This post is mostly focused on whether to acknowledge population decline is a problem -- and is compelling on that score. But, as a general matter, why do we talk about the problem of population decline solely in terms of fertility? I know that sounds silly to say, because of course, increasing fertility would fix the problem. But that may come at a huge price, particularly for women. For instance, suppose a society decides one way to reverse the grave problem of population decline is to keep women out of the workplace during their most fertile years. Is that worth the trade off, given that it would solve the problems of taxation, improve national security, and allow the social welfare state to continue to function? Many people would say no. So why aren't we talking about other policy solutions aside from fertility? For instance, what if we accepted as fact that the global population decline couldn't be reversed in time. What are the best policy proposals then? Should dilapidated cities be converted into national parks? What kind of system could replace the social welfare state that doesn't depend on replacement level population? What tax scheme would be most ideal for a society with fewer workers? What other ways can we address for our national security needs? Unless I've missed it, I don't see people who acknowledge the problem of population decline discussing any solutions aside from fertility and sometimes immigration. Given that fertility comes at a high price, particularly for women's advancement, it's troubling to have the conversation so narrowly focused on this single lever.
Thought-provoking post—this is the definition of ‘thinking outside the box’! Kudos to you, YJ!
I’d like to add one layer to your point, which echoes Noah’s underlying anxiety: How do we manage the immediate economic shock of the transition period?
A major economy designed and built for 350 million people operates on a complex web of fixed assets and long-term investments. Even a mild population shrink manifests almost immediately in local communities—closing neighborhood restaurants, downsizing schools, and shrinking municipal tax bases.
It’s hard to imagine an economy built for 350 million "naturally" or smoothly adjusting down to 200–300 million without triggering severe deflationary spirals, widespread asset devaluations, and prolonged recessions along the way.
In other words, before those grand adaptation policies (like turning shrinking cities into national parks or overhauling welfare systems) can actually take root, how do we prevent the economy from breaking under the pressure of the transition itself? That remains the scariest black box.
Well.... as it happens the only way to have babies and make more people happens in Mammelian biology to be via women's fertility. Nothing revoked that fundamental, no faddish multi-genderism nor anything else.
So, if population decline is a problem globally then that is the need, period - unless one decides to go in for Robotism & Maximal AI which seems to scare the living bejuses out of just about everyone (although myself not so much).
If one adds to this that large percentages of populations - female sex side as well as male sex side generally report a desire for more kids and family over career in developed economies, one may also ask if elite educated priorities are not being simply assumed as the common agenda where they should not perhaps (not noted from an anti-women working PoV but the desires here too often seem to be collapsed into the extreme positions of two opposing ideological camps that don't per se reflect wider society and within society potentially differentiated desires by socio-economic classes).
Personally I think that rate of decline (the evoked in art dif btw .75 and 1.75 e.g.) is the key worry not decline in and of itself, in a world where both robotics and AI are rapidly advancing.
Great points! Though if you don't mind a tiny correction:
You mentioned that "population decline is a problem globally," but strictly speaking, it’s not quite a global issue yet. It is specifically a crisis encompassing virtually all developed economies—or any region as soon as it gets close to becoming wealthy.
In the other half of the world—developing nations that have crossed the basic subsistence line and established essential healthcare and education (primarily parts of South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and much of the Muslim world)—populations are still growing.
I’m somewhat reluctant to say it, but this is precisely where the demographic crisis and the immigration debate intersect in economics.
Well... yes SSA Africa - really a belt of it in the Sahel still has high single digit - but wealthier coastal areas are showing the same trends. I was really focused on the total fertility equation.
Artificial wombs have been invented and are being developed, and infant formula exists already, so if we can teach the robots to be nannies maybe we can transcend mammalian biology.
The actual giving birth part is not really what puts off parents as per data, its long term cost / investment into the offspring. I have to find the recent interesting paper on this transversally across economies.
The intervening 18-20/25 years, that's the fly in the soup. Not artificial wombs except perhaps niche very much upper middle income older oldish women as fetility extender
Given the utter shit results of app driven learning during COVID and popular backlash on AI, I rather doubt tech is a mitigant on age 1-18 problem
Yep. Kids are, bluntly, an economic drain for at least 18 and these days more like 25 years. The demands of what constitutes good parenting have risen, fewer young people can find great or even “great for entry level” or “good enough” jobs right out of high school, so college is a necessity and college is expensive. (Hence the obsession with getting kids in on sports scholarships.)
And all this for no guarantee that your kids will turn out to be law abiding tax paying citizens, or speak to you once they leave home, or do much to pay back what you put into them - and I don’t mean “pay back” in the monetary sense, I mean “will you spend 20-some years pouring your whole soul into this person and now they want nothing to do with you?”
Basically we’ve offloaded a societal good onto individual families; yes, we’ve always done that, but between the emergence of safe, reliable birth control, women with the option to use it, a whole lot of appealing alternatives to parenthood, and the rise of intensive parenting combined with the lessening circle of the people in the family/tribe/village available to pitch in - we’ve hit a wall. No matter how parents say that it’s this amazing experience to show the world to an amazing little person and get this amazing love that is so amazing like nothing else in the world - that is not enough inducement for more and more people to reproduce. So here we are.
as a nuance. I don't know I like to focus on "good parenting" standards given the broad global trend and radically different cultures seeing pretty much near identical outcomes: biological systems show similar effects - if the overall enviro - the bio-economy if one wishes - shows that one needs to put more resources in for the Sprogs to move on, then the reproduction strategy flips to many less Sprogs.
Our economic world really isn't divorced from deep bio-logic
As the pattern is global and across all kinds of different societies, political systems but aligns pretty well with paths where economies have flipped from being "more hands = more income" to "1-18/25 hands are net drain as one has to invest in upskilling so they can make money / get job" - there's this huge broad flip to less kids cause one needs to invest so much more in resources. More or less like biological systems...
So.... I think until the fundamental Cost question changes (scarce people certainly will drive up the return on people: See Black Death econ impact)
Although AI and robotics makes this equation... hmmm I don't know, uncertain for the future.
An important note at least in the US, women's desired fertility rate is above replacement even though actual fertility is below replacement.
So if women were actually having the number of kids they say they want to have, then we wouldn't have a problem.
It makes sense then to increase the amount of supported needed so women (and their families) can have the number of kids wanted.
But this might not be the case in all countries. And the evidence strongly suggest that as the number of kids in a society goes down, then women's desired number of children goes down as well, IE there's a large cultural factor to women's reported desired number of kids.
Thus it's quite likely that most societies will need both economic incentives and to try and shape culture.
The most important point though is that if liberal societies can't figure out how to have a stable population they WILL be replaced by other cultures that figure it out. And most likely those societies won't be a very pleasant place to live especially for women.
Finally, while its conceivable that a society and economy might be able to manage very slow population declines without imploding, that's not what's going on. We are talking about fast and large changes, that won't end well
I don't give much weight to stated preferences like desired fertility rate. If a woman with no kids says she wants three, let's see if she still does after the first one. If a woman with one kid says she wants two more I take that more seriously.
I agree with the rest of it, though. The inverse relationship between women's rights and fertility is disturbing.
The reality that liberal society just doesn't want to admit is that women are simply better at and more inclined towards child care. So no matter how progressive you may be, the truth is that women will always bear 100% of the burden of pregnancy and much greater than 50% of the burden of child care. It may well be that it is simply too much to ask of them to work a full time job and also raise children.
Before birth control and abortion were legal this issue resolved itself by simply forcing women down that path, but I think it's no coincidence that the legalization of those things and the expectation that women work full time arose so close together in time.
A potential solution to this would be publicly funded child care outside the age range and hours of public school to allow raising children while working full time to be much less of a burden. I don't know how effective this would be, though. I wonder if there is any evidence that rich people who can afford this now via hiring a nanny are having any more kids?
That is nonsense. Liberal (lefty I presume since you then jump to progressive) has fuck all to do with this. Identical fertility declines are happening across every society imaginable, dictatorship, democracy and in between,.
US culture war nonsense is nonsense distraction.
The global econometric data show clearly that economic modernisation, industrialisation and workforce upskilling requirements align with global changes per country - hard economics of one's "investment in offspring" needs and an unsurprising correlation with wider biological economics (species switch parenting modes and offspring strategy based on resources investment needs, this is deeply coded in our biology)
The broad global pattern rahter indicates that perceived resource investment need - education in essence, competitive education is a primary driver.
If you read my comment more clearly you would have realized I blame only for failure to admit the obvious differences between men and women, not for the fertility decline.
Fascinating read! The birth rate crisis is a fundamental issue that isn't really an "economic problem" at its core—even though the foundational economic concept of opportunity cost explains it perfectly.
Look at every single developed economy across the globe: culture, history, ideology, public policies, land size, minimum wage, or generous child subsidies make zero difference. The rule remains unbroken. Once a society becomes wealthy and people (both men and women) gain better choices in life, the vast majority simply will not choose to have many kids. Meanwhile, in developing regions with fewer economic opportunities, populations keep growing.
That brings us to immigration: the influx of people from less-developed regions to wealthy ones is a vital, self-correcting, and undeniably effective lifeline for this crisis—even if it makes certain political factions uncomfortable.
An aging, shrinking population is a massive problem. Economically, its damage hits consumer demand first (fewer buyers, stagnant businesses), and labor shortage second (hiring difficulties). AI and robotics focus almost exclusively on the latter, and whether they can actually plug the gap remains questionable—especially given the negative shocks they bring first.
In short, the demographic collapse is an existential, deeply ironic dilemma that neither economists nor politicians can solve. Just ask anyone in Singapore: they’ve tried every incentive under the sun, failed completely, and arrived at this exact conclusion. As of today, immigration is the only functional solution we have.
As for the artificial wombs mentioned in the comments? Sure, if that ever happens, it will completely overhaul thousands of years of human societal structures and render the problem obsolete altogether. But until then, we're just writing science fiction.
'"look at every single developed economy across the globe: culture, history, ideology, public policies, land size, minimum wage, or generous child subsidies make zero difference."
this is false. Interventions can and do move the fertility rate
Moreover, achieved fertility rates are below desired fertility rates (as reported by women). If we could get fertility rates up to where women say they want them to be we wouldn't be shrinking.
Why is actual fertility rates below desired? A combination of reasons, but I submit the high cost of housing is one of the biggest. I know my wife and I refused to have kids in an apartment. I'm quite confident that we weren't the only couple to do so. Thus building a LOT of housing and thus making it easier to young families to start out would help a lot.
Also, greatly expanding the child tax credit would surely help. Start at $10k a year for kids 6 and under. If that doesn't do enough, then raise it to $15k or even $20k a year
That's fair—and thanks for challenging my wording.
To clarify, when I said "zero difference," I was referring strictly to the direction of the trend line (reversing a negative slope to a positive one), not the marginal degree of decline.
Looking at the charts in the article you shared, they actually demonstrate this exact point: policy interventions and generous subsidies can indeed cushion the fall and make the downward slope less steep. In other words, the declining numbers we see today are already the mitigated figures—without those subsidies, the drop would be even more severe. So yes, subsidies work in slowing the decline, but nowhere in the developed world have they successfully reversed the trend to get back above replacement rate (2.1). We are fundamentally agreeing on the impact, just talking about different metrics (slope direction vs. rate of decline). Do you think that’s a fair distinction?
I agree I don't think any developed country has reversed the slide yet after achieving negative fertility. And thus the question remains how much subsidy would be needed to do so.
And if we need to make really large investments that money will need to come from somewhere else, probably old age programs.
Also, I would add we need to sponsor a bunch of pro family propaganda through various media channels including Hollywood and other influencers
I remember a pretty famous study years ago where MTV's 16 and pregnant show lowered the teen birth rate (I think in Brazil).
While the potential challenge of demographic decline is a real one- jumping to absolute conclusions "The rule remains unbroken. Once a society becomes wealthy and people (both men and women) gain better choices in life, the vast majority simply will not choose to have many kids." seems to me a serious analytical error.
So far.
Given an economic set of conditions as currently prevailing.
But the world collectively is in the first time stage of this experience and very much like projections made in the late 19th century and early to mid 20th century off of demographic rules that had held until then, it is unwise to conclude that this is an inevitable trend that absolutely will not change as macroeconomic changes feed through (Singapore as a metro-city-state really doesn't tell us much, South Korea is more extrapolatable (not to say that means it is encouraging but extrapolating from a city-state notably where cities have almost always through history been demographic sinks is not good analytical base.
It strikes me much doomerism at the moment is flipping around to an inversion of the early 20th century analytical errors of forward projection excluding potential substantial socio-economic change. I suspect as this feeds through societies will react in ways that are difficult to model and likely to surprise rather as it happened in late 20th century surprised in a different way.
I really appreciate your pushback here—and honestly, I find myself agreeing with your core logic.
You’re spot on: this is the very first time in human history that "modern" societies are collectively undergoing this steep demographic drop. As we’ve seen in these threads, the irreconcilable friction between micro-level personal rationales and macro-level societal needs has created a deeply confusing puzzle. I certainly don't claim this to be an immutable law of human civilization—after all, economics itself is a modern discipline, and at times like this, its predictive power feels closer to astrology than physics.
So yes, an unexpected inflection point could happen. Some people jump straight to sci-fi scenarios, but like you, I prefer looking through the lens of history. The post-WWII Baby Boom was indeed a massive, unexpected counter-narrative to earlier pessimistic projections—though one could argue it was forged in the crucible of two brutal World Wars and the onset of the Cold War. If we look back at Malthus, his panic over exponential population growth has manifested today in the exact opposite direction—a scenario that would have completely shattered his framework.
Perhaps history will find its own answer in the long run, and long-term predictions are notoriously futile. But while a grand historical perspective is humbling, it doesn't diminish the urgency of our current anxiety. As Keynes famously put it, "In the long run, we are all dead"—we still have to survive the immediate economic friction of today.
Lastly, I stand by Singapore as a fantastic case study precisely because it acted as a controlled laboratory that honestly tested almost every incentive policy imaginable—ultimately showing that immigration became the reluctant, inevitable default. And please, don't get me started on South Korea! It is an even darker data point, but an utterly fascinating one—especially if you throw its northern neighbor into the analytical mix, which makes the existential paradoxes of modern development even more stark.
P.S. To clarify my point: Economics can certainly track birth trends and demographic shifts, measure their impacts, and forecast the future (and I completely agree with Noah and the consensus that population decline is overwhelmingly a net negative for the economy).
However, economics itself—along with political science or whatever any other human discipline—is entirely impotent when it comes to fixing it. We can diagnose the sickness and measure the damage with extreme precision, but we have zero working prescriptions.
When a couple decide to start a family they don’t think about GDP but they do care about not being poor and a big chunk of high status young people are concerned about remaining that way to the point that they make the decision for the potential unborn child that the child would prefer not to have the opportunity to exist and experience this universe, preposterous as that may sound. Can you imagine yourself explaining to that non-kid that - what? You are doing them a favor by saving them the trouble of living a life? Because maybe they will have to be a server at McDonald’s for a couple years?
That since Yale cut the number of legacy enrollments, let’s not bother?
It’s not the economy or the AI. As Melitta pointed out, teen pregnancy has basically been defeated. Women have a bigger choice in the matter and presently educated women have less children.
It used to be a given that your children gave you the most meaning in your life. The women around me - Mom, my wife who is a mom, families I know, even the single moms and the people I know struggling to keep afloat—they see their kids as a gift as do the dads.
How many billion people should have been born but didn’t happen? That is a tragedy to me because I consider human conscious life to be the most special thing in the universe.
It’s ironic that at this point in human history with the greatest abundance and lowest costs for raising a child, potential parents don’t see it that way.
My first house literally had no electricity or running water. Later we only had a home due to help from family and we ate a LOT of bean burritos. But you know what, largely it was fine. Yes it's better to have money than not. But it's very possible to have a great life while being poor especially in this country
What I don't see are studies asking women what it would take for them to have an additional child, or what their concerns are for having an additional child. And even though I'm not a woman, there are some pretty obvious financial downsides:
1 -- Day care until school starts or taking 5 years + 2 years per additional without the ability to work significantly. Perhaps another 5-10 years of diminished income even after your children are in school. In Pittsburgh, the average full day daycare rate for pre-K is probably around $20K/years/kid. You're probably losing $50K / year in salary in the pre-K years, and a minimum of $20K / year while you have younger kids in school.
2 -- More expensive health insurance and health bills in general
3 -- You need a bigger house/apartment. This cost is probably in the $100K level at least.
4 -- Educational expenses. Depending upon where you live, this might even include elementary through high school. And college, well, don't get me started.
5 -- Miscellaneous costs: food, larger auto, and other costs just for having a bigger household.
And what support do we provide? In the US, a $2,200 per year per child tax credit.
So, when I read about governments having tried to pay people to have kids, I have to laugh. This is like offering to buy your $100 bill for $10, and when that doesn't work, upping the offer to $25, and then saying 'well, paying people doesn't seem to work.' Even Singapore offers something like 10% of one year's median household income in total per child.
How about making a serious offer? Free college, trade school or help pay for starting a company for the primary caregiver, and perhaps an additional $100K / year through age 12 and then $50K / year until 18 to cover day care, educational expenses and career damage?
I mean there are obviously big details to think about -- both parents actually encounter some of these expenses, though the primary caregiver takes the bigger hit. But all in all, I don't think we've taken the idea of supporting parents financially at all seriously.
Brilliant breakdown—giving you a virtual round of applause for this! You hit the nail on the head: when people claim "paying people to have kids doesn't work," they ignore the fact that the offered compensation has been laughably inadequate.
To be fair, Singapore actually came remarkably close to taking this seriously—offering substantial cash gifts, housing priorities, heavily subsidized preschool, and tax relief. But even then, as your math clearly demonstrates, the gap between government subsidies and the true, lifetime opportunity cost borne by parents remains enormous.
And here is the brutal fiscal reality: if a government were to make a truly "serious offer" like the numbers you outlined, multiply that by millions of newborns each year, and you’re looking at an expenditure that would consume over 10% of a nation's total tax revenue. In a country like the US, where even universal healthcare is considered too expensive, a fiscal commitment of this magnitude is practically off the table.
While many still naively debate trivial tax credits, your math exposes just how mathematically daunting this challenge really is!
You're right, of course, that comping someone for the true cost of having children is way beyond what could be paid for today. In steady state, even if you're 'only' paying $20K/child/year for 10 years, you're talking about 200K/baby/year * 3.6M babies = $720 billion dollars per year.
Not impossible with a $32T GDP, but way more expensive than, say, a sane immigration policy. It certainly wouldn't hurt to make it easier for foreign students to stay in the US after graduation, for example.
In any event, we'd have to want more kids a lot more than we do now before we'll actually do something that might crank up the fertility rate.
good list, would only add that it's very difficult to get buy and enjoy a middle class lifestyle on one income.
For many women they don't have to have to work especially when the kids are young. For those that would like to stay home it should be financially viable.
I don't get the fear. Unless the rate of population change at a moment is zero, then you can extrapolate to a zero population or to an infinite one. The earth is not better off with 7 billion people than it was with 4 billion. U.S. cities are crowded. We continue to pave over more soil, cut down more forests and build more roads and houses.The Mississippi and the Gulf are polluted. Anything that can't go on forever, won't. That includes population growth. It's not going to work to have ever more young people to care for ever more old ones. If conditions improve, and places are les degraded and crowded, then there will be offsetting behavior, and people will have more children.
Well, strictly speaking, the people on earth are much better off today with 7 billion people than we were with 4 billion in 1975. US per capita income is up more than 100% in real terms. China's per capital income is up 40X. Viet Nam -- 10X. France - 6.6X.
Forest cover in the US is pretty much stable over that period, as well.
But I'm not going to lose sleep over a slow population decline, or with extrapolations way beyond what we can have any confidence in.
I agree you can't have infinite population growth on a finite world. But the problem is developed countries don't seem to know how to have stable population either.
And if you can't have a stable population at 8 billion what's magical about 4 billion that would make it stable?
My suspicion is that population decline will spark dramatic societal changes that will eventually push fertility back up, either by countervailing social/economic trends (higher wage growth leading to higher birth rates, for example) or via societal collapse (in which the fertility-depressing technologies and norms of established societies are lost/forgotten). One thing I do believe is that a population that cannot reproduce itself is dysfunctional.
Exactly! There is a striking paradox between micro-level personal narrative and macro-level statistical reality.
On an individual level, people often say: "It’s too exhausting, housing is too expensive, or my salary is too low—if my circumstances improved, I’d have more kids." And for that specific individual, that might very well be true.
However, at the macro level, as long as a wealthy, free economy offers better life choices, having children simply fails to make the top 10 list of priorities. Conversely, regions with high fertility rates almost all share common traits: they are economically underdeveloped, poor, and often less free.
"However, at the macro level, as long as a wealthy, free economy offers better life choices, having children simply fails to make the top 10 list of priorities."
I think this is a key point. We need a STRONG cultural norm that what you do is grow up, graduate get married have kids
It's really easy for people to understand how big of a pain in the butt kids are. But very hard to understand how great they are till you really have them
The population decline is self reversing by a different mechanism. While the overall fertility rate is very low, there are groups that are reproducing at much higher than replacement, orthodox jews and amish are two notable ones. Society will replenish itself, but it will be a very different society.
The big question I have re demographic collapse is, what stops it? At a 1.5 replacement rate (which is already higher than it is in some countries), the population declines, sure, but it'd be centuries before it "disappears." But at that rate, you halve the population in only 72 years. That would catastrophic. But even then, would people magically decide to have more children? If a population is acculturated to having, say, just 1 child or none, as they appear to be now, why would they have more? There are still people around, aren't there? Even if we came up with artificial wombs, someone or something would have to raise the children. Bots, anyone? JHC.
Immigration—whether people like it or not—is a spontaneous and currently the only effective corrective measure so far.
And Edward, you hit the nail on the head with your last point! Bringing up artificial wombs by other thread is actually a bit misleading. Carrying a pregnancy for nine months is tough and probably yes it is the hardest part, but the long, grueling process of raising a child afterward carries the highest opportunity cost.
As we’ve discussed elsewhere, Bots might temporarily patch up the labor shortage, but they can't fix—and will likely worsen—the collapse in consumer demand.
It’s a fascinating yet devastating puzzle. Like, when a problem stems from an inherent structural trait at the individual and micro-economic level, no macro policy or adjusted incentives on earth can fix it..
The thing with immigration is that *almost all* countries are experiencing a population decline. Mexico, for instance, now has a lower birth rate than the US. Only a very few countries still have above replacement birth rates - and as family sizes decline from 6 or 7 kids to 2 or 3, still above replacement, the inducement to stay home rather than leave is stronger, both to be near parents - who no longer have two or three “spares” to send far away - and because they want to try and get jobs in their home countries. So while yes we should encourage immigration, we’re going to run out of eager, hungry young people in the next few decades, so immigration won’t be a long term solution.
You’re completely right, and I admit I wasn’t looking quite that far down the road!
For the time being, high fertility rates are still concentrated in parts of South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and much of the Muslim world—which is why the demographic crisis and the immigration issue are clashing so violently in today's economic sphere.
Oh did you see other threads, those who keep bringing up artificial wombs, AI, and robot nannies? Honest to God, I feel like I accidentally stumbled into a sci-fi forum. At this point, we might as well just talk about colonizing Mars or transitioning to silicon-based life forms to save ourselves the trouble.
I am a huge Lois Bujold fan, and her Vorkosigan saga is my favorite space opera. The Vorkosigan saga had artificial wombs. (Bujold took the opportunity to turn the “Planet of Women” storyline on its head with “Ethan of Athos,” a colony named after Mt. Athos populated entirely by men, using artificial wombs. Well worth a read, though the main saga featuring Miles is my fave.) I like the idea of artificial wombs, don’t get me wrong! But I also know that it’s something that is far, far in the future if we can ever engineer it. The slowdown in birth rates is here and now.
And, as you noted, it’s not one of those things that can be easily solved or “why don’t we just…”’ed. Lots of things have been tried to little impact. Singapore, the Nordics, all have very generous policies around pregnancy, parental leave, childbearing, subsidies, etc. and yet they don’t budge the needle much.
(Thankfully not on this substack but in some of the darker, danker corners of Reddit there have been suggestions that we need to increase teen births and I want to drop kick anyone who says that through a glass wall. Making it easier for women in their 20s and 30s to have kids, yes. Teen moms, nope. Kids should be raised by adults.)
within 50 years, it will be possible for a fertilized egg to grow for 9 months in an artificial womb. I don't know what impact that will have on fertility, but it will certainly reduce a significant burden that women bear.
BTW, I think you dissected the paper well, Noah. Projecting questionable past trends into a rapidly changing future does not sound like a promising enterprise.
Final random thought: ST did not portray a world where the characters were demonstrating a replacement fertility rate. No one seemed to have more than one kid.
Hey Kathleen, spot on! Reading through the comments earlier made me realize something many young parents would probably agree with: artificial wombs will likely have a limited impact on birth rates.
While carrying a baby for nine months is undeniably tough, hardest part for sure, but it's the long, relentless process of raising a child afterward that keeps the opportunity cost skyrocketing. Both young mothers and involved fathers sacrifice immense, tangible opportunities along the way, and there is simply no good way to compensate for that long haul.
Look at Singapore: the government has tried to offset almost every conceivable cost through tax breaks, housing priority, and direct cash handouts. Yet, there are always invisible personal sacrifices that no policy can cover or compensate for. The result? Total policy failure.
One reason why childrearing subsidies haven't made a dent in fertility rates:
There's a term for people who are given money by the government to be full-time parents to their own biological children: "welfare queen." (In other words, if you were to propose using government tax revenues to pay people to be full-time parents to their own kids, and that those payments would be as much as the median wage earned by full-time employees their age that lack a college degree, everyone else would throw a fit.)
Which leaves me with a joke proposal for solving the fertility crisis: draft childless adults to be foster parents, in the same way people are drafted to be jurors and soldiers. If you have a good chance of being forced to paying the costs of childrearing whether you want to or not, it might as well be your own biological child you're stuck raising rather than someone else's. 😈
(Of course, there is a very obvious reason why this is best left as a joke proposal, which is that the quality of care provided by unwilling parents to biologically unrelated children is likely to be very bad.)
Another reason childrearing subsidies haven't made a dent is that they're way too small to compensate for damage to one's career or to meaningfully dent the costs of actually raising a child.
I think you see REALLY different poll numbers between supporting families where one spouse is working and the other one is staying home and families where their is only one parent and that parent is staying home.
Support for working class families is still pretty strong, support for "welfare queens" is really low.
One way to make the subsidies for parenting pay off is to treat the money given to raise the children as a loan to the child which the repayment will be automatically added to their future income taxes. As long as economic growth continues, the time discount of the money makes this work out, and other people can’t complain because there is no net payment to the parents who participate in this program.
Interesting points, and Noah has had multiple posts on the fertility crisis. But the bottom line is that many women don’t want to have children. So many factors: birth control is readily available and heteropessimism amongst them. The societal expectation that a woman must have children has greatly diminished. The campaign against teen pregnancy has been successful.
" But the bottom line is that many women don’t want to have children"
It's true that some women don't but at least in the US women' desired fertility rate is above replacement even though the actual fertility rate is below. IE women aren't having as many babies as they say they want to have.
In other countries with really low fertility rates that might no longer be true.
But in places where that is the case, cultures will need to change. Because a culture that cannot reproduce itself WILL be replaced by one that can. And most likely we won't want to live there
In addition to the fact that people were told they *had* to have kids because of religion or carry on the family name or “it’s what you do” or if you were a woman, sex = pregnancy much of the time - having kids did pay off for the parents, and quite soon at that. Kids went to work on the farm, in the factory, gathering nuts and berries, minding younger siblings, running errands, all sorts of things. David Lancy’s book “Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings” is a history of childhood and it is well worth a read for us who want to know what it was like for most of human history. Children were still loved and valued, but, they weren’t cosseted and idle resource-drainers like they are today.
I’ve posted a comment on the intensive parenting that is now expected of all parents, the expenses that are supposed to be poured into our children, from car seats to college educations, and the fact that, jobs for pocket money aside, children are a *drain* on parents for at least 18 years, nowadays more like 25. Of course, you get parents who say the upside is that it’s almost like a religious/spiritual experience, leaning heavily on the word “amazing” and the concept of “pure love.” Maybe so. I’m sure there are adults with horrible personalities who nobody can stand, let alone employ, who sit bitterly in their parents’ basements, who were once “amazing small people” their parents wanted to “give the world to.”
The tl;dr is that the stick - children as economic contributors who will care for you in old age and enhance your social status when you are younger (in some societies no *male* child = social ostracism) has been removed entirely from the equation, and if anything replaced with a stick toward childfreedom because children cost that much in time, energy and money - and the “carrot” is no longer any kind of concrete benefit in either the here and now or the future, just “an amazing experience of pure love” which is terribly hard to quantify or even make appealing to childfree or fence-sitting people. And I just cannot see how we can make people have kids “for society” in anything like a democracy or even a *benevolent* dictatorship.
You’ve laid bare the ultimate essence of the crisis: this is a challenge that fundamentally exceeds the framework of traditional policy. Neither economists with their theories nor politicians with their legislation have a real antidote for it.
On the macro level, it is undeniably a fatal crisis, with its devastating consequences felt first and foremost in the economy. Yet its root causes are buried deep within the daily struggles and rational choices of every individual and family—the atomic units of society.
It is a classic paradox where, if there is no solution at the micro level, there can be no triumph at the macro level. This is a profound "extra-credit" question that genuinely defies current paradigms of public governance, political economy, and social engineering.
Yep! It’s a big problem that we are finding it hard to fund, encourage, and “why don’t we just” our way out of. The way parenthood and childrearing is structured, it’s going to be really hard to bring up the birth rates, because raising children IS hard and they ARE an economic drain for decades. It’s not their fault, but it makes childrearing a less appealing proposition when having to compete with all of other modern life’s enticements.
I'm not sure why economists specifically should be "worried". This is perhaps a bit like suggesting physicists should be "worried about gravity". If economics is a science then it should be explaining what might happen and why, and what we might want to do as a result to have various outcomes. "Worrying" suggests some personal preference or desired outcome, which is closer to something else than science.
However, the point is entirely reasonable... we have all built our economies on a growing population, and it will be serendipitous indeed if that same configuration works equally well for a shrinking population. If changes are required to our economies as a result then there are likely going to be costs in the transition, regardless of whether we are better or worse off in the long term.
Hey Jon, I was actually quite tempted to agree with you at first—I've always loved physics myself.
I suspect the word "worried" comes up because economists can see the trend, ordinary people can feel the everyday friction—like shrinking communities, closing neighborhood diners, or getting a roof or fridge repaired becoming absurdly expensive—and while economists can analyze the data and forecast the slide, they simply don't have a solution.
So in that sense, I think you're right: economics isn't a hard science in the exact same way physics is.
That said, to offer a defense for the economists, I’m reminded of what Robert Lucas famously wrote when contemplating long-term growth: "The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else."
So you see, economists do care deeply about human welfare. They’ve chosen a messy, down-to-earth, yet impossibly difficult subject to study—and that sets them apart from physicists who gaze at atoms and the cosmos.
Just a quick comment, and at the cost of repeating some of what was said before. Population growth and fertility are only little correlated. If one thinks population size is good for growth one should look at the cheapest way to increase population. Start with lowering child death among the poor, continue with better health to reduce the death rate within the working cohorts. Pay a lot more of attention to the effects of income distribution on birth, child mortality, youth mortality, labor force participation of women, etc. Being interested in fertility is of course OK, but trying to explain population size with fertility is misleading. Those interested in population size cannot ignore the vast literature in demography and the large literature in economics that dealt with each of these so many questions.
We were worrying about population explosion some 5 decades ago, and wondered if the earth had resources to feed so many mouths. And now we lose sleep over the reverse! I think either fear is overblown - trend-lines cannot be stretched indefefinitely into the future.
Also, I am not sure we have put our finger at why exactly fertility is falling. Most people in comments section have spoken about the economic cost of raising children. Yet, fertility rates are the highest in the poorest countries of the world, where childcare and other such conveniences are underdeveloped. Within India itself, the picture is stark: The highest fertility rates are in the poorest states with no maternity benefits or childcare. Yet, those poorer parents pay an arm and a leg to educate their children in private schools. The richest states with a more mother-friendly corporate culture and better childcare, instead match South Korea in fertility rates.
I wonder if it has more to do with the decay of the joint family culture, and the increasing trend of aged parents not living with or close to their now-working children. I suspect US moved out of this culture a long time ago, but this was pretty common in India till quite recently
This post is mostly focused on whether to acknowledge population decline is a problem -- and is compelling on that score. But, as a general matter, why do we talk about the problem of population decline solely in terms of fertility? I know that sounds silly to say, because of course, increasing fertility would fix the problem. But that may come at a huge price, particularly for women. For instance, suppose a society decides one way to reverse the grave problem of population decline is to keep women out of the workplace during their most fertile years. Is that worth the trade off, given that it would solve the problems of taxation, improve national security, and allow the social welfare state to continue to function? Many people would say no. So why aren't we talking about other policy solutions aside from fertility? For instance, what if we accepted as fact that the global population decline couldn't be reversed in time. What are the best policy proposals then? Should dilapidated cities be converted into national parks? What kind of system could replace the social welfare state that doesn't depend on replacement level population? What tax scheme would be most ideal for a society with fewer workers? What other ways can we address for our national security needs? Unless I've missed it, I don't see people who acknowledge the problem of population decline discussing any solutions aside from fertility and sometimes immigration. Given that fertility comes at a high price, particularly for women's advancement, it's troubling to have the conversation so narrowly focused on this single lever.
Thought-provoking post—this is the definition of ‘thinking outside the box’! Kudos to you, YJ!
I’d like to add one layer to your point, which echoes Noah’s underlying anxiety: How do we manage the immediate economic shock of the transition period?
A major economy designed and built for 350 million people operates on a complex web of fixed assets and long-term investments. Even a mild population shrink manifests almost immediately in local communities—closing neighborhood restaurants, downsizing schools, and shrinking municipal tax bases.
It’s hard to imagine an economy built for 350 million "naturally" or smoothly adjusting down to 200–300 million without triggering severe deflationary spirals, widespread asset devaluations, and prolonged recessions along the way.
In other words, before those grand adaptation policies (like turning shrinking cities into national parks or overhauling welfare systems) can actually take root, how do we prevent the economy from breaking under the pressure of the transition itself? That remains the scariest black box.
Well.... as it happens the only way to have babies and make more people happens in Mammelian biology to be via women's fertility. Nothing revoked that fundamental, no faddish multi-genderism nor anything else.
So, if population decline is a problem globally then that is the need, period - unless one decides to go in for Robotism & Maximal AI which seems to scare the living bejuses out of just about everyone (although myself not so much).
If one adds to this that large percentages of populations - female sex side as well as male sex side generally report a desire for more kids and family over career in developed economies, one may also ask if elite educated priorities are not being simply assumed as the common agenda where they should not perhaps (not noted from an anti-women working PoV but the desires here too often seem to be collapsed into the extreme positions of two opposing ideological camps that don't per se reflect wider society and within society potentially differentiated desires by socio-economic classes).
Personally I think that rate of decline (the evoked in art dif btw .75 and 1.75 e.g.) is the key worry not decline in and of itself, in a world where both robotics and AI are rapidly advancing.
Great points! Though if you don't mind a tiny correction:
You mentioned that "population decline is a problem globally," but strictly speaking, it’s not quite a global issue yet. It is specifically a crisis encompassing virtually all developed economies—or any region as soon as it gets close to becoming wealthy.
In the other half of the world—developing nations that have crossed the basic subsistence line and established essential healthcare and education (primarily parts of South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and much of the Muslim world)—populations are still growing.
I’m somewhat reluctant to say it, but this is precisely where the demographic crisis and the immigration debate intersect in economics.
Well... yes SSA Africa - really a belt of it in the Sahel still has high single digit - but wealthier coastal areas are showing the same trends. I was really focused on the total fertility equation.
Even in the developing countries that populations are still growing though their fertility rates are dropping fast (which is probably a good thing).
And I expect it will continue to drop further as they develop.
Artificial wombs have been invented and are being developed, and infant formula exists already, so if we can teach the robots to be nannies maybe we can transcend mammalian biology.
The actual giving birth part is not really what puts off parents as per data, its long term cost / investment into the offspring. I have to find the recent interesting paper on this transversally across economies.
The intervening 18-20/25 years, that's the fly in the soup. Not artificial wombs except perhaps niche very much upper middle income older oldish women as fetility extender
Given the utter shit results of app driven learning during COVID and popular backlash on AI, I rather doubt tech is a mitigant on age 1-18 problem
Yep. Kids are, bluntly, an economic drain for at least 18 and these days more like 25 years. The demands of what constitutes good parenting have risen, fewer young people can find great or even “great for entry level” or “good enough” jobs right out of high school, so college is a necessity and college is expensive. (Hence the obsession with getting kids in on sports scholarships.)
And all this for no guarantee that your kids will turn out to be law abiding tax paying citizens, or speak to you once they leave home, or do much to pay back what you put into them - and I don’t mean “pay back” in the monetary sense, I mean “will you spend 20-some years pouring your whole soul into this person and now they want nothing to do with you?”
Basically we’ve offloaded a societal good onto individual families; yes, we’ve always done that, but between the emergence of safe, reliable birth control, women with the option to use it, a whole lot of appealing alternatives to parenthood, and the rise of intensive parenting combined with the lessening circle of the people in the family/tribe/village available to pitch in - we’ve hit a wall. No matter how parents say that it’s this amazing experience to show the world to an amazing little person and get this amazing love that is so amazing like nothing else in the world - that is not enough inducement for more and more people to reproduce. So here we are.
as a nuance. I don't know I like to focus on "good parenting" standards given the broad global trend and radically different cultures seeing pretty much near identical outcomes: biological systems show similar effects - if the overall enviro - the bio-economy if one wishes - shows that one needs to put more resources in for the Sprogs to move on, then the reproduction strategy flips to many less Sprogs.
Our economic world really isn't divorced from deep bio-logic
As the pattern is global and across all kinds of different societies, political systems but aligns pretty well with paths where economies have flipped from being "more hands = more income" to "1-18/25 hands are net drain as one has to invest in upskilling so they can make money / get job" - there's this huge broad flip to less kids cause one needs to invest so much more in resources. More or less like biological systems...
So.... I think until the fundamental Cost question changes (scarce people certainly will drive up the return on people: See Black Death econ impact)
Although AI and robotics makes this equation... hmmm I don't know, uncertain for the future.
An important note at least in the US, women's desired fertility rate is above replacement even though actual fertility is below replacement.
So if women were actually having the number of kids they say they want to have, then we wouldn't have a problem.
It makes sense then to increase the amount of supported needed so women (and their families) can have the number of kids wanted.
But this might not be the case in all countries. And the evidence strongly suggest that as the number of kids in a society goes down, then women's desired number of children goes down as well, IE there's a large cultural factor to women's reported desired number of kids.
Thus it's quite likely that most societies will need both economic incentives and to try and shape culture.
The most important point though is that if liberal societies can't figure out how to have a stable population they WILL be replaced by other cultures that figure it out. And most likely those societies won't be a very pleasant place to live especially for women.
Finally, while its conceivable that a society and economy might be able to manage very slow population declines without imploding, that's not what's going on. We are talking about fast and large changes, that won't end well
I don't give much weight to stated preferences like desired fertility rate. If a woman with no kids says she wants three, let's see if she still does after the first one. If a woman with one kid says she wants two more I take that more seriously.
I agree with the rest of it, though. The inverse relationship between women's rights and fertility is disturbing.
The reality that liberal society just doesn't want to admit is that women are simply better at and more inclined towards child care. So no matter how progressive you may be, the truth is that women will always bear 100% of the burden of pregnancy and much greater than 50% of the burden of child care. It may well be that it is simply too much to ask of them to work a full time job and also raise children.
Before birth control and abortion were legal this issue resolved itself by simply forcing women down that path, but I think it's no coincidence that the legalization of those things and the expectation that women work full time arose so close together in time.
A potential solution to this would be publicly funded child care outside the age range and hours of public school to allow raising children while working full time to be much less of a burden. I don't know how effective this would be, though. I wonder if there is any evidence that rich people who can afford this now via hiring a nanny are having any more kids?
That is nonsense. Liberal (lefty I presume since you then jump to progressive) has fuck all to do with this. Identical fertility declines are happening across every society imaginable, dictatorship, democracy and in between,.
US culture war nonsense is nonsense distraction.
The global econometric data show clearly that economic modernisation, industrialisation and workforce upskilling requirements align with global changes per country - hard economics of one's "investment in offspring" needs and an unsurprising correlation with wider biological economics (species switch parenting modes and offspring strategy based on resources investment needs, this is deeply coded in our biology)
The broad global pattern rahter indicates that perceived resource investment need - education in essence, competitive education is a primary driver.
If you read my comment more clearly you would have realized I blame only for failure to admit the obvious differences between men and women, not for the fertility decline.
Fascinating read! The birth rate crisis is a fundamental issue that isn't really an "economic problem" at its core—even though the foundational economic concept of opportunity cost explains it perfectly.
Look at every single developed economy across the globe: culture, history, ideology, public policies, land size, minimum wage, or generous child subsidies make zero difference. The rule remains unbroken. Once a society becomes wealthy and people (both men and women) gain better choices in life, the vast majority simply will not choose to have many kids. Meanwhile, in developing regions with fewer economic opportunities, populations keep growing.
That brings us to immigration: the influx of people from less-developed regions to wealthy ones is a vital, self-correcting, and undeniably effective lifeline for this crisis—even if it makes certain political factions uncomfortable.
An aging, shrinking population is a massive problem. Economically, its damage hits consumer demand first (fewer buyers, stagnant businesses), and labor shortage second (hiring difficulties). AI and robotics focus almost exclusively on the latter, and whether they can actually plug the gap remains questionable—especially given the negative shocks they bring first.
In short, the demographic collapse is an existential, deeply ironic dilemma that neither economists nor politicians can solve. Just ask anyone in Singapore: they’ve tried every incentive under the sun, failed completely, and arrived at this exact conclusion. As of today, immigration is the only functional solution we have.
As for the artificial wombs mentioned in the comments? Sure, if that ever happens, it will completely overhaul thousands of years of human societal structures and render the problem obsolete altogether. But until then, we're just writing science fiction.
'"look at every single developed economy across the globe: culture, history, ideology, public policies, land size, minimum wage, or generous child subsidies make zero difference."
this is false. Interventions can and do move the fertility rate
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/storks-take-orders-from-the-state?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&utm_medium=email&hide_intro_popup=true
Moreover, achieved fertility rates are below desired fertility rates (as reported by women). If we could get fertility rates up to where women say they want them to be we wouldn't be shrinking.
Why is actual fertility rates below desired? A combination of reasons, but I submit the high cost of housing is one of the biggest. I know my wife and I refused to have kids in an apartment. I'm quite confident that we weren't the only couple to do so. Thus building a LOT of housing and thus making it easier to young families to start out would help a lot.
Also, greatly expanding the child tax credit would surely help. Start at $10k a year for kids 6 and under. If that doesn't do enough, then raise it to $15k or even $20k a year
That's fair—and thanks for challenging my wording.
To clarify, when I said "zero difference," I was referring strictly to the direction of the trend line (reversing a negative slope to a positive one), not the marginal degree of decline.
Looking at the charts in the article you shared, they actually demonstrate this exact point: policy interventions and generous subsidies can indeed cushion the fall and make the downward slope less steep. In other words, the declining numbers we see today are already the mitigated figures—without those subsidies, the drop would be even more severe. So yes, subsidies work in slowing the decline, but nowhere in the developed world have they successfully reversed the trend to get back above replacement rate (2.1). We are fundamentally agreeing on the impact, just talking about different metrics (slope direction vs. rate of decline). Do you think that’s a fair distinction?
Also, I fully respect your personal experience regarding housing costs—it’s a deeply valid concern for many young couples. I actually addressed this exact tension between micro-level personal experiences and macro-level statistical realities in other threads here: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/economists-should-be-worried-about/comment/318563978, and https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/economists-should-be-worried-about/comment/318869256.
Appreciate the thoughtful exchange and the link!
I agree I don't think any developed country has reversed the slide yet after achieving negative fertility. And thus the question remains how much subsidy would be needed to do so.
And if we need to make really large investments that money will need to come from somewhere else, probably old age programs.
Also, I would add we need to sponsor a bunch of pro family propaganda through various media channels including Hollywood and other influencers
I remember a pretty famous study years ago where MTV's 16 and pregnant show lowered the teen birth rate (I think in Brazil).
Culture can be influenced
Well...
While the potential challenge of demographic decline is a real one- jumping to absolute conclusions "The rule remains unbroken. Once a society becomes wealthy and people (both men and women) gain better choices in life, the vast majority simply will not choose to have many kids." seems to me a serious analytical error.
So far.
Given an economic set of conditions as currently prevailing.
But the world collectively is in the first time stage of this experience and very much like projections made in the late 19th century and early to mid 20th century off of demographic rules that had held until then, it is unwise to conclude that this is an inevitable trend that absolutely will not change as macroeconomic changes feed through (Singapore as a metro-city-state really doesn't tell us much, South Korea is more extrapolatable (not to say that means it is encouraging but extrapolating from a city-state notably where cities have almost always through history been demographic sinks is not good analytical base.
It strikes me much doomerism at the moment is flipping around to an inversion of the early 20th century analytical errors of forward projection excluding potential substantial socio-economic change. I suspect as this feeds through societies will react in ways that are difficult to model and likely to surprise rather as it happened in late 20th century surprised in a different way.
I really appreciate your pushback here—and honestly, I find myself agreeing with your core logic.
You’re spot on: this is the very first time in human history that "modern" societies are collectively undergoing this steep demographic drop. As we’ve seen in these threads, the irreconcilable friction between micro-level personal rationales and macro-level societal needs has created a deeply confusing puzzle. I certainly don't claim this to be an immutable law of human civilization—after all, economics itself is a modern discipline, and at times like this, its predictive power feels closer to astrology than physics.
So yes, an unexpected inflection point could happen. Some people jump straight to sci-fi scenarios, but like you, I prefer looking through the lens of history. The post-WWII Baby Boom was indeed a massive, unexpected counter-narrative to earlier pessimistic projections—though one could argue it was forged in the crucible of two brutal World Wars and the onset of the Cold War. If we look back at Malthus, his panic over exponential population growth has manifested today in the exact opposite direction—a scenario that would have completely shattered his framework.
Perhaps history will find its own answer in the long run, and long-term predictions are notoriously futile. But while a grand historical perspective is humbling, it doesn't diminish the urgency of our current anxiety. As Keynes famously put it, "In the long run, we are all dead"—we still have to survive the immediate economic friction of today.
Lastly, I stand by Singapore as a fantastic case study precisely because it acted as a controlled laboratory that honestly tested almost every incentive policy imaginable—ultimately showing that immigration became the reluctant, inevitable default. And please, don't get me started on South Korea! It is an even darker data point, but an utterly fascinating one—especially if you throw its northern neighbor into the analytical mix, which makes the existential paradoxes of modern development even more stark.
Appreciate the brilliant pushback!
P.S. To clarify my point: Economics can certainly track birth trends and demographic shifts, measure their impacts, and forecast the future (and I completely agree with Noah and the consensus that population decline is overwhelmingly a net negative for the economy).
However, economics itself—along with political science or whatever any other human discipline—is entirely impotent when it comes to fixing it. We can diagnose the sickness and measure the damage with extreme precision, but we have zero working prescriptions.
When a couple decide to start a family they don’t think about GDP but they do care about not being poor and a big chunk of high status young people are concerned about remaining that way to the point that they make the decision for the potential unborn child that the child would prefer not to have the opportunity to exist and experience this universe, preposterous as that may sound. Can you imagine yourself explaining to that non-kid that - what? You are doing them a favor by saving them the trouble of living a life? Because maybe they will have to be a server at McDonald’s for a couple years?
That since Yale cut the number of legacy enrollments, let’s not bother?
It’s not the economy or the AI. As Melitta pointed out, teen pregnancy has basically been defeated. Women have a bigger choice in the matter and presently educated women have less children.
It used to be a given that your children gave you the most meaning in your life. The women around me - Mom, my wife who is a mom, families I know, even the single moms and the people I know struggling to keep afloat—they see their kids as a gift as do the dads.
How many billion people should have been born but didn’t happen? That is a tragedy to me because I consider human conscious life to be the most special thing in the universe.
It’s ironic that at this point in human history with the greatest abundance and lowest costs for raising a child, potential parents don’t see it that way.
Sorry for the Boomer rant.
My first house literally had no electricity or running water. Later we only had a home due to help from family and we ate a LOT of bean burritos. But you know what, largely it was fine. Yes it's better to have money than not. But it's very possible to have a great life while being poor especially in this country
What I don't see are studies asking women what it would take for them to have an additional child, or what their concerns are for having an additional child. And even though I'm not a woman, there are some pretty obvious financial downsides:
1 -- Day care until school starts or taking 5 years + 2 years per additional without the ability to work significantly. Perhaps another 5-10 years of diminished income even after your children are in school. In Pittsburgh, the average full day daycare rate for pre-K is probably around $20K/years/kid. You're probably losing $50K / year in salary in the pre-K years, and a minimum of $20K / year while you have younger kids in school.
2 -- More expensive health insurance and health bills in general
3 -- You need a bigger house/apartment. This cost is probably in the $100K level at least.
4 -- Educational expenses. Depending upon where you live, this might even include elementary through high school. And college, well, don't get me started.
5 -- Miscellaneous costs: food, larger auto, and other costs just for having a bigger household.
And what support do we provide? In the US, a $2,200 per year per child tax credit.
So, when I read about governments having tried to pay people to have kids, I have to laugh. This is like offering to buy your $100 bill for $10, and when that doesn't work, upping the offer to $25, and then saying 'well, paying people doesn't seem to work.' Even Singapore offers something like 10% of one year's median household income in total per child.
How about making a serious offer? Free college, trade school or help pay for starting a company for the primary caregiver, and perhaps an additional $100K / year through age 12 and then $50K / year until 18 to cover day care, educational expenses and career damage?
I mean there are obviously big details to think about -- both parents actually encounter some of these expenses, though the primary caregiver takes the bigger hit. But all in all, I don't think we've taken the idea of supporting parents financially at all seriously.
Brilliant breakdown—giving you a virtual round of applause for this! You hit the nail on the head: when people claim "paying people to have kids doesn't work," they ignore the fact that the offered compensation has been laughably inadequate.
To be fair, Singapore actually came remarkably close to taking this seriously—offering substantial cash gifts, housing priorities, heavily subsidized preschool, and tax relief. But even then, as your math clearly demonstrates, the gap between government subsidies and the true, lifetime opportunity cost borne by parents remains enormous.
And here is the brutal fiscal reality: if a government were to make a truly "serious offer" like the numbers you outlined, multiply that by millions of newborns each year, and you’re looking at an expenditure that would consume over 10% of a nation's total tax revenue. In a country like the US, where even universal healthcare is considered too expensive, a fiscal commitment of this magnitude is practically off the table.
While many still naively debate trivial tax credits, your math exposes just how mathematically daunting this challenge really is!
You're right, of course, that comping someone for the true cost of having children is way beyond what could be paid for today. In steady state, even if you're 'only' paying $20K/child/year for 10 years, you're talking about 200K/baby/year * 3.6M babies = $720 billion dollars per year.
Not impossible with a $32T GDP, but way more expensive than, say, a sane immigration policy. It certainly wouldn't hurt to make it easier for foreign students to stay in the US after graduation, for example.
In any event, we'd have to want more kids a lot more than we do now before we'll actually do something that might crank up the fertility rate.
As I posted above, you can make the big subsidies for these kids be debt that follows the child to be paid back from their future income taxes.
good list, would only add that it's very difficult to get buy and enjoy a middle class lifestyle on one income.
For many women they don't have to have to work especially when the kids are young. For those that would like to stay home it should be financially viable.
I don't get the fear. Unless the rate of population change at a moment is zero, then you can extrapolate to a zero population or to an infinite one. The earth is not better off with 7 billion people than it was with 4 billion. U.S. cities are crowded. We continue to pave over more soil, cut down more forests and build more roads and houses.The Mississippi and the Gulf are polluted. Anything that can't go on forever, won't. That includes population growth. It's not going to work to have ever more young people to care for ever more old ones. If conditions improve, and places are les degraded and crowded, then there will be offsetting behavior, and people will have more children.
Well, strictly speaking, the people on earth are much better off today with 7 billion people than we were with 4 billion in 1975. US per capita income is up more than 100% in real terms. China's per capital income is up 40X. Viet Nam -- 10X. France - 6.6X.
Forest cover in the US is pretty much stable over that period, as well.
But I'm not going to lose sleep over a slow population decline, or with extrapolations way beyond what we can have any confidence in.
I agree you can't have infinite population growth on a finite world. But the problem is developed countries don't seem to know how to have stable population either.
And if you can't have a stable population at 8 billion what's magical about 4 billion that would make it stable?
My suspicion is that population decline will spark dramatic societal changes that will eventually push fertility back up, either by countervailing social/economic trends (higher wage growth leading to higher birth rates, for example) or via societal collapse (in which the fertility-depressing technologies and norms of established societies are lost/forgotten). One thing I do believe is that a population that cannot reproduce itself is dysfunctional.
It won’t be wages for sure. Lack of high wages are definitely not why people aren’t having kids.
Exactly! There is a striking paradox between micro-level personal narrative and macro-level statistical reality.
On an individual level, people often say: "It’s too exhausting, housing is too expensive, or my salary is too low—if my circumstances improved, I’d have more kids." And for that specific individual, that might very well be true.
However, at the macro level, as long as a wealthy, free economy offers better life choices, having children simply fails to make the top 10 list of priorities. Conversely, regions with high fertility rates almost all share common traits: they are economically underdeveloped, poor, and often less free.
That is the ultimate paradox.
"However, at the macro level, as long as a wealthy, free economy offers better life choices, having children simply fails to make the top 10 list of priorities."
I think this is a key point. We need a STRONG cultural norm that what you do is grow up, graduate get married have kids
It's really easy for people to understand how big of a pain in the butt kids are. But very hard to understand how great they are till you really have them
The population decline is self reversing by a different mechanism. While the overall fertility rate is very low, there are groups that are reproducing at much higher than replacement, orthodox jews and amish are two notable ones. Society will replenish itself, but it will be a very different society.
But societal collapse would also lead to higher mortality
Quality post.
The big question I have re demographic collapse is, what stops it? At a 1.5 replacement rate (which is already higher than it is in some countries), the population declines, sure, but it'd be centuries before it "disappears." But at that rate, you halve the population in only 72 years. That would catastrophic. But even then, would people magically decide to have more children? If a population is acculturated to having, say, just 1 child or none, as they appear to be now, why would they have more? There are still people around, aren't there? Even if we came up with artificial wombs, someone or something would have to raise the children. Bots, anyone? JHC.
Immigration—whether people like it or not—is a spontaneous and currently the only effective corrective measure so far.
And Edward, you hit the nail on the head with your last point! Bringing up artificial wombs by other thread is actually a bit misleading. Carrying a pregnancy for nine months is tough and probably yes it is the hardest part, but the long, grueling process of raising a child afterward carries the highest opportunity cost.
As we’ve discussed elsewhere, Bots might temporarily patch up the labor shortage, but they can't fix—and will likely worsen—the collapse in consumer demand.
It’s a fascinating yet devastating puzzle. Like, when a problem stems from an inherent structural trait at the individual and micro-economic level, no macro policy or adjusted incentives on earth can fix it..
The thing with immigration is that *almost all* countries are experiencing a population decline. Mexico, for instance, now has a lower birth rate than the US. Only a very few countries still have above replacement birth rates - and as family sizes decline from 6 or 7 kids to 2 or 3, still above replacement, the inducement to stay home rather than leave is stronger, both to be near parents - who no longer have two or three “spares” to send far away - and because they want to try and get jobs in their home countries. So while yes we should encourage immigration, we’re going to run out of eager, hungry young people in the next few decades, so immigration won’t be a long term solution.
You’re completely right, and I admit I wasn’t looking quite that far down the road!
For the time being, high fertility rates are still concentrated in parts of South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and much of the Muslim world—which is why the demographic crisis and the immigration issue are clashing so violently in today's economic sphere.
Oh did you see other threads, those who keep bringing up artificial wombs, AI, and robot nannies? Honest to God, I feel like I accidentally stumbled into a sci-fi forum. At this point, we might as well just talk about colonizing Mars or transitioning to silicon-based life forms to save ourselves the trouble.
I am a huge Lois Bujold fan, and her Vorkosigan saga is my favorite space opera. The Vorkosigan saga had artificial wombs. (Bujold took the opportunity to turn the “Planet of Women” storyline on its head with “Ethan of Athos,” a colony named after Mt. Athos populated entirely by men, using artificial wombs. Well worth a read, though the main saga featuring Miles is my fave.) I like the idea of artificial wombs, don’t get me wrong! But I also know that it’s something that is far, far in the future if we can ever engineer it. The slowdown in birth rates is here and now.
And, as you noted, it’s not one of those things that can be easily solved or “why don’t we just…”’ed. Lots of things have been tried to little impact. Singapore, the Nordics, all have very generous policies around pregnancy, parental leave, childbearing, subsidies, etc. and yet they don’t budge the needle much.
(Thankfully not on this substack but in some of the darker, danker corners of Reddit there have been suggestions that we need to increase teen births and I want to drop kick anyone who says that through a glass wall. Making it easier for women in their 20s and 30s to have kids, yes. Teen moms, nope. Kids should be raised by adults.)
within 50 years, it will be possible for a fertilized egg to grow for 9 months in an artificial womb. I don't know what impact that will have on fertility, but it will certainly reduce a significant burden that women bear.
BTW, I think you dissected the paper well, Noah. Projecting questionable past trends into a rapidly changing future does not sound like a promising enterprise.
Final random thought: ST did not portray a world where the characters were demonstrating a replacement fertility rate. No one seemed to have more than one kid.
Hey Kathleen, spot on! Reading through the comments earlier made me realize something many young parents would probably agree with: artificial wombs will likely have a limited impact on birth rates.
While carrying a baby for nine months is undeniably tough, hardest part for sure, but it's the long, relentless process of raising a child afterward that keeps the opportunity cost skyrocketing. Both young mothers and involved fathers sacrifice immense, tangible opportunities along the way, and there is simply no good way to compensate for that long haul.
Look at Singapore: the government has tried to offset almost every conceivable cost through tax breaks, housing priority, and direct cash handouts. Yet, there are always invisible personal sacrifices that no policy can cover or compensate for. The result? Total policy failure.
One reason why childrearing subsidies haven't made a dent in fertility rates:
There's a term for people who are given money by the government to be full-time parents to their own biological children: "welfare queen." (In other words, if you were to propose using government tax revenues to pay people to be full-time parents to their own kids, and that those payments would be as much as the median wage earned by full-time employees their age that lack a college degree, everyone else would throw a fit.)
Which leaves me with a joke proposal for solving the fertility crisis: draft childless adults to be foster parents, in the same way people are drafted to be jurors and soldiers. If you have a good chance of being forced to paying the costs of childrearing whether you want to or not, it might as well be your own biological child you're stuck raising rather than someone else's. 😈
(Of course, there is a very obvious reason why this is best left as a joke proposal, which is that the quality of care provided by unwilling parents to biologically unrelated children is likely to be very bad.)
Another reason childrearing subsidies haven't made a dent is that they're way too small to compensate for damage to one's career or to meaningfully dent the costs of actually raising a child.
I think you see REALLY different poll numbers between supporting families where one spouse is working and the other one is staying home and families where their is only one parent and that parent is staying home.
Support for working class families is still pretty strong, support for "welfare queens" is really low.
One way to make the subsidies for parenting pay off is to treat the money given to raise the children as a loan to the child which the repayment will be automatically added to their future income taxes. As long as economic growth continues, the time discount of the money makes this work out, and other people can’t complain because there is no net payment to the parents who participate in this program.
Interesting points, and Noah has had multiple posts on the fertility crisis. But the bottom line is that many women don’t want to have children. So many factors: birth control is readily available and heteropessimism amongst them. The societal expectation that a woman must have children has greatly diminished. The campaign against teen pregnancy has been successful.
" But the bottom line is that many women don’t want to have children"
It's true that some women don't but at least in the US women' desired fertility rate is above replacement even though the actual fertility rate is below. IE women aren't having as many babies as they say they want to have.
In other countries with really low fertility rates that might no longer be true.
But in places where that is the case, cultures will need to change. Because a culture that cannot reproduce itself WILL be replaced by one that can. And most likely we won't want to live there
In addition to the fact that people were told they *had* to have kids because of religion or carry on the family name or “it’s what you do” or if you were a woman, sex = pregnancy much of the time - having kids did pay off for the parents, and quite soon at that. Kids went to work on the farm, in the factory, gathering nuts and berries, minding younger siblings, running errands, all sorts of things. David Lancy’s book “Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings” is a history of childhood and it is well worth a read for us who want to know what it was like for most of human history. Children were still loved and valued, but, they weren’t cosseted and idle resource-drainers like they are today.
I’ve posted a comment on the intensive parenting that is now expected of all parents, the expenses that are supposed to be poured into our children, from car seats to college educations, and the fact that, jobs for pocket money aside, children are a *drain* on parents for at least 18 years, nowadays more like 25. Of course, you get parents who say the upside is that it’s almost like a religious/spiritual experience, leaning heavily on the word “amazing” and the concept of “pure love.” Maybe so. I’m sure there are adults with horrible personalities who nobody can stand, let alone employ, who sit bitterly in their parents’ basements, who were once “amazing small people” their parents wanted to “give the world to.”
The tl;dr is that the stick - children as economic contributors who will care for you in old age and enhance your social status when you are younger (in some societies no *male* child = social ostracism) has been removed entirely from the equation, and if anything replaced with a stick toward childfreedom because children cost that much in time, energy and money - and the “carrot” is no longer any kind of concrete benefit in either the here and now or the future, just “an amazing experience of pure love” which is terribly hard to quantify or even make appealing to childfree or fence-sitting people. And I just cannot see how we can make people have kids “for society” in anything like a democracy or even a *benevolent* dictatorship.
Well said! I couldn't agree more.
You’ve laid bare the ultimate essence of the crisis: this is a challenge that fundamentally exceeds the framework of traditional policy. Neither economists with their theories nor politicians with their legislation have a real antidote for it.
On the macro level, it is undeniably a fatal crisis, with its devastating consequences felt first and foremost in the economy. Yet its root causes are buried deep within the daily struggles and rational choices of every individual and family—the atomic units of society.
It is a classic paradox where, if there is no solution at the micro level, there can be no triumph at the macro level. This is a profound "extra-credit" question that genuinely defies current paradigms of public governance, political economy, and social engineering.
Yep! It’s a big problem that we are finding it hard to fund, encourage, and “why don’t we just” our way out of. The way parenthood and childrearing is structured, it’s going to be really hard to bring up the birth rates, because raising children IS hard and they ARE an economic drain for decades. It’s not their fault, but it makes childrearing a less appealing proposition when having to compete with all of other modern life’s enticements.
I'm not sure why economists specifically should be "worried". This is perhaps a bit like suggesting physicists should be "worried about gravity". If economics is a science then it should be explaining what might happen and why, and what we might want to do as a result to have various outcomes. "Worrying" suggests some personal preference or desired outcome, which is closer to something else than science.
However, the point is entirely reasonable... we have all built our economies on a growing population, and it will be serendipitous indeed if that same configuration works equally well for a shrinking population. If changes are required to our economies as a result then there are likely going to be costs in the transition, regardless of whether we are better or worse off in the long term.
Hey Jon, I was actually quite tempted to agree with you at first—I've always loved physics myself.
I suspect the word "worried" comes up because economists can see the trend, ordinary people can feel the everyday friction—like shrinking communities, closing neighborhood diners, or getting a roof or fridge repaired becoming absurdly expensive—and while economists can analyze the data and forecast the slide, they simply don't have a solution.
So in that sense, I think you're right: economics isn't a hard science in the exact same way physics is.
That said, to offer a defense for the economists, I’m reminded of what Robert Lucas famously wrote when contemplating long-term growth: "The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else."
So you see, economists do care deeply about human welfare. They’ve chosen a messy, down-to-earth, yet impossibly difficult subject to study—and that sets them apart from physicists who gaze at atoms and the cosmos.
Dear Noah, wonder whether you are aware of this recent paper: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Demographics.pdf
I’m not Noah but thanks for the link! Interesting paper!
Just a quick comment, and at the cost of repeating some of what was said before. Population growth and fertility are only little correlated. If one thinks population size is good for growth one should look at the cheapest way to increase population. Start with lowering child death among the poor, continue with better health to reduce the death rate within the working cohorts. Pay a lot more of attention to the effects of income distribution on birth, child mortality, youth mortality, labor force participation of women, etc. Being interested in fertility is of course OK, but trying to explain population size with fertility is misleading. Those interested in population size cannot ignore the vast literature in demography and the large literature in economics that dealt with each of these so many questions.
We were worrying about population explosion some 5 decades ago, and wondered if the earth had resources to feed so many mouths. And now we lose sleep over the reverse! I think either fear is overblown - trend-lines cannot be stretched indefefinitely into the future.
Also, I am not sure we have put our finger at why exactly fertility is falling. Most people in comments section have spoken about the economic cost of raising children. Yet, fertility rates are the highest in the poorest countries of the world, where childcare and other such conveniences are underdeveloped. Within India itself, the picture is stark: The highest fertility rates are in the poorest states with no maternity benefits or childcare. Yet, those poorer parents pay an arm and a leg to educate their children in private schools. The richest states with a more mother-friendly corporate culture and better childcare, instead match South Korea in fertility rates.
I wonder if it has more to do with the decay of the joint family culture, and the increasing trend of aged parents not living with or close to their now-working children. I suspect US moved out of this culture a long time ago, but this was pretty common in India till quite recently