Demographic decline, once dismissed as a niche obsession of “pronatalists” on the right, has increasingly gained mainstream media and scholarly attention in the United States. In this way the US is somewhat behind the curve; falling birthrates have long obsessed policymakers abroad, particularly in East Asia and Europe. Nevertheless, in popular US discourse, demographic decline currently seems to be roughly where climate change was around 1990, in that while some people are trying to sound the alarm, most of the public is either unaware of the problem or doesn’t see it as one, and some are even trying to argue that it is a good thing. With that being the case, we are still far from the stage of implementing policy solutions, both because there is not yet a critical mass of voters and politicians who understand the problem, and because there is no consensus among those who do about what an effective policy solution would look like, especially since no policy implemented in any country in the world that has a birthrate below the replacement level of 2.1 has effectively course corrected. The policies that have been proposed in the US, on both the right and the left, however, have reflected a narrow understanding of the problem in terms of both its causes and its scope. The purpose of this piece then, is to lay out four theses about demographic decline that need to be taken into account if and when policy solutions are sought and implemented.
1. Demographic decline is a global problem, not a national one
Much of the debate in the US, unsurprisingly, has been very America-centric, focusing on issues that are particular to domestic society and political economy such as the costs of housing and childcare, inadequate parental leave, controversies around gender identity, the availability of contraception, and even the pervasiveness of therapy. However, in trying to understand this problem, we need to begin from the reality that it is not a specifically American problem, or even a problem specific to high-GDP countries. According to the UN, in 2024 over half of all countries comprising roughly two-thirds of the global population had birthrates below replacement level, a group that “crosses all regions and income groups.” Even in countries where birthrates remain above replacement level, those rates are falling and appear to be following the trajectories of the rest of the world. Analyses of the problem and resulting policy solutions therefore need to account for the fact that this is occurring across the globe simultaneously in countries with different levels of development, with different political economies and policy approaches, and with different social and communal structures.
2. Demographic decline has multiple causes across many different policy areas that interact with each other
While the above proposition indicates that there are likely some universal contributing factors, it does not necessarily mean that locally specific issues are not also exacerbating the problem. It certainly can be the case that the cost of child care in the US, the job market in China, tense gender relations in South Korea, or any number of other nationally and regionally specific factors are important elements of the issue. Global and local issues interact in a multitude of ways; It might be the case that technological shifts which reduce the economic returns to physical labor are creating shifting job opportunities that are undermining gender roles and relations, a problem that is exacerbated and reified by technology, specifically social media and the way it both amplifies social discontent and facilitates isolation. Technology might be fundamentally altering human habits, behavior, and health in ways that are difficult to see or admit because those changes are given ideological cover stories by political parties, universities, or religious institutions. What this means is that the causes are a mixture of economic, social, technological, political, and ideological, and therefore an effective policy solution would have to take those different fields into account and operate across them. It will not be sufficient either to limit ourselves to only economic policies, which have thus far proved ineffective, or to attempt an ideological offensive that essentially exhorts people to moral heroism but does not make people’s day-to-day lives any easier. In short, this is not a problem that can be solved with money.
3. Demographic decline is unlikely to stabilize on its own. On the contrary, it is likely to snowball: the fewer kids there are, the harder it becomes to have kids
One of the ways that many justify avoiding dealing with the problem of demographic decline is by arguing that, actually, the world would be better off with a smaller population. They argue that it would be better for the climate (though that has been debunked), or that fewer young people would mean fewer wars. After all, everyone who is alive has only ever experienced a growing population, and the problems that people face in their everyday lives often appear to have been caused by overpopulation: too little housing, too much traffic, too much pollution, too much competition for jobs and schools, etc. It is thus understandable that people think having fewer people would be better, and this is part of what makes solving demographic decline so challenging: it requires getting people to see that the real problem is the opposite of the one they think they’re facing.
The problem with the smaller-is-better argument is that it requires stabilization. In order to have a sustainably smaller population, whether that means 6 billion people, or 4 billion, or 2 billion, the birth rate would ultimately still have to rise to replacement level. Otherwise, we are still on a mathematical slide to oblivion. So, for starters, that still leaves us with the same problem: how to increase the birth rate from its current level back to the 2.1 replacement level. A mistake that people make is thinking that somehow this shift will happen naturally, as if once the population starts falling, people will just spontaneously decide to have more babies. However, this seems extremely unlikely. On the contrary, the fewer kids there are, the harder it becomes to have kids. Institutions necessary for child-rearing disappear: daycares, schools, pediatricians, formula manufacturers, etc. Aging and increasingly childless voters prioritize what matters to them—especially funding pensions—rather than pushing lawmakers to devote public funds to children and growing families. Venues become less friendly to children over time, and people become less tolerant of children in public. Perhaps most importantly, social pressures to not have kids increase. People who might want to have children are surrounded by friends and colleagues who spend and travel without the burdens of time, energy, and money that kids represent, and they increasingly feel ostracized and trapped. As having kids becomes the exception rather than the rule, society will increasingly adapt to a default of childlessness, which will only increase the difficulty of having children.
4. While the most obvious and immediate consequences of demographic decline are economic, those are not the only or possibly even the most important consequences
When asked why demographic decline is a problem, commentators invariably resort to economic explanations: It will decrease the labor supply, raise inflation, deplete pensions, and squeeze tax revenue. These things are all likely to be true, even with the possibility that AI will replace a significant number of jobs, and many of these are already beginning to take place. European countries, caught between a social safety net that can no longer be funded by aging populations and the social unrest that has resulted from mass immigration as a way of mitigating labor scarcity, are stuck in a sort of political doom loop. In the US, the estimated date by which Social Security’s trust fund will run out keeps getting moved up, without any political consensus on what to do about it. And yet, while the economic consequences of demographic decline might be the most obvious, immediate, and easy to quantify, they may not ultimately be the most consequential.
Humanity has never lived in a time of long-term secular population decline. There have been sudden demographic shocks, like the Black Death, but those were short-lived and came at times when the human population as a whole was much younger on average. To a degree we probably cannot even fathom, human civilization and human psychology are built upon notions of growth, youth, renewal, and hope. What would it mean to live in a shrinking world, where most people will have no direct connection to future generations? Where innovation and creativity, disproportionately supplied by younger people, are not only increasingly scarce but perhaps even seen as increasingly undesirable? Where the very notion of sacrificing for the future becomes obsolete? Unlike the economic consequences of demographic decline, these are some of the harder-to-quantify aspects of the problem that society, by and large, has not even begun to reckon with. But they might prove far more important, especially if it turns out that the techno-optimists are right about the role technology can play in the economy of the future. In short, we are on the precipice of arguably the most fundamental shift humanity has ever experienced. And right now, for the most part, we are going into that shift blind.
Jeremy Friedman is the Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Previously, he was Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University. He is an international historian who has published two books, including most recently Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World (Harvard University Press, 2022).
