revelation playing out, a century from now I foresee a post-apocalyptic environment, not because any nukes were ever used, but because people kept expecting government or someone else to save them, and that never happened as infrastructure and logistics and productivity collapsed around them. The early stages are already playing out.
the
COVID sterilization shot
I put that notion in the same category as flat-earth beliefs.
without God there is no hope, without hope... why bother having children.
That will not be true and hasn't been. The number of takers has far exceeded the contributors and the ratio continues to worsen.
...where even the poorest are wildly better off than people were a few centuries ago, strikes me as false.
The "Worst Negates the Bad" Fallacy, also known as "Be Grateful for What You’ve Got" is an extremely common modern logical fallacy that an objectively bad situation somehow isn’t so bad simply because it could have been far worse, or because someone, somewhere has it even worse.
"I cried because I had no shoes, until I saw someone who had no feet."
"You’re protesting because you earn only $x per hour? You could just as easily be out on the street! People in foreign countries make less than that in a week."
Telling someone they should suck it up and work harder because their ancestors didn't have the same "luxuries" doesn't change their current reality.
Slaves under pharoahs worked fewer days of the year than workers today. And slaves kept a higher percentage of their earnings than today.
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