Great list of research topics. I would add: would it help to call it "child rearing policy," not "fertility policy," because the real problem is the daunting task of child rearing. "Fertility" doesn't get at the actual labor. Ask any grandparent who is doing substantial child-rearing work. (My hand is raised.) Everyone I know who is not having kids will tell you: parents fear the grueling, 18+year long task of doing a good job, when the world is watching, when once you're in you can't back out.
The problem in this area is too much concern about "child rearing policy. " Parents worry so much about doing everything right, but the research shows little to no benefit beyond the bare minimum of a stable household.
I do not disagree! Perhaps the worry should be researched; perhaps it falls under "too much social media" and podcasts that are always hyping the dangers of this and that.
Sounds like a place for Hollywood and the media to step in and reassure parents.
Instead we have endless short form media telling you you've got to spend 100 hours a week or little Johnny will turn into a sociopath and hate you to boot.
Of the worries that Noah cited in the post, fear of school shootings has got to be the least justified. There are over 100k schools in the United States; if there are 2 mass school shootings a year on average, a given child’s chance of a shooting happening at their school at some point in their 13-year school career is around 1 in 4000, and their chance of being killed is a small fraction of that. They’re about as likely to be struck by lightning!
if just pumping out another human being and keeping it alive to the age of 18, maybe. Doing it right so the kid isn’t messed up is hella hard. The challenges society poses to raising a decent human are real. I have 2 successful twenty-somethings. It’s very satisfying but grueling and expensive, and there is not much of you left afterwards.
I don't know what research that is, but there are loads of studies showing impressive benefits beyond providing stability (although that's clearly the most critical). Among the wide range of beneficial activities (at different ages) , are reading, teaching household finances, having family dinners together, and drilling arithmetic. Instruments aren't well understood: some studies show life-long term health benefits in the children when the father maintains fitness through their child's teen years.
That said, the total is not onerous.* I have 4 kids, much of my schedule revolves around them, but it's hardly onerous except for a brief period when you might have 3+ toddlers**. BUT if you observe middle class parents seized by competitive parenting, it no doubt appears daunting.
*Some special needs children, or those with severe illness or addiction excepted
** Also daunting is having several teenage girls at once, which requires a lot of time listening (OMG, right?).
I agree this is a problem in some parts of America, but it doesn't explain the global issue. I find the global issue truly puzzling. I don't have any avenues of investigation other than the ones Noah lists, though.
Latin America seems to be pretty lax, and while their TFRs are mostly below replacement they are much higher than South Korea.
Africa is still in the early stages of the demographic transition, with fertility rates falling but still way above replacement. It’ll be interesting to see where they go as the decades go by.
So there’s some performance anxiety? Once again, the crushing weight of social media scolds add to the weight of the calculus. No grandchildren yet. The possibility keeps me exercising …
This is a really good point. I have never seen this point so well made. There are no easy answers here. My best guess is that most child-rearing labor stayed within the family but the control of child-related activity moved closer to state institutions. And then the state, plus state-aligned media, won the tug of war that followed.
Good point. Women are the fertility bottleneck, not men, and it seems unlikely that Musk's strategy has increased the fertility of his baby mommas. It's possible that he has reduced their fertility. Musk's "solution" is just self-indulgence.
You jest but this is a fun question to ask an AI what the TFR of the global 1% would need to be to offset the current decline. Even 100+ per person isn’t close
For shame. The global elite aren't what they used to be. Apparently 2% of the entire Chinese population are direct descendants of Genghis Khan. Or something like that. I have so little vim and vigour that I can't even be bothered to Google it to check!
“ Collapsing fertility is a bit different from those other problems, because it’s fundamentally a social problem rather than a physical threat like climate change, disease, or starvation.” Are you sure about that? Sperm counts have halved in the past fifty years. Endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment are increasing. There is likely a physical element too.
I am skeptical that this is a major cause of declining fertility rate.
I believe that the most important proximal cause of declining fertility rate is the age at first marriage for women. When women marry in their early to mid twenties, they have replacement levels of children (on average). When age of first marriage is in the thirties or never, women rarely have replacement levels of children. The correlation is quite strong.
Even modest delays matter mechanically:
Marrying at 28 instead of 22 removes ~6 high-fertility years.
With deliberate spacing and contraception, that often means 1–2 fewer births, even if desired family size is unchanged.
Tbf women aren't the only ones focusing more on B than on A. I can't think of a single male friend, including high paid ones in tech, who was ready (or even willing) to get married and have kids immediately after graduating college.
Sperm count just one possible issue. As you point out it may not be a key issue. However, infertility is on the rise and I don’t think that can be ignored. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39752330/
These articles seem to be saying that sperm counts have probably gone down - though probably not by as much as 50% - but the authors are unsure whether or not they have gone down sufficiently to affect fertility.
I’m sure there are some men who want to sire a child but can’t due to sperm counts. But by and large, low fertility rates are caused by men and women who are biologically capable of having children, but just don’t want to.
But it's possible to freeze eggs (ideally before a woman is over 35) and then do IVF. That combination has something like a 70% success rate at 20+ eggs frozen, even after age 40. One of the main barriers to using this strategy is the cost of these procedures, so one concrete pro-natal government policy would be to make this path inexpensive for women in their late 20s/early 30s who want to have children but need to defer it for professional / educational / personal reasons.
Only if accidental pregnancies increase the number of children people have in their life! I would expect that there are a significant number of parents for whom an accidental pregnancy just changes the timing of their children, not the number (and similarly for many fertility problems).
I strongly doubt the decrease in fertility rate is driven by some Children of Men style sterility and that fixing infertility issues would move the needle on the rate of population level child bearing.
Agree. For me personally it’s the latter. But I’m hopeful that technology will help here as well: Just saw that scientists derived the first human embryo from skin cells.
But speeding up the regulatory process would be great (my wife and I are still struggling to produce embryos). Especially in Europe there are a lot of unnecessary “ethical” hurdles around this type of research and urgency and pragmatism hasn’t arrived in the legislature yet.
Study released last year shows “a growing prevalence of infertility among individuals aged 15-49 years worldwide from 1990 to 2021, with an expected continued increase through 2040.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39752330/
That study finds infertility (1.8%) for males (3.7%) for females, so it is obviously not a major cause. Not irrelevant, obviously, but still not a major cause.
May not be a major cause but remember the study I cited is of infertility. The same factors leading to infertility are also likely leading to subfertility. And together with infertility that could add up to be more significant. I checked but there don't seem to be good global numbers on subfertility, but the ones I did see suggest the numbers of subfertile could be 2-3x as high as infertile.
It does seem to be one but endocrine disruptors look like another likely one. Debatable how reversible endocrine disruptors are. There are ways you can modify your habits to avoid them to some extent, but there are a lot of them all around.
Both happen, but on average subfertile people end up with fewer children, not just the same number after more tries. Timing is the key reason.
Across demographic and epidemiological studies, people with subfertility (longer time-to-pregnancy, lower monthly conception probability) tend to show:
* Longer intervals between births
* Later age at first birth
* Lower probability of progressing to a second or third child
* Higher likelihood of stopping earlier than intended
Even when they do eventually conceive, the delay itself compounds: biological fecundity declines with age, especially for women, so each delay reduces the window for additional children.
That's true. And the decline in sperm count has been linked to industrially produced dioxins. So Noah's fertility drive may be at odds with his abundance agenda. Just spotted Susan H's response below which is along similar lines.
There’s a far bigger likely cause of decreased sperm counts. Luckily it’s now treatable.
“Obesity is significantly associated with reduced sperm count and overall semen quality, with men who have obesity showing an average reduction of 19.56 × 10⁶ in total sperm number compared to normal-weight men.The correlation is dose-dependent, with more pronounced effects in higher obesity classes…”
“Obesity represents a particularly important target for intervention because it is highly prevalent, modifiable, and supported by robust evidence across systematic reviews and meta-analyses.The concurrent rise in obesity prevalence and decline in semen quality over recent decades suggests population-level significance.While Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals pose significant risks with potentially severe effects at critical developmental windows, obesity affects a larger proportion of the population and operates through well-characterized, reversible mechanisms”
Dioxins are mainly produced from incomplete burning of waste or paper making using chlorine, or recycling of some metals or plastics, especially the one TCDD with negative fertility effects. Abundance on the other hand calls for more energy, housing and infrastructure, not paper or waste burning. Paper use (note that cardboard doesn’t use much chlorine in its production) is declining, so abundance isn’t a problem here. Maybe stop incomplete incineration and recycling metal and plastics would reduce dioxins somewhat.
The main fact that we possess: that this fertility decline is almost universal, world-wide.
Thus, many of the obvious suspects are not the core problem.
I might believe fervently that young couples need housing. My conservative neighbor might believe fervently that birth control is immoral. And thus political responses to fertility decline are likely to follow those directions.
However, fertility decline is occurring in places with sufficient housing as well as in locations with only the limited birth control that existed throughout history -- so obviously these are NOT the core causes of fertility decline.
But in case anyone hasn't noticed, it is very difficult to get masses of human beings to address problems with anything like that sort of objective mindset. I suspect that this, more than coping statements, creates the greatest obstacle to solving the problem.
However, fertility decline is occurring in places with sufficient housing as well as in locations with only the limited birth control that existed throughout history”
Citation needed. I would be surprised to learn family planning wasn’t happening.
Birth control is increasingly available even in poorer countries. 2026-India doesn't have the same birth control access as 2026-USA, but it has way more birth control access than 1900-India. Likewise for many other poor-to-middle-development countries.
I am finally glad that people are waking up to this issue. I cannot address the world, only a small party of mine. As was reported in The Dispatch and repeated here, government inducements are not working. I can recount the issues with my two daughters.
Neither wants to be the sole childcare giver. Both want careers, neither wants to be a “trad wife” per se. They both would love to find a man who was interested in marriage and accepting of sharing household and childcare. Both would like to marry a successful man. Not necessarily a businessman, it could easily be a tradesman. Equality essentially.
Neither has found their guy. One is 33, the other 31. One is an occupational therapist, the other is finding her way by trying many industries. I do believe the dating apps have been a failure. Interestingly, J Date has worked for others, and that is because of the affinity the clients have. Sharing the Jewish experience and religion probably helps break the ice, whereas an app that is just for hooking up people who share nothing in common.
Cost and child care are the two biggest obstacles once you get beyond finding a partner. I am finding men do not want the responsibility of marriage and fatherhood, which is leading to women getting married older, while they are hitting their stride in their careers in their mid-30s.
The allure of marriage is just not there. People seem to be ok with it. They don’t see the value of family, even though they came from one. It is odd. My dating was probably geared to sex at first, but as I aged, I wanted a partner, a marriage, and a family. I will be married to my best friend for 39 years this year.
Child care is a huge issue. Many don’t want to send their kid away to strangers. So here are my solutions. Day Care at your place of business and offerings of work from home for both spouses. This way, the children are not with strangers, and duties can be shared.
It obviously wouldn’t work for a married waitress and cook; a restaurant probably isn't the perfect place to have day care. It wouldn’t work for a cop married to a nurse.
Full-time for a nurse is three 12-hour shifts, cops work from 10 to 12 hours, and some have 8-hour days.
So how do you solve some insolvables? Obviously, staggered work schedules might help. The cop could also work 12-hour shifts on different days from his nurse wife. She potentially might have her hospital or facility offer daycare.
One way to solve this would be to have zero taxes for couples with young children. Early schooling with day care options and after-care options. The old question of how to eat an elephant, one bite at a time. We perhaps cannot solve the cost of raising a teenager, but child care, the real time frame is until the kids get to school full-time. We have to get them past age 6.
Once they pass that, and the cost of daycare won’t wreck them, we can raise their taxes slightly.
Enlisting businesses to be family-friendly will fall on businesses that can help. Some will not be able to help. We need to tackle this one bite at a time.
Part of the problem is that people aren't bored any more. For the whole of human history boredom was a fundamental fact of human existence and coupling, sex and child-rearing were a diverting way to pass the time. But with the growth of the entertainment sector over the last 30 years no one is bored any more. Pascal described the human condition as 'boredom, fear and inconstancy'; But Lana Del Rey describes the modern human condition: 'I say, "You the bestest", Lean in for a big kiss, Put his favourite perfume on, Go play your video game'.
Plenty. There are successful families and fractured families. Most of the time, those fractures can heal with age, or they continue. Have you been with happy families or mostly bad familial relationships? I guess it matters which one defines your perspective.
I was trying to keep it light but plenty of people have poor family experiences that sort of take away the romance of it and maybe they choose to only have one kid because they (rationally) anticipate that will be less stressful for everyone and more conducive to a happier life. Or they forgo it entirely to focus on work, fun or survival as the case may be.
Fun fact millennial dads are spending about the same amount of time on child care as boomer moms did. The problem is that moms are spending even MORE time with their kids.
IE moms asked dad's to step up and they did. But then moms went even more overboard. they are the reason they are overworked.
More generally on child care, I think policy should be agnostic and let parents decide what's best for them. There should be enough support for either one parent to stay home OR to pay for child care. The majority of women still prefer to stay home the first couple of years.
I think we bump the child tax credit up to $10k a year for the first 5 years, or maybe even $20k a year. And get rid of any child care tax credits.
To be fair I live in Tokyo with a young daughter; daycare and all medical expenses for children are free, and yet the birth rate is not exactly stellar. I’m grateful for it and these things probably help, but what counts from a societal viewpoint is getting people to decide to go from 0 to 1, 1 to 2, 2 to 3 kids as cost effectively as possible, and I suspect that such generous tax cuts are a very expensive way to do that.
I think that it is better for the world long term to figure out how to live reasonablly with a smaller population than to figure out how to increase the population to fit our current expectations and requirements. I believe that what we are seeing is the human population is reverting to some sort of norm, and that the having large families was a transitional phase driven by a combination of significant infant and childhood mortality ( largely solved) and the need to have a large and compliant workforce for your farm or business ( completely solved in the West and those Asian countries mentioned here).
Noah spent the entire article explaining why this is likely wrong. There is no mathematical or evolutionary way that we are reverting to some sort of norm. If populations decrease by half each generation, soon there are effectively no people at all.
this is a slippery slope fallacy. The human race is expected to reach its population maximum of 10 billion people in 25-30 years. That is not the point where you want to achieve replacement level as it's simply not sustainable to have that many people on earth for a long period of time. There's no reason to think that the population won't decline for a time and then stop declining. Postulating species extinction because a crowded earth isn't getting more crowded even faster is such a huge leap.
There is precisely zero evidence that a population of ten billion people is not sustainable, for any definition of sustainability that you would wish to use. I am genuinely surprised that people will state this as if it is a fact, rather than an unlikely hypothesis which requires evidence.
All the optimistic estimates I’ve seen pretty much demand a best case scenario on every factor for it to even begin to work, and plenty of researchers won't go that far. For example:
“The paper has looked in particular at challenges in the areas of food, water, nonrenewable resources, and climate change… On the other hand, evidence regarding water and greenhouse gas emissions is less reassuring. Levels of water extraction exceed sustainable levels in many countries. Global warming has continued at a rate that threatens the planet. While CO2 emissions have declined in both per capita and total terms in Europe and North America, this has been more than offset by rising emissions in other regions, especially Asia.” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/padr.12685
“In this paper, we present the current global food system challenge and consider both relatively high and relatively low fertility trajectories and their impacts for food policy and systems. Two futures are proposed. The first is a “stormy future” which is an extension of the “business as usual” scenario. The population would be hit hard by conflict, global warming, and/or other calamities and shocks (e.g., potentially another pandemic). These factors would strain food production and wreak havoc on both human and planetary health. Potential increases in mortality (from war, famine, and/or infectious diseases) cannot be easily modeled because the time, location, and magnitude of such events are unknowable, but a challenged future is foreseen for food security.” The other scenario, the “brighter futures scenario”, is one of population decline.
“In exploring question (2) we have chosen 20,000 dollars in 2011 prices as the basis of the exercise. The figure for N we reached is about 3.3 billion, which is about 42% of the present population size. That was the global population in the early 1960s, so it is not an outlandish number. In any event, we have presented the estimate only to show how far off humanity is from where we should probably now be in terms of population size and a sustainable living standard.
We also estimated that that the highest sustainable living standard for a global population of 9 billion would, other things equal, be a bit over 11,800 dollars at 2011 prices.”
look forward to a reasoned exchange of arguments. It's just not clear to me why it would be better to go to any or all sorts of social extremes (there are people in the comments here suggesting growing humans in factories as a solution, after all) to force the population to sustain at 10 billion or more, rather than allow it to naturally take the course it's already on to decline to a more moderate easily sustained population level that can enjoy a higher standard of living. We can focus on using our intellect and resources to make that transition smoother rather than coming up with ways to grow humans in factory vats...
Thanks for the response here and below. My clarifications/responses.
1) I was responding to MD’s argument that less than two children per woman was a historic norm. You are right that just because we are dropping well below two now does not imply we will always do so. Agree 100%. Indeed Noah’s argument is to start reversing this trend now.
2) I agree that there are way too many people in some poor countries, and that they likely will not be able to sustain themselves if current projections continue. I would strongly argue against initiatives to increase fertility in most of Africa and parts of SE Asia. The aging of the developed nations might even harm our ability to help them
3) I think the developed world (and China) risks catastrophic disaster if it does not address fertility. For the US, we could partly offset this with selective immigration and temporary workers. I suspect AI could play a major role in the solution as well.
4) I believe 8-10 B people is sustainable with growing prosperity. Countless “experts” agree and disagree. The optimists have tended to have a much better track record so far, with prosperity and living standards increasing dramatically as population grew, and environmental outcomes improving once a prosperity threshold was crossed.
I guess the point is that overpopulation is something we should be worried about, especially in some places. But declining fertility is a a threat as well. Both things can be true. I look forward to your thoughts…
Declining fertility is *not a threat*. Of course at some point it would be -- "did you know that if you cut the population in half forever it eventually goes to zero?!?!??!?!!!!?!?!?!". Mm-hmm. And did you know that people will behave differently when there's far fewer people around?
You believe 8-10B people is sustainable with growing prosperity. Great. We're going to be on the *upper bound* of that range soon. It'd be easier if the population declined a little. (It'd be even easier if it declined *substantially*). How do you get the population to decline? Well, you could kill a bunch of people. Or they could die by disease. Or ... they could choose to have fewer children? For awhile? And this prospect terrifies people for some freakish reason?
...And I'm not typically the kind of person to do this, but it's hard not to notice that the reason seems to be *where* the breeding is happening today and where it's not, and that's honestly just very gross.
If you disagree with Noah’s concerns on possible problems of massively declining fertility, then please share where and why he is wrong. I agree with him that societies made up disproportionately of old retirees is a serious issue. In other places, the problem is too many kids and no education or economic opportunities.
That was perhaps the silliest part. Let's start with propositions that are so obvious that, absent this very silly argument, they wouldn't need to be said:
(1) The human population can't increase indefinitely
(2) It'd be nicer if increases in the population were prevented by reduced births rather than large-scale violent death
...Right? Well ... do I really have to spell it out? At some point, it will inevitably be the case that there are some old-heavy generations, because *currently* (as in, *right this minute*, not just in recent decades), the world is running way over replacement fertility. Thus -- unless you somehow disagree with (1), which would just be hilarious -- there'll come a point where the products of an overbreeding generation are old, and the young are the result of more moderate breeding. There's just no way to avoid that, unless you think we can grow indefinitely (dumb) or you want many people to die violently (I don't think Noah does, but many of his pro-natalist commenters seem fully crazy enough -- are you the "let's throw them into war" kind?)
So, yes, that'll happen on our way to a smaller population. That's obvious, so raising it as a problem is weird and disingenuous.
The other concern he has is that people will keep up this level of reproduction forever, until there are 0 people, which is if anything even sillier in its obvious falsehood. There are going to be 10 billion people. Obviously at some point before we get to 0 people, people will find that reproduction is more attractive. Will that be at 6 billion? 4 billion? Even as "low" as 1 billion, which is much higher than the population was for almost all of history? I don't know, or at all care, but *obviously* breeding will pick back up as space and resources become available again.
correct, there is nothing wrong with this other than the human organizational systems will have to be adjusted and the people winning in these systems don't want that, it will be significantly better for the environment for sure
Let’s ignore the question about total population - the relevant point Noah is mostly talking about is the direction of change. If the population is growing, then there are more young people than old people. If the population is shrinking, then there are more old people than young people. The question is how to restructure life to work well with more old people than young people (if we are shrinking) or how to stop shrinking (so that we can maintain steady ratios of old and young people).
That assumes that at some magical point we will figure out how to have a stable population. But if population isn't stable at 7 billion, why would it be stable at 5 billion, or 3 billion.
Because things change in ways that we can't possibly predict and also in some ways that maybe we can. For example, once children have been rare for a while, they may come to be seen as more valuable and the people that have them may be rewarded by having higher social status, getting more attention and support. The people to watch are the earlier adopters and influencers.
"For example, once children have been rare for a while, they may come to be seen as more valuable"
actually the reverse is what happens, when kids are rare having kids is seen as a just one choice amongst many (and often kind of a weird one, don't you realize kids destroy your life).
Having kids need to be the default thing you do when you grow up.
You have absolutely no idea whether that happens. Children haven't been rare "for a while" ever. The planet is still unpleasantly and widely overcrowded.
Actually we do know that is happening, we can see it happening in big cities, and we can especially see that in countries like South Korea, Japan etc, And even to an extent in many parts of Europe.
Culture mattes a LOT. If children are seen as the normal thing to do when you become an adult, people have children. If they are seen as a "nice thing that some people like, but not for everyone" then a lot of people don't
No, this is where people get weirdly blinkered and also -- and I usually hate this kind of argument -- a little weirdly ethnically centered. *The planet* is crowded af. People are aware of that -- both because they can read and because the consequences of the planet being crowded af are all around them. It is *not* relevant that babies are relatively rare *in the most expensive parts of South Korea and the US coasts*. It is *not* relevant that the babies that are rarest are white and certain Asian ethnicities. There are still absolute *hordes* of babies flooding out onto the surface of the planet every day. We are crowded to the gills.
People's panic about fertility is just literally insane. The planet's population grows every day; the shape of the population curve over the last millenia is an absolute hockey stick. Not unrelatedly, those people's energy needs are swamping the planet in greenhouse gasses. The water those people pump for agriculture has drained ocean-sized reservoirs. The animals those people eat are their own distinct ecological catastrophe. And people immediately jump to wondering "what if, when all those problems naturally solve themselves, then people just don't reproduce until there's literally zero people? WHAT THEN?!"
...right, and it's also similarly possible that aliens will invade and eat us. I mean, it's possible. WHAT WOULD HAPPEN THEN? ... I guess we'd die, but I think it's not something to worry and make public policy about.
Thank you for this comment. I don't understand how Noah could write this essay without placing these numbers in context - the human race is expected to reach a population maximum of 10 billion people on earth in the next 25-30 years. That is not the point where you want to stabilize the population; absolutely no one who studies populations and resource management thinks that that is a sustainable number of humans on planet earth. We _need_ the total number of people to come down before worrying about global population stabilization. And yes, it will mean moving away from the semi-ponzi scheme of "growth is the only answer" economic scheme we've been living under for a long time, but seriously what exactly is the alternative?
Ma'am, the statement that "absolutely no one who studies populations and resource management thinks that that is a sustainable number of humans on planet earth" is false.
I would be interested in seeing credible evidence from the very few of those social scientists and ecologist who do believe this.
Isn't the environmental movement a tacit suggestion that there are too many people on the planet at the current time?
E.g.:
William E. Rees: Population ecologist and originator of the "Ecological Footprint" concept, who argues that current human populations are in a state of gross ecological dysfunction.
William J. Ripple: Ecologist and lead author of "World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice," which highlighted rapid population growth as a primary driver of environmental threats.
John Harte: Environmental scientist who argues that population growth contributes to numerous social issues, including unemployment, overcrowding, and conflict.
Albert Allen Bartlett: Physics professor known for his lectures on "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy," warning that the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function in relation to population.
Serge Latouche: Economist who argues that the planet crossed the threshold of sustainability in the 1960s.
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: Economist who argued as early as 1975 that the planet was already overpopulated.
Colin Butler: Epidemiologist who has written extensively on the negative impact of high population growth on public health, food security, and environmental stability.
And what constitutes credible evidence? We put out 70 million pounds of atrazine each year, putting this endocrine disrupter in water supplies at what some think is unacceptable levels. Fact? Opinion? We get into the realm of the judgement call: should we have 100 people in luxury; a 1000 people in comfort; or 10,000 people in squalor?
The problem is that this is a grim reality for humanity… to be explicit, if there’s one young person in charge of supporting 16 old people, probably 14 of those old people will die early from starvation or disease, and the young person might not scrape by either.
Noah, this is characteristically rigorous, and your demolition of the six coping statements is valuable. But I think you're calling for centralized research to discover a solution that's already emerging through distributed discovery—and missing why.
Your proposed research question—"Does geographically concentrating people with high fertility rates tend to increase or decrease society-wide birth rates?"—already has an answer. Two answers, actually, from very different contexts.
Utah County. Over 100,000 people migrated there specifically for family formation over the past decade. Fertility runs 2.1-2.4 while the national rate collapsed to 1.6. No subsidies. No RCT. Just identity infrastructure: community networks normalizing large families, housing supply keeping pace with demand, and a migration mechanism concentrating family-oriented people who reinforce the culture that attracted them.
Israel. The only OECD nation reproducing above replacement, at 2.9-3.0. And here's what makes it remarkable: it's not just the Haredi. Non-Haredi Jewish women maintain TFR of 2.45. Even self-identified secular Jewish women sustain 1.96—higher than France despite France spending 4% of GDP on family policy. A 2025 Foreign Policy analysis found Israel's fertility gains are "mainly caused by a rise in fertility among secular Jews." Israeli Jewish women are unique globally in showing a positive correlation between fertility and urbanization, education, and income. Even after 15 months of war following October 7th, Israel saw a 10% rise in births in late 2024.
Two radically different societies. One LDS-influenced American suburb, one Middle Eastern nation under existential threat. Same pattern: identity drives fertility, not subsidies.
The deeper issue is diagnostic. You're treating fertility as a technical problem requiring policy optimization. I'd argue it's an identity problem requiring paradigm transformation—and that's why subsidies fail at scale despite working at the margin.
Nordic countries eliminated every economic barrier to childbearing. Swedish parents face zero childcare costs, 480 days paid leave, and $30-35K in lifetime transfers per child. Fertility: 1.43 and falling. Finland's Kela agency now admits "we cannot really any longer say that it's our good family policies that explain good fertility in the Nordics." They solved the wrong problem.
The binding constraint isn't affordability—it's identity strategy. When Gen Z Harris voters rank "having children" 12th of 13 priorities (6% essential) versus Gen Z Trump voters ranking it 1st (34% essential), we're not seeing different calculations about the same goal. We're seeing fundamentally different conceptions of what constitutes a fulfilling life. The economic barriers are real but not binding—they're post-hoc rationalizations for choices already made at the identity level.
Utah County and Israel share one thing: both created environments where family formation is central to identity rather than obstacle to self-actualization. In Israel, it's existential—children are contributions to national continuity, not consumption goods to be afforded when convenient. In Utah County, it's community infrastructure that makes parenthood normative rather than exceptional. Neither required an RCT to discover this. Both emerged from identity environments, not policy interventions.
No randomized trial will discover "build identity infrastructure and let people migrate to it," because that's not a policy lever. But America already has the mechanism: federalism enables Utah County to exist while San Francisco runs different experiments. Mobility (2.5% interstate migration, far exceeding Europe's sub-1%) enables selection. Free speech lets us observe and discuss results. The discovery process is operating right now—no $10 billion research center required.
Your instinct for research is right, but the research question should shift from "which policy intervention raises fertility?" to "why do Utah County and Israel sustain replacement-plus fertility without Nordic-level subsidies while Sweden and Korea collapse despite them?" The answer is identity, community, and infrastructure—not transfer payments.
I explore this at length in my forthcoming book on why America's structural "chaos" is actually competitive advantage. The fertility crisis will be repaired—not by discovering the optimal subsidy in an RCT, but by observing what already works and building toward it. The repair is already happening.
All human action proceeds from identity. If we lack the identity of being a parent, we will never have children. In the survey data I shared above regarding Harris and Trump voters, what you see is a stark difference in their preferred identities regarding family formation. Most Harris voters don't see themselves being parents, which means they won't become parents, at least not on purpose. How do we get people to desire to have this identity? It comes from teaching and supporting values associated with family formation, which says that this is the most noble and highest level of human development and expression ... creating more humans. I have neighbors who have chosen not to have children because they view having children as a waste of resources, selfish, destructive ... their identity is that of "Earth Savior" by protecting the earth from more harmful humans.
But that is their choice. I actually applaud people that have no desire to be a parent and still don't procreate anyway. There are too many people who have kids for identity purposes and end up half adding parenting. People are too identity driven and not values driven enough imo.
Europe tries lots of different experiments within their very diverse cultures. What we lack in our efforts to boost fertility is the widespread religious belief which makes people less worldly and more defensive of group interests - very fertile ground for your fertility policies. But There's very little you can do to promote religion. It's largely an accident of history
We are seeing a religious awakening and revival in the US and Europe right now, which will have a positive impact on family formation. What is interesting is that in Israel you have strong fertility even among the non-religious because family identity is very strong, largely driven by the impact of the Holocaust.
Conflict with other groups also seems to boost fertility. The intensifying conflict between Israel and Palestinians in recent years must be a factor as well.
I think changes in culture are needed. That being said, making housing a lot cheaper plus more generous transfer payments early on would surely help move the needle.
The easier you make it to start a family early the more families you will get given any particular culture.
What you are already seeing is that the housing market is correcting. This normally takes 10 years to return to past equilibria, but we have already approached this in the rental market, where rents have declined rapidly, and it is much more attractive to rent versus own. In Europe they provide huge financial subsidies, as they do in Korea, Japan, and China and they have had virtually no impact on fertility rates. It is because no matter the amount of money thrown at family formation, it is not a preferred identity versus personal and financial independence, especially among women. Their identity of a working professional is stronger than that of mother or father.
At a minimum, we should be teaching in our public, private schools and colleges that having families and being parents is the most noble personal pursuit and ultimate expression of love and personal development, rather than teaching people that you should put off marriage and family formation until you have established your career, accumulated substantial wealth, purchased a home, etc. The evidence shows that getting married at a younger age, starting families while you are still poor, delivers better long-term results regarding reduced divorce rates, healthier families, better relationships, etc. Policy, as well as education, could support these realities rather than the former, which is the dominant narrative.
Do you have sources for some of these claims? From what I know and can easily look up, some of your claims are straight up false. For instance people on average who get married younger (<25) and are still broke get divorced at higher rates. People divorce way less once they are in their mid to late 20's - early 30s as shown in the Institute for Family Studies Research. Also this is same for rates of happiness, health and depression... Waiting usually helps. But there is no one simple answer for everyone when it comes to choosing a life partner or having kids.
I do agree that we as a culture should say that having families and being a parent is a noble pursuit. But I also think partially what we are seeing is that people have choice and they are choosing to have less kids. Not everyone wants the expression of love, the work or simply wants to have kids. I think that's okay. That's not even discounting the material reasons, time and support that also factor in to why people may wait to have kids. You also don't really discuss how solving teen pregnancy for the most part in Western Countries has impacted the amount of kids people have as well... Gen X had complicated relationships with their parents and also had kids younger on average than the millennials they raised while drilling into our heads that we should wait to get married, be more stable, etc because of what they went through.
PhillyT, you're right to ask for sources—let me share what the recent research actually shows.
The relationship between marriage age and divorce isn't as simple as "older is better." Brad Wilcox (Director of the National Marriage Project at UVA) and Lyman Stone analyzed data from 53,000+ women in their Institute for Family Studies study "The Religious Marriage Paradox." They found that religious people who marry in their early-to-mid 20s without cohabiting have the *lowest* divorce rates—challenging conventional wisdom.
Nicholas Wolfinger's analysis of National Survey of Family Growth data (2006-2010) revealed that divorce risk decreases 11% per year until age 32, then *increases* 5% per year after that. The relationship is curvilinear, not linear.
On your specific claim about marrying young while broke: The National Center for Family & Marriage Research shows divorce rates for ages 15-24 dropped 62% from 1990-2021—the largest decrease of any age group. Modern younger marriages are far more stable than past data suggests.
Regarding financial outcomes, Wilcox's wealth research found stably married couples have $640,000+ in assets by age 50 versus $167,000 for divorced/never-married peers. Marriage facilitates wealth building through economies of scale and behavioral changes, rather than requiring financial stability as a prerequisite.
The teen marriage data you cite is accurate—those do have higher risks. But the evidence for early-to-mid 20s marriages is much more nuanced, especially when accounting for religiosity and cohabitation history. Context matters more than age alone.
Sources: Institute for Family Studies, National Marriage Project, NSFG, NCFMR
Thanks for the source. I've seen multiple studies that support older on average is better up to a certain point. And my point still stands. Waiting on average is better... Obviously it is nuanced, but your gotcha of religious people divorce less in that age range is true... but we are talking about overall data... Speaking from experience those groups also sometimes stay together because of social conditioning and pressure. It doesn't always equal happiness, because people stay together or success. I wouldn't over index the Wilcox study.
Also I'm not surprised by the assets / wealth building information. That makes sense as since you'll have kids or be married you are more likely to hold on to assets, divorced people also having less isn't surprising.
You seem to have a slight religious angle or discount peoples choice or happiness though. Like you said context matters, and I wouldn't bade everything just on one recent study. Things break down a lot more by zip code, income bracket and education as well. Staying married or having kids doesn't immediately mean that you are a good mate or a good parent.
PhillyT, I appreciate the thoughtful pushback on the "social pressure" hypothesis. Let me address this with data.
If religious people stayed married due to pressure rather than satisfaction, we'd expect lower marital quality. The research shows the opposite. Pew Research Center's international study found actively religious Americans are 44% more likely to report being "very happy" (36% vs. 25%). The Handbook of Religion and Health analyzed 326 studies: 79% found religious people happier, only 1% found them less happy.
On marital satisfaction specifically: religious married couples report *higher* marital satisfaction, lower psychological distress, and greater overall life satisfaction than their non-religious peers—even after controlling for selection effects. The British Household Panel Survey controlled for pre-marital well-being and still found married people more satisfied, "suggesting a causal effect at all stages of the marriage."
More tellingly, randomized control trials (the gold standard for causation) assigned people to religious interventions. Result: measurable increases in happiness. Can't be explained by selection.
The University of Chicago (2025) found being married creates a "30-percentage point happy-unhappy gap." Brad Wilcox's research shows religious couples are "30% less likely to get divorced" *and* report higher marital quality—not an either/or.
You're right that staying married doesn't automatically make someone a good spouse or parent. Individual cases vary. But population-level data is overwhelming: religious married people aren't just staying together reluctantly—they're genuinely happier.
Sources: Pew Research (2019), Handbook of Religion and Health, British Household Panel Survey, U of Chicago (2025), National Marriage Project
This is a problem that will solve itself through natural selection. Whichever biological or cultural traits lead people to actually reproduce above replacement rate will become more prevalent in the human population, and those that don't will decrease, until average fertility once again reaches replacement levels.
We might not particularly look forward to the Amish, the Orthodox Jews, and other such groups inheriting the earth, but Homo Sapiens is in no danger of going extinct from fertility collapse.
Homo Sapiens is in no danger from extinction, but we'd preferably like to reverse fertility collapse before modern industrial society collapses, right?
okay, but wouldn't you agree that 10 billion people (the estimated population in 25-30 years) is not sustainable in the long term for our one planet and that some population decline is also going to be necessary for sustaining society and preventing excessive resource conflict, worsening climate instability, etc.?
This ‘10 billion’ figure is not clear to me or would it not actually change in the future due to technological progress.
For instance, the earth would possess a much less sustainable population if we haven’t had the Industrial Revolution. There’s only too much farmlands/sunlight-to-calories conversion.
However, as we advances, the ‘maximum carrying capacity’ will be continually pushed back as we’re more adept at controlling matters to our will.
Plants might be(and are) bioengineered to be more efficient in sun-to-energy conversion (more calories). More nuclear power generations mean easier access to fresh water as we convert sea water to human usage.
Given an advanced level of technology, I see no physical limitation as to why a kardashev’s type 1 civilization can’t have 1 trillion people as sustainable. The surface of the earth is only 1/10 an apple skin thick of resources we’ve barely utilized.
Oh, definitely. I just don't know how much population shrinkage civilization can safely absorb, but the world was very much able to run an industrial civilization using only the population of developed non-Communist countries in 1960...
I was thinking of this at well. Inherently, nature is such that you’re basically forced to choose a viable sets of belief or be wiped out.
Not having children and focusing all your effort on your careers is not a viable set of beliefs. Thus, it will be wiped out.
Obviously, once human obtain immortality or being able to factory-produce children from artificial wombs, then that belief would become viable, but until then.
I think you are right, it seems mainly a cultural issue but can't you influence culture?
In the past the cultural norm was to have children, we moved as societies to individualism (with the technical means for birth control). People are sheep, so here we are with a different cultural norm regarding getting children except as you point out at certain minorities.
So the question than becomes how can we influence the cultural aspect of getting children, without going back to the peer pressure of the past. Sounds like an impossible dilemma to solve but I think this might be the only way.
"So the question than becomes how can we influence the cultural aspect of getting children, without going back to the peer pressure of the past"
You can't.
So I vote to going back to the peer pressure of the past. It's either that or replace it with an authoritarian government that will enforce it via men with guns.
As a 35 yo man who has been married for 10 years and is still child-less but eventually wants children I can safely say I'm the problem. Hypocritically, I recognize this is a big issue.
I think the biggest problem is that in my generation we were told over and over and over again how damaging having children is in an attempt to solve teenage pregnancy. And it was solved! But now everyone (myself included) is convinced that they need to wait until we are financially secure, in a good career, own a big home, etc to even start trying. And by the time people have their first kid they're 35 and there's not a lot of time left for additional kids.
We need to swing the pendulum back a bit from this over correction by:
1. Stigmatizing starting a family after 30
2. Lowering the age of first home purchase by pursuing an abundance agenda
3. Seeing having kids less as a capstone of achievement and more as another step
I'm deeply unconvinced that technology is the answer here. If you made it so people can have kids until they're 45 people might just wait until they're 40 to start a family.
As Cartoons Hate Her pointed out the other day, women aren't delaying marriage and children for fun. They're delaying because they can't find partners.
Instead of all this punitive "Tax the childless! Leave them to starve in old age!" shit, we need to find ways to get young people off their phones and back to hanging out together in the malls, where they might actually form relationships.
Children I disagree with, because children are hard work and a big responsibility. I know many, many married couples with no plans for kids until their mid 30s like myself. In my wife's circle of 10ish new england high school friends most are in long term relationships but the only one with children is the one that married a man 4 years older. They're all turning 35 this year.
And well if you start trying at 35 you'll have families with 1, maybe 2, rarely 3 children. Ie below replacement level.
Well, I find my children fun. I'm not sure why other people don't; I generally find their children fun too. But that's idiosyncratic, perhaps, and you shouldn't take advice from a stranger on the internet.
But what I will say is that one good but honest way to shock people is to tell them that you have zero problem if your teenage daughter gets pregnant and has a kid.
CHH painted with too big of a brush. Surely she's right about some or even many women.
But just as surely there are a non zero percent of women that just want to focus on their career and so aren't actively trying to settle down. Or even if they have a long term prospect, they don't want to get married and or have kids yet.
Just like my wife and I refused to have kids in an apartment. If we could have afforded a house sooner we probably would have had kids sooner. Again does that describe everyone, of course not. But it describes some percentage of the population.
Likewise another percent is men stringing women along.
As always big problems like these are multi-factorial.
How much of women being unable to find partners comes from the focus on girls in school and opportunities vs. neglect of the needs of boys? When I went to college in the late 90s, colleges were already 60% female.
The other question is: how big of a world population do we actually want? Fewer people does tend to mean less consumption of natural resources and less pollution. Paul Erlich was wrong about the dangers of population growth in the 1960s and food production has indeed kept pace with population, but people are still burning lots of carbon and doing other things that are likely to bite humanity in its ass...
The biggest cause of habitat destruction isn't climate change or pollution, it's population, clearer forests for farms etc, so many people are freaking out because it will disrupt our corrupt, unsustainable systems but maybe behavior-wise humans are just finding their equilibrium
Although he sold lots of books 50 years ago, Paul Ehrlich was never right about anything, as anyone who has followed up on what he’s claimed can readily see.
Fewer people also means less innovation and cultural creation. People aren’t net negatives for the world - each person is on average a net positive for the other people, despite using some resources and causing some carbon emissions.
This is surprisingly simple problem to fix. Why should /I/ have children when other people will bear all the costs of raising children and then I get to steal the labor of those children to fund my state pension(social security)? The simple solution is that he who doesn't work does not want those who don't have children at replacement should not be allowed to collect social security. At a minimum the retirement age should be changed to 75 and then lowered for every child that you have such that 3 children allows you to retire at 65. But I would prefer that no children means no checks.
This is the solution I imagine would occur if we find nothing else. Even if it doesn't reverse fertility, it will free governments from the shackles of aging populations.
Still, it seems so... crude and dehumanizing, treating people as if they are only worth dignity if they have children. It would be far better, from the perspective of a liberal humanist, if we could find gentler ways to prod people to have children.
We as a pair already spent a lot of money on IVF, no luck so far. It would be evil to hit us with extra taxes or exclusion from social security on top of this. Indeed in that case, for a person with fertility problems, it would make sense not to try any treatments as well and save/spend the money instead, thus reducing birthrates further as fewer IVF attempts would be done.
Oh, and the clinics are full. It is not a rare problem at all.
Adoption and foster care will count as having children. The right to collect social security on the basis of a child couldl also be a fully tradable asset. You could purchase from a single mother of 6 children the right to collect on the basis of 3 of her children. There are no excuses.
There won't be any children to foster or adopt in this system. There are few enough already. That's why I propose changing contributions rather than benefits. Yes that means infertile people pay much more in taxes, but they don't have the expense of raising kids, so it is naturally fair - important for the politics. Incentives are also much more effective when they are immediate. Lots of people don't think about retirement in their 20s and early 30s.
How many kids do you have for adoption if there is a general dearth of kids being born in the very same society? Far fewer than actual infertile couples. Order of magnitude less at least.
And cross-border adoption with highly fertile nations (mostly in Africa) is terrible. Try doing anything within the framework of a highly corrupt African bureaucracy which sees you as a naive rich person to be mercilessly fleeced.
Social Security is going to be insolvent. I expected to be childless, and as a millennial, I expected to fund my entire retirement. If the reason you’re panicking about crashing fertility is that you or others won’t get a pension, I have bad news. You weren’t going to get one, anyway.
If we just up and eliminate Social Security, does that mean I never have to read another hand-wringing article about fertility again? If so, then let’s do it.
What is completely missing from your analysis is the fact that the identified problems are related to the "transient" phase, not to the "steady state".
Human population has been below one billion for 99.5% of its existence. Even with a worldwide fertility rate of 1, it would take 240 years to get us back there.
So there is actually 3 centuries to work on the problem, once every country reaches the "catastrophic" rate of China.
Of course I understand that the transient problems are nothing to be scoffed at, but the global fertility rate is not even below replacement yet.
And actually a redistribution from the older population (which owns most of the assets) to the younger one (who has the capacity for labour) would not be unwelcome.
Once fertility gets too low for an extended period of time, the population cannot get back to a steady state, it simply collapses. The age distribution makes it impossible, on average, for child-bearing age adults to support both several older adults plus 2.1+ children.
China, the world's oldest country demographically, is demonstrating this now.
This assumes no horrific technological advances eliminating parenting or a social change along the lines of Logan's Run.
This is demonstrably false, by looking at the period of higher population growth in the past.
Child-bearing-age adults supported 2 older parents plus 5+ children. So they will be able to support 4 grandparents plus 2.1 children.
And this before considering that elder care is less strenuous and more optional than child care.
There is no reason to worry about population collapse when the global fertility rate is above replacement and the child bearing population is in the billions.
Of course, we can study the phenomenon and think of policies to stabilise the population, but it's not going to be an emergency for a few hundred years, during which the trend might change.
You've assumed that minors and seniors are equivalent burdens, when they're nowhere close. Except for education, most of the financial burden of children is borne privately, while most of the burden of seniors is socialized.
This matters, because we aren't discussing 2 parents. We are discussing the average # of seniors the working age population supports, per capita - throughout one's working life, not just for 18 years. Right now, the US ratio is about 0.25. But by the 2070s, it will start to reach 2.0 in some societies.
In the OECD, spending on seniors per capita is 2 to 3 times that for children.. So right now, taking the low end, the senior burden is like having 0.5 children (for 50 years), or about 1.5 children for 17 years (which is more reflective of child-rearing).
Fast forward to the 2070s. That 2.0 senior/worker ratio is like having a family give birth to 12 to 18 children. In an industrial society.
While that's only the money, the labour situation is actually worse. Because 8 times the proportion of labour is tied up with elder care, non-care output is dramatically reduced. And that's the base for supporting it all.
So right now, about 7% of jobs are for senior care or senior health care. 93% is available for other things, including production for that 7%. In the 2070s, that 7% grows to 56% of care, with only 44% available for other things, to support it all.
As for "no reason to worry" - get real. Global TFR is headed below replacement fast, assuming it hasn't already, which is quite possible given past estimate revision history.
It's not an emergency in a few hundred years. It's collapse in about 40 years for many societies, and catastrophic turmoil for the rest. The emergency is already here, and it's too late already for some.
The burden for seniors being more socialized than for minors is a sociopolitical happenstance, not a universal need or biological reality.
A recent popular substack post shows our welfare/tax system favours older people, even when financially better off.
Yes, I posit that caring for one minor is on average equivalent to caring for one senior, especially if defined as 65+.
I didn't write a scientific paper on it, so I can be convinced otherwise, but I'll need hard data.
Annetodically, my parents are approaching 80; for the past 15 years they lived alone (in a different continent) without any support; they even took care of the kids during holidays. My two children are almost teenagers and have consumed more than half of the household resources (financial and time commitment). I believe you underestimate how much of the economy and of people personal time is consumed for providing services to people under 18: education, entertainment, sport, transport.
Most importantly, it's not true that the population just collapses when you reach a low fertility rate, as long as you have a reasonably sized cohort of high fertility people. A million or so Amish could repopulate the Earth in a few hundred years.
As you admitted, it's not even sure if we are below replacement yet. Thus this isn't a global problem, but an issue specific to some countries. Those countries should financially incentivize natality reassigning resources from old people welfare; and in the meantime import young and child-bearing-age immigrants from high natality countries.
> Child-bearing-age adults supported 2 older parents plus 5+ children.
That just isn’t true. There has never been a society where there are equal numbers of people 20-65 as people over 65 before.
There have been many societies in which people spend a small part of their life with two senior citizen parents and several young children at once, but these people have always had friends and neighbors that didn’t have so many dependents to help out.
The only we an entire population can have the ratios you mention is some weird whipsaw of very low fertility for several decades and then a sudden jump.
There are three categories, with somewhat arbitrary thresholds. Let's say productive people (P) are 20 to 65 years old; young unproductive people (Y) are 0-19 years old; old unproductive people (O) are 65+ years old.
The ratio you are concerned is P / (Y+O). If it gets too low it is difficult for the productive people to care for the unproductive.
But the ratio can get low either for low fertility (as forecasted for China in the original article) or for very high fertility (such as subsharian Africa in the 90s).
What I was saying is that on a worldwide scale, this ratio is not at an historical maximum. Locally (like Italy, China) there are issues, but that can be balanced via migration.
"I haven’t seen anyone contemplate turning society into The Handmaid’s Tale," - Oh ffs Noah. How can you live in these United States in 2026 and say this?
Noah, love your work, but huge whiff when you addressed all the "cope" arguments but didn't address the one that says "fewer humans is a good thing because it leads to less environmental strain." This belief is a *huge* reason why most folks on the political left aren't worried about population decline. There are good counterarguments to this belief, including that growing populations can best promote the scientific research that we really need to address climate change and other environmental problems. But by not even addressing the Malthusian belief that "more people = more resource and environmental strain," you're simply ducking the central issue that causes many to not care about (or even cheer on) population decline.
You could start by removing the legal requirement for parents of a third child to replace their car with a minivan because you can't fit three car seats in the back seat of a car and the law says that you have to keep kids in booster seats much longer than any reasonable assessment would show.
"Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. Using census data and state-year variation in laws, we estimate that when women have two children of ages requiring mandated car seats, they have a lower annual probability of giving birth by 0.73 percentage points. Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied). We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000."
Social science, as Noah stated, is extremely expensive and few people are doing it in this arena. Every parent has anecdotal evidence, on the other hand. I don’t see how we can dismiss it out of hand.
I had a bad back in my 30s, and child seats became a deal breaker. We have 4 kids instead of 5 in part because of child seats, which were extended to age 8 shortly after #4 was born. #1 was forced back into a child seat, preventing us from driving in 1 car.
Around the time we graduated out of child seats, years of agonizing back problems went away.
down to rational choice. At no time in history has the opportunity cost to having children been greater in terms of independence, ease of life, and material comfort.
Great list of research topics. I would add: would it help to call it "child rearing policy," not "fertility policy," because the real problem is the daunting task of child rearing. "Fertility" doesn't get at the actual labor. Ask any grandparent who is doing substantial child-rearing work. (My hand is raised.) Everyone I know who is not having kids will tell you: parents fear the grueling, 18+year long task of doing a good job, when the world is watching, when once you're in you can't back out.
Good point
The problem in this area is too much concern about "child rearing policy. " Parents worry so much about doing everything right, but the research shows little to no benefit beyond the bare minimum of a stable household.
I do not disagree! Perhaps the worry should be researched; perhaps it falls under "too much social media" and podcasts that are always hyping the dangers of this and that.
Sounds like a place for Hollywood and the media to step in and reassure parents.
Instead we have endless short form media telling you you've got to spend 100 hours a week or little Johnny will turn into a sociopath and hate you to boot.
Of the worries that Noah cited in the post, fear of school shootings has got to be the least justified. There are over 100k schools in the United States; if there are 2 mass school shootings a year on average, a given child’s chance of a shooting happening at their school at some point in their 13-year school career is around 1 in 4000, and their chance of being killed is a small fraction of that. They’re about as likely to be struck by lightning!
School shootings are horrific, but statistically speaking, parents should be much more afraid of cars.
if just pumping out another human being and keeping it alive to the age of 18, maybe. Doing it right so the kid isn’t messed up is hella hard. The challenges society poses to raising a decent human are real. I have 2 successful twenty-somethings. It’s very satisfying but grueling and expensive, and there is not much of you left afterwards.
I don't know what research that is, but there are loads of studies showing impressive benefits beyond providing stability (although that's clearly the most critical). Among the wide range of beneficial activities (at different ages) , are reading, teaching household finances, having family dinners together, and drilling arithmetic. Instruments aren't well understood: some studies show life-long term health benefits in the children when the father maintains fitness through their child's teen years.
That said, the total is not onerous.* I have 4 kids, much of my schedule revolves around them, but it's hardly onerous except for a brief period when you might have 3+ toddlers**. BUT if you observe middle class parents seized by competitive parenting, it no doubt appears daunting.
*Some special needs children, or those with severe illness or addiction excepted
** Also daunting is having several teenage girls at once, which requires a lot of time listening (OMG, right?).
How much of that is correlation and how much is causation? If you have any RCTs, I'd be interested in looking at them.
I agree this is a problem in some parts of America, but it doesn't explain the global issue. I find the global issue truly puzzling. I don't have any avenues of investigation other than the ones Noah lists, though.
I don't know, from what I have read childhood is pretty stressful in South Korea, with obsessions over schooling, exams, the right schools, etc.
But what about Africa and Latin America? (I know, Africa is BIG and there are many different cultures, but that just makes it all more puzzling.)
Latin America seems to be pretty lax, and while their TFRs are mostly below replacement they are much higher than South Korea.
Africa is still in the early stages of the demographic transition, with fertility rates falling but still way above replacement. It’ll be interesting to see where they go as the decades go by.
So there’s some performance anxiety? Once again, the crushing weight of social media scolds add to the weight of the calculus. No grandchildren yet. The possibility keeps me exercising …
This is a really good point. I have never seen this point so well made. There are no easy answers here. My best guess is that most child-rearing labor stayed within the family but the control of child-related activity moved closer to state institutions. And then the state, plus state-aligned media, won the tug of war that followed.
Would that it were only 18 years...
Musk's solution to declining fertility rates so far has been rather more direct than funding research into the problem.
LOL
Not much, because most of the mothers of his sons not have much kids (and what matter for population growth is the ration children/mothers)
Good point. Women are the fertility bottleneck, not men, and it seems unlikely that Musk's strategy has increased the fertility of his baby mommas. It's possible that he has reduced their fertility. Musk's "solution" is just self-indulgence.
That approach doesn’t scale.
Being a very rich absentee dad doesn't seem like a scalable solution.
You jest but this is a fun question to ask an AI what the TFR of the global 1% would need to be to offset the current decline. Even 100+ per person isn’t close
For shame. The global elite aren't what they used to be. Apparently 2% of the entire Chinese population are direct descendants of Genghis Khan. Or something like that. I have so little vim and vigour that I can't even be bothered to Google it to check!
I mean, 100 per person for the top 1% would, by definition, be a high enough TFR to fully maintain the current population.
D’oh, I meant 0.1%, you’re right! I’d originally just done the math with billionaires (which I think is global 0.001%).
See my comment above on this point
“ Collapsing fertility is a bit different from those other problems, because it’s fundamentally a social problem rather than a physical threat like climate change, disease, or starvation.” Are you sure about that? Sperm counts have halved in the past fifty years. Endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment are increasing. There is likely a physical element too.
I am skeptical that this is a major cause of declining fertility rate.
I believe that the most important proximal cause of declining fertility rate is the age at first marriage for women. When women marry in their early to mid twenties, they have replacement levels of children (on average). When age of first marriage is in the thirties or never, women rarely have replacement levels of children. The correlation is quite strong.
Even modest delays matter mechanically:
Marrying at 28 instead of 22 removes ~6 high-fertility years.
With deliberate spacing and contraception, that often means 1–2 fewer births, even if desired family size is unchanged.
IE, the increased focus on college and not getting married till after college, is probably a factor.
But women graduate from college by age 21. Many women got married during or immediately after college during 1945-1970.
It is more what happens afterwards.
Here is a look the percent of people with degree
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attainment-in-the-us/
it went from 8% in 1960 to 37% in now.
That's a delay of at least 4 years. That's a delay of 4 years from when people are considering marriage.
I agree it's not the whole story, but submit it's a major factor.
Just like me doing the military and then college was a factor for me.
Going to university is not necessarily a delay at all.
I think what really matters is whether young women in their early and middle 20s prioritize:
A) Finding a good husband to marry, or
B) Other things, including career or “just finding themselves”, etc.
If it is A, then university is actually the perfect environment to do so.
And the choice of the men in their twenties is far less important for biological reasons.
Tbf women aren't the only ones focusing more on B than on A. I can't think of a single male friend, including high paid ones in tech, who was ready (or even willing) to get married and have kids immediately after graduating college.
Most people won't be getting married in college, they will delay till after college.
This is not correct. It's possible (but far from certain) that sperm count has gone down, but even if it has, it is not causing any significant society-wide fertility issues now. See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-more-than for more information.
Sperm count just one possible issue. As you point out it may not be a key issue. However, infertility is on the rise and I don’t think that can be ignored. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39752330/
These articles seem to be saying that sperm counts have probably gone down - though probably not by as much as 50% - but the authors are unsure whether or not they have gone down sufficiently to affect fertility.
True, that's really worth looking into
Yes, this does happen, and it happens to older men. Often the cause is mysterious, or an intervention will work and later cease working.
I wish I had no direct knowledge of this issue.
I’m sure there are some men who want to sire a child but can’t due to sperm counts. But by and large, low fertility rates are caused by men and women who are biologically capable of having children, but just don’t want to.
Or want to, but just not yet, then they run our of time.
Yes, that is usually the reason. A gap between long-term goals and short-term actions.
But it's possible to freeze eggs (ideally before a woman is over 35) and then do IVF. That combination has something like a 70% success rate at 20+ eggs frozen, even after age 40. One of the main barriers to using this strategy is the cost of these procedures, so one concrete pro-natal government policy would be to make this path inexpensive for women in their late 20s/early 30s who want to have children but need to defer it for professional / educational / personal reasons.
It would probably manifest in the more subtle way of accidental pregnancies becoming statistically less likely to happen.
Only if accidental pregnancies increase the number of children people have in their life! I would expect that there are a significant number of parents for whom an accidental pregnancy just changes the timing of their children, not the number (and similarly for many fertility problems).
I strongly doubt the decrease in fertility rate is driven by some Children of Men style sterility and that fixing infertility issues would move the needle on the rate of population level child bearing.
Agree. For me personally it’s the latter. But I’m hopeful that technology will help here as well: Just saw that scientists derived the first human embryo from skin cells.
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/30/nx-s1-5553322/ivg-human-eggs-cells-fertility
But speeding up the regulatory process would be great (my wife and I are still struggling to produce embryos). Especially in Europe there are a lot of unnecessary “ethical” hurdles around this type of research and urgency and pragmatism hasn’t arrived in the legislature yet.
Study released last year shows “a growing prevalence of infertility among individuals aged 15-49 years worldwide from 1990 to 2021, with an expected continued increase through 2040.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39752330/
That study finds infertility (1.8%) for males (3.7%) for females, so it is obviously not a major cause. Not irrelevant, obviously, but still not a major cause.
May not be a major cause but remember the study I cited is of infertility. The same factors leading to infertility are also likely leading to subfertility. And together with infertility that could add up to be more significant. I checked but there don't seem to be good global numbers on subfertility, but the ones I did see suggest the numbers of subfertile could be 2-3x as high as infertile.
And I'd guess obesity is the number one reversible driver by a long way.
It does seem to be one but endocrine disruptors look like another likely one. Debatable how reversible endocrine disruptors are. There are ways you can modify your habits to avoid them to some extent, but there are a lot of them all around.
Do subfertile people usually go on to have fewer children, or do they usually take more tries to have the same number of children?
Both happen, but on average subfertile people end up with fewer children, not just the same number after more tries. Timing is the key reason.
Across demographic and epidemiological studies, people with subfertility (longer time-to-pregnancy, lower monthly conception probability) tend to show:
* Longer intervals between births
* Later age at first birth
* Lower probability of progressing to a second or third child
* Higher likelihood of stopping earlier than intended
Even when they do eventually conceive, the delay itself compounds: biological fecundity declines with age, especially for women, so each delay reduces the window for additional children.
That's true. And the decline in sperm count has been linked to industrially produced dioxins. So Noah's fertility drive may be at odds with his abundance agenda. Just spotted Susan H's response below which is along similar lines.
There’s a far bigger likely cause of decreased sperm counts. Luckily it’s now treatable.
“Obesity is significantly associated with reduced sperm count and overall semen quality, with men who have obesity showing an average reduction of 19.56 × 10⁶ in total sperm number compared to normal-weight men.The correlation is dose-dependent, with more pronounced effects in higher obesity classes…”
“Obesity represents a particularly important target for intervention because it is highly prevalent, modifiable, and supported by robust evidence across systematic reviews and meta-analyses.The concurrent rise in obesity prevalence and decline in semen quality over recent decades suggests population-level significance.While Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals pose significant risks with potentially severe effects at critical developmental windows, obesity affects a larger proportion of the population and operates through well-characterized, reversible mechanisms”
Dioxins are mainly produced from incomplete burning of waste or paper making using chlorine, or recycling of some metals or plastics, especially the one TCDD with negative fertility effects. Abundance on the other hand calls for more energy, housing and infrastructure, not paper or waste burning. Paper use (note that cardboard doesn’t use much chlorine in its production) is declining, so abundance isn’t a problem here. Maybe stop incomplete incineration and recycling metal and plastics would reduce dioxins somewhat.
Sans abundance we have economic decline that without doubt triggers shrinking pie violence and competition.
Medical counter-balancing (fertility medicine) to the quite plausible own-effect is the best route.
Pie violence, if intended as written, is a fantastic term.
hmmm.... I wish I was so clever but merely should have a -dash but accidental cleverness through sloppy typing....
See my comment above about identity changes required
The main fact that we possess: that this fertility decline is almost universal, world-wide.
Thus, many of the obvious suspects are not the core problem.
I might believe fervently that young couples need housing. My conservative neighbor might believe fervently that birth control is immoral. And thus political responses to fertility decline are likely to follow those directions.
However, fertility decline is occurring in places with sufficient housing as well as in locations with only the limited birth control that existed throughout history -- so obviously these are NOT the core causes of fertility decline.
But in case anyone hasn't noticed, it is very difficult to get masses of human beings to address problems with anything like that sort of objective mindset. I suspect that this, more than coping statements, creates the greatest obstacle to solving the problem.
Excluding technology, there is little that is global, and multi-determination should not be discounted.
In the developing world, the decline is almost all explained by female education, access to birth control, and urbanization.
In the urban developed world, lack of access to space, later marriage age and low gap in male-female income explains most fertility decline.
"as well as in locations with only the limited birth control that existed throughout history"
What percentage of the world doesn't have access to some form of birth control?
Also, even there, I would imagine that greatly knowledge of how the reproductive cycle is a factor.
That being said, I believe that fertility rates were falling even before the invention of hormonal birth control, the baby boom was an aberration.
But surely it greatly accelerated the trend.
“
However, fertility decline is occurring in places with sufficient housing as well as in locations with only the limited birth control that existed throughout history”
Citation needed. I would be surprised to learn family planning wasn’t happening.
Birth control is increasingly available even in poorer countries. 2026-India doesn't have the same birth control access as 2026-USA, but it has way more birth control access than 1900-India. Likewise for many other poor-to-middle-development countries.
2026-India has far more birth control than India of 10 years ago.
No. It wouldn't explain why poor countries have/had high fertility rates.
I am finally glad that people are waking up to this issue. I cannot address the world, only a small party of mine. As was reported in The Dispatch and repeated here, government inducements are not working. I can recount the issues with my two daughters.
Neither wants to be the sole childcare giver. Both want careers, neither wants to be a “trad wife” per se. They both would love to find a man who was interested in marriage and accepting of sharing household and childcare. Both would like to marry a successful man. Not necessarily a businessman, it could easily be a tradesman. Equality essentially.
Neither has found their guy. One is 33, the other 31. One is an occupational therapist, the other is finding her way by trying many industries. I do believe the dating apps have been a failure. Interestingly, J Date has worked for others, and that is because of the affinity the clients have. Sharing the Jewish experience and religion probably helps break the ice, whereas an app that is just for hooking up people who share nothing in common.
Cost and child care are the two biggest obstacles once you get beyond finding a partner. I am finding men do not want the responsibility of marriage and fatherhood, which is leading to women getting married older, while they are hitting their stride in their careers in their mid-30s.
The allure of marriage is just not there. People seem to be ok with it. They don’t see the value of family, even though they came from one. It is odd. My dating was probably geared to sex at first, but as I aged, I wanted a partner, a marriage, and a family. I will be married to my best friend for 39 years this year.
Child care is a huge issue. Many don’t want to send their kid away to strangers. So here are my solutions. Day Care at your place of business and offerings of work from home for both spouses. This way, the children are not with strangers, and duties can be shared.
It obviously wouldn’t work for a married waitress and cook; a restaurant probably isn't the perfect place to have day care. It wouldn’t work for a cop married to a nurse.
Full-time for a nurse is three 12-hour shifts, cops work from 10 to 12 hours, and some have 8-hour days.
So how do you solve some insolvables? Obviously, staggered work schedules might help. The cop could also work 12-hour shifts on different days from his nurse wife. She potentially might have her hospital or facility offer daycare.
One way to solve this would be to have zero taxes for couples with young children. Early schooling with day care options and after-care options. The old question of how to eat an elephant, one bite at a time. We perhaps cannot solve the cost of raising a teenager, but child care, the real time frame is until the kids get to school full-time. We have to get them past age 6.
Once they pass that, and the cost of daycare won’t wreck them, we can raise their taxes slightly.
Enlisting businesses to be family-friendly will fall on businesses that can help. Some will not be able to help. We need to tackle this one bite at a time.
Part of the problem is that people aren't bored any more. For the whole of human history boredom was a fundamental fact of human existence and coupling, sex and child-rearing were a diverting way to pass the time. But with the growth of the entertainment sector over the last 30 years no one is bored any more. Pascal described the human condition as 'boredom, fear and inconstancy'; But Lana Del Rey describes the modern human condition: 'I say, "You the bestest", Lean in for a big kiss, Put his favourite perfume on, Go play your video game'.
I don’t exactly remember, but I’ll bet when my wife and I were younger, we had sex if we were bored.
"They don’t see the value of family, even though they came from one. It is odd."
Have you met families? : )
Plenty. There are successful families and fractured families. Most of the time, those fractures can heal with age, or they continue. Have you been with happy families or mostly bad familial relationships? I guess it matters which one defines your perspective.
I was trying to keep it light but plenty of people have poor family experiences that sort of take away the romance of it and maybe they choose to only have one kid because they (rationally) anticipate that will be less stressful for everyone and more conducive to a happier life. Or they forgo it entirely to focus on work, fun or survival as the case may be.
I blame fun! :-)
Fun fact millennial dads are spending about the same amount of time on child care as boomer moms did. The problem is that moms are spending even MORE time with their kids.
IE moms asked dad's to step up and they did. But then moms went even more overboard. they are the reason they are overworked.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2026/01/09/millennials-spend-more-time-than-past-generations-with-their-children
More generally on child care, I think policy should be agnostic and let parents decide what's best for them. There should be enough support for either one parent to stay home OR to pay for child care. The majority of women still prefer to stay home the first couple of years.
I think we bump the child tax credit up to $10k a year for the first 5 years, or maybe even $20k a year. And get rid of any child care tax credits.
For those that have careers, we must make the company respect that and do what it can for her to carry on with her carreer
To be fair I live in Tokyo with a young daughter; daycare and all medical expenses for children are free, and yet the birth rate is not exactly stellar. I’m grateful for it and these things probably help, but what counts from a societal viewpoint is getting people to decide to go from 0 to 1, 1 to 2, 2 to 3 kids as cost effectively as possible, and I suspect that such generous tax cuts are a very expensive way to do that.
I address many of these issues in my comment above
Good post Earl.
Thanks boss. I don’t have a broken bones...I jsut finished my morning rant, I think you’ll enjoy it.
I did! amd said so young lad
I think that it is better for the world long term to figure out how to live reasonablly with a smaller population than to figure out how to increase the population to fit our current expectations and requirements. I believe that what we are seeing is the human population is reverting to some sort of norm, and that the having large families was a transitional phase driven by a combination of significant infant and childhood mortality ( largely solved) and the need to have a large and compliant workforce for your farm or business ( completely solved in the West and those Asian countries mentioned here).
Noah spent the entire article explaining why this is likely wrong. There is no mathematical or evolutionary way that we are reverting to some sort of norm. If populations decrease by half each generation, soon there are effectively no people at all.
this is a slippery slope fallacy. The human race is expected to reach its population maximum of 10 billion people in 25-30 years. That is not the point where you want to achieve replacement level as it's simply not sustainable to have that many people on earth for a long period of time. There's no reason to think that the population won't decline for a time and then stop declining. Postulating species extinction because a crowded earth isn't getting more crowded even faster is such a huge leap.
There is precisely zero evidence that a population of ten billion people is not sustainable, for any definition of sustainability that you would wish to use. I am genuinely surprised that people will state this as if it is a fact, rather than an unlikely hypothesis which requires evidence.
All the optimistic estimates I’ve seen pretty much demand a best case scenario on every factor for it to even begin to work, and plenty of researchers won't go that far. For example:
“The paper has looked in particular at challenges in the areas of food, water, nonrenewable resources, and climate change… On the other hand, evidence regarding water and greenhouse gas emissions is less reassuring. Levels of water extraction exceed sustainable levels in many countries. Global warming has continued at a rate that threatens the planet. While CO2 emissions have declined in both per capita and total terms in Europe and North America, this has been more than offset by rising emissions in other regions, especially Asia.” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/padr.12685
“In this paper, we present the current global food system challenge and consider both relatively high and relatively low fertility trajectories and their impacts for food policy and systems. Two futures are proposed. The first is a “stormy future” which is an extension of the “business as usual” scenario. The population would be hit hard by conflict, global warming, and/or other calamities and shocks (e.g., potentially another pandemic). These factors would strain food production and wreak havoc on both human and planetary health. Potential increases in mortality (from war, famine, and/or infectious diseases) cannot be easily modeled because the time, location, and magnitude of such events are unknowable, but a challenged future is foreseen for food security.” The other scenario, the “brighter futures scenario”, is one of population decline.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11111-023-00431-6
“In exploring question (2) we have chosen 20,000 dollars in 2011 prices as the basis of the exercise. The figure for N we reached is about 3.3 billion, which is about 42% of the present population size. That was the global population in the early 1960s, so it is not an outlandish number. In any event, we have presented the estimate only to show how far off humanity is from where we should probably now be in terms of population size and a sustainable living standard.
We also estimated that that the highest sustainable living standard for a global population of 9 billion would, other things equal, be a bit over 11,800 dollars at 2011 prices.”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-021-00595-5
Thank you. These will be interesting to fisk.
look forward to a reasoned exchange of arguments. It's just not clear to me why it would be better to go to any or all sorts of social extremes (there are people in the comments here suggesting growing humans in factories as a solution, after all) to force the population to sustain at 10 billion or more, rather than allow it to naturally take the course it's already on to decline to a more moderate easily sustained population level that can enjoy a higher standard of living. We can focus on using our intellect and resources to make that transition smoother rather than coming up with ways to grow humans in factory vats...
Thanks for the response here and below. My clarifications/responses.
1) I was responding to MD’s argument that less than two children per woman was a historic norm. You are right that just because we are dropping well below two now does not imply we will always do so. Agree 100%. Indeed Noah’s argument is to start reversing this trend now.
2) I agree that there are way too many people in some poor countries, and that they likely will not be able to sustain themselves if current projections continue. I would strongly argue against initiatives to increase fertility in most of Africa and parts of SE Asia. The aging of the developed nations might even harm our ability to help them
3) I think the developed world (and China) risks catastrophic disaster if it does not address fertility. For the US, we could partly offset this with selective immigration and temporary workers. I suspect AI could play a major role in the solution as well.
4) I believe 8-10 B people is sustainable with growing prosperity. Countless “experts” agree and disagree. The optimists have tended to have a much better track record so far, with prosperity and living standards increasing dramatically as population grew, and environmental outcomes improving once a prosperity threshold was crossed.
I guess the point is that overpopulation is something we should be worried about, especially in some places. But declining fertility is a a threat as well. Both things can be true. I look forward to your thoughts…
Declining fertility is *not a threat*. Of course at some point it would be -- "did you know that if you cut the population in half forever it eventually goes to zero?!?!??!?!!!!?!?!?!". Mm-hmm. And did you know that people will behave differently when there's far fewer people around?
You believe 8-10B people is sustainable with growing prosperity. Great. We're going to be on the *upper bound* of that range soon. It'd be easier if the population declined a little. (It'd be even easier if it declined *substantially*). How do you get the population to decline? Well, you could kill a bunch of people. Or they could die by disease. Or ... they could choose to have fewer children? For awhile? And this prospect terrifies people for some freakish reason?
...And I'm not typically the kind of person to do this, but it's hard not to notice that the reason seems to be *where* the breeding is happening today and where it's not, and that's honestly just very gross.
If you disagree with Noah’s concerns on possible problems of massively declining fertility, then please share where and why he is wrong. I agree with him that societies made up disproportionately of old retirees is a serious issue. In other places, the problem is too many kids and no education or economic opportunities.
That was perhaps the silliest part. Let's start with propositions that are so obvious that, absent this very silly argument, they wouldn't need to be said:
(1) The human population can't increase indefinitely
(2) It'd be nicer if increases in the population were prevented by reduced births rather than large-scale violent death
...Right? Well ... do I really have to spell it out? At some point, it will inevitably be the case that there are some old-heavy generations, because *currently* (as in, *right this minute*, not just in recent decades), the world is running way over replacement fertility. Thus -- unless you somehow disagree with (1), which would just be hilarious -- there'll come a point where the products of an overbreeding generation are old, and the young are the result of more moderate breeding. There's just no way to avoid that, unless you think we can grow indefinitely (dumb) or you want many people to die violently (I don't think Noah does, but many of his pro-natalist commenters seem fully crazy enough -- are you the "let's throw them into war" kind?)
So, yes, that'll happen on our way to a smaller population. That's obvious, so raising it as a problem is weird and disingenuous.
The other concern he has is that people will keep up this level of reproduction forever, until there are 0 people, which is if anything even sillier in its obvious falsehood. There are going to be 10 billion people. Obviously at some point before we get to 0 people, people will find that reproduction is more attractive. Will that be at 6 billion? 4 billion? Even as "low" as 1 billion, which is much higher than the population was for almost all of history? I don't know, or at all care, but *obviously* breeding will pick back up as space and resources become available again.
correct, there is nothing wrong with this other than the human organizational systems will have to be adjusted and the people winning in these systems don't want that, it will be significantly better for the environment for sure
Math and evolution dictate that we can't grow forever.
Feedback loops kick in when we're groaning under a large population.
Feedback loops will kick in if we are in an existential birthing crisis.
Meant as a reply to Swami.
Let’s ignore the question about total population - the relevant point Noah is mostly talking about is the direction of change. If the population is growing, then there are more young people than old people. If the population is shrinking, then there are more old people than young people. The question is how to restructure life to work well with more old people than young people (if we are shrinking) or how to stop shrinking (so that we can maintain steady ratios of old and young people).
That assumes that at some magical point we will figure out how to have a stable population. But if population isn't stable at 7 billion, why would it be stable at 5 billion, or 3 billion.
Because things change in ways that we can't possibly predict and also in some ways that maybe we can. For example, once children have been rare for a while, they may come to be seen as more valuable and the people that have them may be rewarded by having higher social status, getting more attention and support. The people to watch are the earlier adopters and influencers.
"For example, once children have been rare for a while, they may come to be seen as more valuable"
actually the reverse is what happens, when kids are rare having kids is seen as a just one choice amongst many (and often kind of a weird one, don't you realize kids destroy your life).
Having kids need to be the default thing you do when you grow up.
You have absolutely no idea whether that happens. Children haven't been rare "for a while" ever. The planet is still unpleasantly and widely overcrowded.
Actually we do know that is happening, we can see it happening in big cities, and we can especially see that in countries like South Korea, Japan etc, And even to an extent in many parts of Europe.
Culture mattes a LOT. If children are seen as the normal thing to do when you become an adult, people have children. If they are seen as a "nice thing that some people like, but not for everyone" then a lot of people don't
No, this is where people get weirdly blinkered and also -- and I usually hate this kind of argument -- a little weirdly ethnically centered. *The planet* is crowded af. People are aware of that -- both because they can read and because the consequences of the planet being crowded af are all around them. It is *not* relevant that babies are relatively rare *in the most expensive parts of South Korea and the US coasts*. It is *not* relevant that the babies that are rarest are white and certain Asian ethnicities. There are still absolute *hordes* of babies flooding out onto the surface of the planet every day. We are crowded to the gills.
People's panic about fertility is just literally insane. The planet's population grows every day; the shape of the population curve over the last millenia is an absolute hockey stick. Not unrelatedly, those people's energy needs are swamping the planet in greenhouse gasses. The water those people pump for agriculture has drained ocean-sized reservoirs. The animals those people eat are their own distinct ecological catastrophe. And people immediately jump to wondering "what if, when all those problems naturally solve themselves, then people just don't reproduce until there's literally zero people? WHAT THEN?!"
...right, and it's also similarly possible that aliens will invade and eat us. I mean, it's possible. WHAT WOULD HAPPEN THEN? ... I guess we'd die, but I think it's not something to worry and make public policy about.
Thank you for this comment. I don't understand how Noah could write this essay without placing these numbers in context - the human race is expected to reach a population maximum of 10 billion people on earth in the next 25-30 years. That is not the point where you want to stabilize the population; absolutely no one who studies populations and resource management thinks that that is a sustainable number of humans on planet earth. We _need_ the total number of people to come down before worrying about global population stabilization. And yes, it will mean moving away from the semi-ponzi scheme of "growth is the only answer" economic scheme we've been living under for a long time, but seriously what exactly is the alternative?
Ma'am, the statement that "absolutely no one who studies populations and resource management thinks that that is a sustainable number of humans on planet earth" is false.
I would be interested in seeing credible evidence from the very few of those social scientists and ecologist who do believe this.
Isn't the environmental movement a tacit suggestion that there are too many people on the planet at the current time?
E.g.:
William E. Rees: Population ecologist and originator of the "Ecological Footprint" concept, who argues that current human populations are in a state of gross ecological dysfunction.
William J. Ripple: Ecologist and lead author of "World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice," which highlighted rapid population growth as a primary driver of environmental threats.
John Harte: Environmental scientist who argues that population growth contributes to numerous social issues, including unemployment, overcrowding, and conflict.
Albert Allen Bartlett: Physics professor known for his lectures on "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy," warning that the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function in relation to population.
Serge Latouche: Economist who argues that the planet crossed the threshold of sustainability in the 1960s.
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: Economist who argued as early as 1975 that the planet was already overpopulated.
Colin Butler: Epidemiologist who has written extensively on the negative impact of high population growth on public health, food security, and environmental stability.
And what constitutes credible evidence? We put out 70 million pounds of atrazine each year, putting this endocrine disrupter in water supplies at what some think is unacceptable levels. Fact? Opinion? We get into the realm of the judgement call: should we have 100 people in luxury; a 1000 people in comfort; or 10,000 people in squalor?
The problem is that this is a grim reality for humanity… to be explicit, if there’s one young person in charge of supporting 16 old people, probably 14 of those old people will die early from starvation or disease, and the young person might not scrape by either.
I would love for us to figure out a way to do that without creating economic suffering, but I'm not quite sure what that would be, or if there is one.
Noah, this is characteristically rigorous, and your demolition of the six coping statements is valuable. But I think you're calling for centralized research to discover a solution that's already emerging through distributed discovery—and missing why.
Your proposed research question—"Does geographically concentrating people with high fertility rates tend to increase or decrease society-wide birth rates?"—already has an answer. Two answers, actually, from very different contexts.
Utah County. Over 100,000 people migrated there specifically for family formation over the past decade. Fertility runs 2.1-2.4 while the national rate collapsed to 1.6. No subsidies. No RCT. Just identity infrastructure: community networks normalizing large families, housing supply keeping pace with demand, and a migration mechanism concentrating family-oriented people who reinforce the culture that attracted them.
Israel. The only OECD nation reproducing above replacement, at 2.9-3.0. And here's what makes it remarkable: it's not just the Haredi. Non-Haredi Jewish women maintain TFR of 2.45. Even self-identified secular Jewish women sustain 1.96—higher than France despite France spending 4% of GDP on family policy. A 2025 Foreign Policy analysis found Israel's fertility gains are "mainly caused by a rise in fertility among secular Jews." Israeli Jewish women are unique globally in showing a positive correlation between fertility and urbanization, education, and income. Even after 15 months of war following October 7th, Israel saw a 10% rise in births in late 2024.
Two radically different societies. One LDS-influenced American suburb, one Middle Eastern nation under existential threat. Same pattern: identity drives fertility, not subsidies.
The deeper issue is diagnostic. You're treating fertility as a technical problem requiring policy optimization. I'd argue it's an identity problem requiring paradigm transformation—and that's why subsidies fail at scale despite working at the margin.
Nordic countries eliminated every economic barrier to childbearing. Swedish parents face zero childcare costs, 480 days paid leave, and $30-35K in lifetime transfers per child. Fertility: 1.43 and falling. Finland's Kela agency now admits "we cannot really any longer say that it's our good family policies that explain good fertility in the Nordics." They solved the wrong problem.
The binding constraint isn't affordability—it's identity strategy. When Gen Z Harris voters rank "having children" 12th of 13 priorities (6% essential) versus Gen Z Trump voters ranking it 1st (34% essential), we're not seeing different calculations about the same goal. We're seeing fundamentally different conceptions of what constitutes a fulfilling life. The economic barriers are real but not binding—they're post-hoc rationalizations for choices already made at the identity level.
Utah County and Israel share one thing: both created environments where family formation is central to identity rather than obstacle to self-actualization. In Israel, it's existential—children are contributions to national continuity, not consumption goods to be afforded when convenient. In Utah County, it's community infrastructure that makes parenthood normative rather than exceptional. Neither required an RCT to discover this. Both emerged from identity environments, not policy interventions.
No randomized trial will discover "build identity infrastructure and let people migrate to it," because that's not a policy lever. But America already has the mechanism: federalism enables Utah County to exist while San Francisco runs different experiments. Mobility (2.5% interstate migration, far exceeding Europe's sub-1%) enables selection. Free speech lets us observe and discuss results. The discovery process is operating right now—no $10 billion research center required.
Your instinct for research is right, but the research question should shift from "which policy intervention raises fertility?" to "why do Utah County and Israel sustain replacement-plus fertility without Nordic-level subsidies while Sweden and Korea collapse despite them?" The answer is identity, community, and infrastructure—not transfer payments.
I explore this at length in my forthcoming book on why America's structural "chaos" is actually competitive advantage. The fertility crisis will be repaired—not by discovering the optimal subsidy in an RCT, but by observing what already works and building toward it. The repair is already happening.
—Chris Wasden
I practice you are saying "people will start having many children if people start to want having many children"
All human action proceeds from identity. If we lack the identity of being a parent, we will never have children. In the survey data I shared above regarding Harris and Trump voters, what you see is a stark difference in their preferred identities regarding family formation. Most Harris voters don't see themselves being parents, which means they won't become parents, at least not on purpose. How do we get people to desire to have this identity? It comes from teaching and supporting values associated with family formation, which says that this is the most noble and highest level of human development and expression ... creating more humans. I have neighbors who have chosen not to have children because they view having children as a waste of resources, selfish, destructive ... their identity is that of "Earth Savior" by protecting the earth from more harmful humans.
But that is their choice. I actually applaud people that have no desire to be a parent and still don't procreate anyway. There are too many people who have kids for identity purposes and end up half adding parenting. People are too identity driven and not values driven enough imo.
Europe tries lots of different experiments within their very diverse cultures. What we lack in our efforts to boost fertility is the widespread religious belief which makes people less worldly and more defensive of group interests - very fertile ground for your fertility policies. But There's very little you can do to promote religion. It's largely an accident of history
We are seeing a religious awakening and revival in the US and Europe right now, which will have a positive impact on family formation. What is interesting is that in Israel you have strong fertility even among the non-religious because family identity is very strong, largely driven by the impact of the Holocaust.
Conflict with other groups also seems to boost fertility. The intensifying conflict between Israel and Palestinians in recent years must be a factor as well.
yes, it helps reinforce your identity and to band together to preserve others with similar identities.
You make a number of really good points here.
I think changes in culture are needed. That being said, making housing a lot cheaper plus more generous transfer payments early on would surely help move the needle.
The easier you make it to start a family early the more families you will get given any particular culture.
What you are already seeing is that the housing market is correcting. This normally takes 10 years to return to past equilibria, but we have already approached this in the rental market, where rents have declined rapidly, and it is much more attractive to rent versus own. In Europe they provide huge financial subsidies, as they do in Korea, Japan, and China and they have had virtually no impact on fertility rates. It is because no matter the amount of money thrown at family formation, it is not a preferred identity versus personal and financial independence, especially among women. Their identity of a working professional is stronger than that of mother or father.
This seems to suggest that fertility policy can have an effect.
But I think you need both. To change culture AND have pro fertility policies.
Maybe we need research to find if there’s a policy lever that can change culture. Propaganda?
At a minimum, we should be teaching in our public, private schools and colleges that having families and being parents is the most noble personal pursuit and ultimate expression of love and personal development, rather than teaching people that you should put off marriage and family formation until you have established your career, accumulated substantial wealth, purchased a home, etc. The evidence shows that getting married at a younger age, starting families while you are still poor, delivers better long-term results regarding reduced divorce rates, healthier families, better relationships, etc. Policy, as well as education, could support these realities rather than the former, which is the dominant narrative.
Do you have sources for some of these claims? From what I know and can easily look up, some of your claims are straight up false. For instance people on average who get married younger (<25) and are still broke get divorced at higher rates. People divorce way less once they are in their mid to late 20's - early 30s as shown in the Institute for Family Studies Research. Also this is same for rates of happiness, health and depression... Waiting usually helps. But there is no one simple answer for everyone when it comes to choosing a life partner or having kids.
I do agree that we as a culture should say that having families and being a parent is a noble pursuit. But I also think partially what we are seeing is that people have choice and they are choosing to have less kids. Not everyone wants the expression of love, the work or simply wants to have kids. I think that's okay. That's not even discounting the material reasons, time and support that also factor in to why people may wait to have kids. You also don't really discuss how solving teen pregnancy for the most part in Western Countries has impacted the amount of kids people have as well... Gen X had complicated relationships with their parents and also had kids younger on average than the millennials they raised while drilling into our heads that we should wait to get married, be more stable, etc because of what they went through.
PhillyT, you're right to ask for sources—let me share what the recent research actually shows.
The relationship between marriage age and divorce isn't as simple as "older is better." Brad Wilcox (Director of the National Marriage Project at UVA) and Lyman Stone analyzed data from 53,000+ women in their Institute for Family Studies study "The Religious Marriage Paradox." They found that religious people who marry in their early-to-mid 20s without cohabiting have the *lowest* divorce rates—challenging conventional wisdom.
Nicholas Wolfinger's analysis of National Survey of Family Growth data (2006-2010) revealed that divorce risk decreases 11% per year until age 32, then *increases* 5% per year after that. The relationship is curvilinear, not linear.
On your specific claim about marrying young while broke: The National Center for Family & Marriage Research shows divorce rates for ages 15-24 dropped 62% from 1990-2021—the largest decrease of any age group. Modern younger marriages are far more stable than past data suggests.
Regarding financial outcomes, Wilcox's wealth research found stably married couples have $640,000+ in assets by age 50 versus $167,000 for divorced/never-married peers. Marriage facilitates wealth building through economies of scale and behavioral changes, rather than requiring financial stability as a prerequisite.
The teen marriage data you cite is accurate—those do have higher risks. But the evidence for early-to-mid 20s marriages is much more nuanced, especially when accounting for religiosity and cohabitation history. Context matters more than age alone.
Sources: Institute for Family Studies, National Marriage Project, NSFG, NCFMR
Thanks for the source. I've seen multiple studies that support older on average is better up to a certain point. And my point still stands. Waiting on average is better... Obviously it is nuanced, but your gotcha of religious people divorce less in that age range is true... but we are talking about overall data... Speaking from experience those groups also sometimes stay together because of social conditioning and pressure. It doesn't always equal happiness, because people stay together or success. I wouldn't over index the Wilcox study.
Also I'm not surprised by the assets / wealth building information. That makes sense as since you'll have kids or be married you are more likely to hold on to assets, divorced people also having less isn't surprising.
You seem to have a slight religious angle or discount peoples choice or happiness though. Like you said context matters, and I wouldn't bade everything just on one recent study. Things break down a lot more by zip code, income bracket and education as well. Staying married or having kids doesn't immediately mean that you are a good mate or a good parent.
PhillyT, I appreciate the thoughtful pushback on the "social pressure" hypothesis. Let me address this with data.
If religious people stayed married due to pressure rather than satisfaction, we'd expect lower marital quality. The research shows the opposite. Pew Research Center's international study found actively religious Americans are 44% more likely to report being "very happy" (36% vs. 25%). The Handbook of Religion and Health analyzed 326 studies: 79% found religious people happier, only 1% found them less happy.
On marital satisfaction specifically: religious married couples report *higher* marital satisfaction, lower psychological distress, and greater overall life satisfaction than their non-religious peers—even after controlling for selection effects. The British Household Panel Survey controlled for pre-marital well-being and still found married people more satisfied, "suggesting a causal effect at all stages of the marriage."
More tellingly, randomized control trials (the gold standard for causation) assigned people to religious interventions. Result: measurable increases in happiness. Can't be explained by selection.
The University of Chicago (2025) found being married creates a "30-percentage point happy-unhappy gap." Brad Wilcox's research shows religious couples are "30% less likely to get divorced" *and* report higher marital quality—not an either/or.
You're right that staying married doesn't automatically make someone a good spouse or parent. Individual cases vary. But population-level data is overwhelming: religious married people aren't just staying together reluctantly—they're genuinely happier.
Sources: Pew Research (2019), Handbook of Religion and Health, British Household Panel Survey, U of Chicago (2025), National Marriage Project
This is a problem that will solve itself through natural selection. Whichever biological or cultural traits lead people to actually reproduce above replacement rate will become more prevalent in the human population, and those that don't will decrease, until average fertility once again reaches replacement levels.
We might not particularly look forward to the Amish, the Orthodox Jews, and other such groups inheriting the earth, but Homo Sapiens is in no danger of going extinct from fertility collapse.
Homo Sapiens is in no danger from extinction, but we'd preferably like to reverse fertility collapse before modern industrial society collapses, right?
okay, but wouldn't you agree that 10 billion people (the estimated population in 25-30 years) is not sustainable in the long term for our one planet and that some population decline is also going to be necessary for sustaining society and preventing excessive resource conflict, worsening climate instability, etc.?
This ‘10 billion’ figure is not clear to me or would it not actually change in the future due to technological progress.
For instance, the earth would possess a much less sustainable population if we haven’t had the Industrial Revolution. There’s only too much farmlands/sunlight-to-calories conversion.
However, as we advances, the ‘maximum carrying capacity’ will be continually pushed back as we’re more adept at controlling matters to our will.
Plants might be(and are) bioengineered to be more efficient in sun-to-energy conversion (more calories). More nuclear power generations mean easier access to fresh water as we convert sea water to human usage.
Given an advanced level of technology, I see no physical limitation as to why a kardashev’s type 1 civilization can’t have 1 trillion people as sustainable. The surface of the earth is only 1/10 an apple skin thick of resources we’ve barely utilized.
Oh, definitely. I just don't know how much population shrinkage civilization can safely absorb, but the world was very much able to run an industrial civilization using only the population of developed non-Communist countries in 1960...
I was thinking of this at well. Inherently, nature is such that you’re basically forced to choose a viable sets of belief or be wiped out.
Not having children and focusing all your effort on your careers is not a viable set of beliefs. Thus, it will be wiped out.
Obviously, once human obtain immortality or being able to factory-produce children from artificial wombs, then that belief would become viable, but until then.
That may be right, but humanity may be in for a dark few centuries until that happens.
I am skeptical of this. Have researchers tried modelling this "high fertility island" scenario?
I think you are right, it seems mainly a cultural issue but can't you influence culture?
In the past the cultural norm was to have children, we moved as societies to individualism (with the technical means for birth control). People are sheep, so here we are with a different cultural norm regarding getting children except as you point out at certain minorities.
So the question than becomes how can we influence the cultural aspect of getting children, without going back to the peer pressure of the past. Sounds like an impossible dilemma to solve but I think this might be the only way.
"So the question than becomes how can we influence the cultural aspect of getting children, without going back to the peer pressure of the past"
You can't.
So I vote to going back to the peer pressure of the past. It's either that or replace it with an authoritarian government that will enforce it via men with guns.
In other words liberal societies will be replaced by less liberal ones that figure out how to keep populations levels up.
"This is a problem that will solve itself through natural selection."
Agree, but that can be a low bar, as natural selection trends towards minimal survival traits.
Might help to put a thumb on the scale for those with more executive function, but then things get fraught.
As a 35 yo man who has been married for 10 years and is still child-less but eventually wants children I can safely say I'm the problem. Hypocritically, I recognize this is a big issue.
I think the biggest problem is that in my generation we were told over and over and over again how damaging having children is in an attempt to solve teenage pregnancy. And it was solved! But now everyone (myself included) is convinced that they need to wait until we are financially secure, in a good career, own a big home, etc to even start trying. And by the time people have their first kid they're 35 and there's not a lot of time left for additional kids.
We need to swing the pendulum back a bit from this over correction by:
1. Stigmatizing starting a family after 30
2. Lowering the age of first home purchase by pursuing an abundance agenda
3. Seeing having kids less as a capstone of achievement and more as another step
I'm deeply unconvinced that technology is the answer here. If you made it so people can have kids until they're 45 people might just wait until they're 40 to start a family.
As Cartoons Hate Her pointed out the other day, women aren't delaying marriage and children for fun. They're delaying because they can't find partners.
Instead of all this punitive "Tax the childless! Leave them to starve in old age!" shit, we need to find ways to get young people off their phones and back to hanging out together in the malls, where they might actually form relationships.
Marriage I agree with, because marriage is fun!
Children I disagree with, because children are hard work and a big responsibility. I know many, many married couples with no plans for kids until their mid 30s like myself. In my wife's circle of 10ish new england high school friends most are in long term relationships but the only one with children is the one that married a man 4 years older. They're all turning 35 this year.
And well if you start trying at 35 you'll have families with 1, maybe 2, rarely 3 children. Ie below replacement level.
Well, I find my children fun. I'm not sure why other people don't; I generally find their children fun too. But that's idiosyncratic, perhaps, and you shouldn't take advice from a stranger on the internet.
But what I will say is that one good but honest way to shock people is to tell them that you have zero problem if your teenage daughter gets pregnant and has a kid.
CHH painted with too big of a brush. Surely she's right about some or even many women.
But just as surely there are a non zero percent of women that just want to focus on their career and so aren't actively trying to settle down. Or even if they have a long term prospect, they don't want to get married and or have kids yet.
Just like my wife and I refused to have kids in an apartment. If we could have afforded a house sooner we probably would have had kids sooner. Again does that describe everyone, of course not. But it describes some percentage of the population.
Likewise another percent is men stringing women along.
As always big problems like these are multi-factorial.
How much of women being unable to find partners comes from the focus on girls in school and opportunities vs. neglect of the needs of boys? When I went to college in the late 90s, colleges were already 60% female.
So Step One is: Build more malls.
It's not a big issue, keep doing you
Not mutually exclusive. You can do both what you suggest and extend the female fertility window.
Absolutely. I just think this is far more social than technology driven, and as such I doubt a technology solution will address it.
The other question is: how big of a world population do we actually want? Fewer people does tend to mean less consumption of natural resources and less pollution. Paul Erlich was wrong about the dangers of population growth in the 1960s and food production has indeed kept pace with population, but people are still burning lots of carbon and doing other things that are likely to bite humanity in its ass...
The biggest cause of habitat destruction isn't climate change or pollution, it's population, clearer forests for farms etc, so many people are freaking out because it will disrupt our corrupt, unsustainable systems but maybe behavior-wise humans are just finding their equilibrium
Although he sold lots of books 50 years ago, Paul Ehrlich was never right about anything, as anyone who has followed up on what he’s claimed can readily see.
Fewer people also means less innovation and cultural creation. People aren’t net negatives for the world - each person is on average a net positive for the other people, despite using some resources and causing some carbon emissions.
There's the quality/quantity thing. Weren't that many Hellenistic Greeks.
Plenty of net negatives out there; e.g. investment bankers. Bwaahaahaa.
At least it's generally worked that way so far...
This is surprisingly simple problem to fix. Why should /I/ have children when other people will bear all the costs of raising children and then I get to steal the labor of those children to fund my state pension(social security)? The simple solution is that he who doesn't work does not want those who don't have children at replacement should not be allowed to collect social security. At a minimum the retirement age should be changed to 75 and then lowered for every child that you have such that 3 children allows you to retire at 65. But I would prefer that no children means no checks.
This is the solution I imagine would occur if we find nothing else. Even if it doesn't reverse fertility, it will free governments from the shackles of aging populations.
Still, it seems so... crude and dehumanizing, treating people as if they are only worth dignity if they have children. It would be far better, from the perspective of a liberal humanist, if we could find gentler ways to prod people to have children.
Say hello to geriatric mass shooters and suicide bombers in this scenario.
"tt would be far better, from the perspective of a liberal humanist, if we could find gentler ways to prod people to have children."
Very much agreed.
which is why my first preferred policies would be big a lot more housing to drive down the cost of buying a home and thus starting a family.
And huge increases in the child tax credit.
Those would also be politically MUCH easier.
What about naturally infertile people?
We as a pair already spent a lot of money on IVF, no luck so far. It would be evil to hit us with extra taxes or exclusion from social security on top of this. Indeed in that case, for a person with fertility problems, it would make sense not to try any treatments as well and save/spend the money instead, thus reducing birthrates further as fewer IVF attempts would be done.
Oh, and the clinics are full. It is not a rare problem at all.
Adoption and foster care will count as having children. The right to collect social security on the basis of a child couldl also be a fully tradable asset. You could purchase from a single mother of 6 children the right to collect on the basis of 3 of her children. There are no excuses.
Well that's an empathetic response (not).
There won't be any children to foster or adopt in this system. There are few enough already. That's why I propose changing contributions rather than benefits. Yes that means infertile people pay much more in taxes, but they don't have the expense of raising kids, so it is naturally fair - important for the politics. Incentives are also much more effective when they are immediate. Lots of people don't think about retirement in their 20s and early 30s.
How many kids do you have for adoption if there is a general dearth of kids being born in the very same society? Far fewer than actual infertile couples. Order of magnitude less at least.
And cross-border adoption with highly fertile nations (mostly in Africa) is terrible. Try doing anything within the framework of a highly corrupt African bureaucracy which sees you as a naive rich person to be mercilessly fleeced.
Social Security is going to be insolvent. I expected to be childless, and as a millennial, I expected to fund my entire retirement. If the reason you’re panicking about crashing fertility is that you or others won’t get a pension, I have bad news. You weren’t going to get one, anyway.
If we just up and eliminate Social Security, does that mean I never have to read another hand-wringing article about fertility again? If so, then let’s do it.
What is completely missing from your analysis is the fact that the identified problems are related to the "transient" phase, not to the "steady state".
Human population has been below one billion for 99.5% of its existence. Even with a worldwide fertility rate of 1, it would take 240 years to get us back there.
So there is actually 3 centuries to work on the problem, once every country reaches the "catastrophic" rate of China.
Of course I understand that the transient problems are nothing to be scoffed at, but the global fertility rate is not even below replacement yet.
And actually a redistribution from the older population (which owns most of the assets) to the younger one (who has the capacity for labour) would not be unwelcome.
Once fertility gets too low for an extended period of time, the population cannot get back to a steady state, it simply collapses. The age distribution makes it impossible, on average, for child-bearing age adults to support both several older adults plus 2.1+ children.
China, the world's oldest country demographically, is demonstrating this now.
This assumes no horrific technological advances eliminating parenting or a social change along the lines of Logan's Run.
This is demonstrably false, by looking at the period of higher population growth in the past.
Child-bearing-age adults supported 2 older parents plus 5+ children. So they will be able to support 4 grandparents plus 2.1 children.
And this before considering that elder care is less strenuous and more optional than child care.
There is no reason to worry about population collapse when the global fertility rate is above replacement and the child bearing population is in the billions.
Of course, we can study the phenomenon and think of policies to stabilise the population, but it's not going to be an emergency for a few hundred years, during which the trend might change.
That's no demonstration at all.
You've assumed that minors and seniors are equivalent burdens, when they're nowhere close. Except for education, most of the financial burden of children is borne privately, while most of the burden of seniors is socialized.
This matters, because we aren't discussing 2 parents. We are discussing the average # of seniors the working age population supports, per capita - throughout one's working life, not just for 18 years. Right now, the US ratio is about 0.25. But by the 2070s, it will start to reach 2.0 in some societies.
In the OECD, spending on seniors per capita is 2 to 3 times that for children.. So right now, taking the low end, the senior burden is like having 0.5 children (for 50 years), or about 1.5 children for 17 years (which is more reflective of child-rearing).
Fast forward to the 2070s. That 2.0 senior/worker ratio is like having a family give birth to 12 to 18 children. In an industrial society.
While that's only the money, the labour situation is actually worse. Because 8 times the proportion of labour is tied up with elder care, non-care output is dramatically reduced. And that's the base for supporting it all.
So right now, about 7% of jobs are for senior care or senior health care. 93% is available for other things, including production for that 7%. In the 2070s, that 7% grows to 56% of care, with only 44% available for other things, to support it all.
As for "no reason to worry" - get real. Global TFR is headed below replacement fast, assuming it hasn't already, which is quite possible given past estimate revision history.
It's not an emergency in a few hundred years. It's collapse in about 40 years for many societies, and catastrophic turmoil for the rest. The emergency is already here, and it's too late already for some.
The burden for seniors being more socialized than for minors is a sociopolitical happenstance, not a universal need or biological reality.
A recent popular substack post shows our welfare/tax system favours older people, even when financially better off.
Yes, I posit that caring for one minor is on average equivalent to caring for one senior, especially if defined as 65+.
I didn't write a scientific paper on it, so I can be convinced otherwise, but I'll need hard data.
Annetodically, my parents are approaching 80; for the past 15 years they lived alone (in a different continent) without any support; they even took care of the kids during holidays. My two children are almost teenagers and have consumed more than half of the household resources (financial and time commitment). I believe you underestimate how much of the economy and of people personal time is consumed for providing services to people under 18: education, entertainment, sport, transport.
Most importantly, it's not true that the population just collapses when you reach a low fertility rate, as long as you have a reasonably sized cohort of high fertility people. A million or so Amish could repopulate the Earth in a few hundred years.
As you admitted, it's not even sure if we are below replacement yet. Thus this isn't a global problem, but an issue specific to some countries. Those countries should financially incentivize natality reassigning resources from old people welfare; and in the meantime import young and child-bearing-age immigrants from high natality countries.
> Child-bearing-age adults supported 2 older parents plus 5+ children.
That just isn’t true. There has never been a society where there are equal numbers of people 20-65 as people over 65 before.
There have been many societies in which people spend a small part of their life with two senior citizen parents and several young children at once, but these people have always had friends and neighbors that didn’t have so many dependents to help out.
The only we an entire population can have the ratios you mention is some weird whipsaw of very low fertility for several decades and then a sudden jump.
There are three categories, with somewhat arbitrary thresholds. Let's say productive people (P) are 20 to 65 years old; young unproductive people (Y) are 0-19 years old; old unproductive people (O) are 65+ years old.
The ratio you are concerned is P / (Y+O). If it gets too low it is difficult for the productive people to care for the unproductive.
But the ratio can get low either for low fertility (as forecasted for China in the original article) or for very high fertility (such as subsharian Africa in the 90s).
What I was saying is that on a worldwide scale, this ratio is not at an historical maximum. Locally (like Italy, China) there are issues, but that can be balanced via migration.
"I haven’t seen anyone contemplate turning society into The Handmaid’s Tale," - Oh ffs Noah. How can you live in these United States in 2026 and say this?
Yes, this sentence made me go “Noah, you sweet summer child, have you ever seen Xitter?”
Are those really people or just bots?
Someone is running those bots, so the comment still applies.
Noah, love your work, but huge whiff when you addressed all the "cope" arguments but didn't address the one that says "fewer humans is a good thing because it leads to less environmental strain." This belief is a *huge* reason why most folks on the political left aren't worried about population decline. There are good counterarguments to this belief, including that growing populations can best promote the scientific research that we really need to address climate change and other environmental problems. But by not even addressing the Malthusian belief that "more people = more resource and environmental strain," you're simply ducking the central issue that causes many to not care about (or even cheer on) population decline.
Yeah, this view is so common on the left that the issue is currently “right coded.”
I find that notion the most aggravating and self-serving cope of all.
You could start by removing the legal requirement for parents of a third child to replace their car with a minivan because you can't fit three car seats in the back seat of a car and the law says that you have to keep kids in booster seats much longer than any reasonable assessment would show.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception?triedRedirect=true
I bet this would have zero detectable effect on fertility.
You might be surprised to find out that people actually have found an effect of car seat laws on fertility...
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/731812
"Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. Using census data and state-year variation in laws, we estimate that when women have two children of ages requiring mandated car seats, they have a lower annual probability of giving birth by 0.73 percentage points. Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied). We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000."
It's peer reviewed science! 😉
It's peer-reviewed "science" 😉
Seriously, these types of uncontrolled observational population "studies" are worse than useless.
They actively pollute the information space. In the worst case, they can wind up influencing government policy - c.f. Tylenol in pregnancy
Social science, as Noah stated, is extremely expensive and few people are doing it in this arena. Every parent has anecdotal evidence, on the other hand. I don’t see how we can dismiss it out of hand.
Is it better to have no studies than to have studies that have less than the best possible evidence?
Indeed, that's why I put the wink emoji - just because a study found a statistical effect doesn't mean it's actually there. Replication matters a lot.
Oh it's detectable all right. In the lower back.
I had a bad back in my 30s, and child seats became a deal breaker. We have 4 kids instead of 5 in part because of child seats, which were extended to age 8 shortly after #4 was born. #1 was forced back into a child seat, preventing us from driving in 1 car.
Around the time we graduated out of child seats, years of agonizing back problems went away.
Car seats are contraception.
Why would you suspect that. Do you believe incentives and costs don't matter?
If your car can only fit 2 car seats, you have no money or desire for a new car, then yeah, maybe you stop at 2 kids.
Does that describe 100% of people of course not. But the number is surely greater than zero.
great article and agreed.
I think it really boils
down to rational choice. At no time in history has the opportunity cost to having children been greater in terms of independence, ease of life, and material comfort.