There are a lot of good reasons people ignore the discussion of the global birth crash. First, there’s the fact that not so long ago the big concern was overpopulation. Plus, it can seem a little creepy to even talk about. Concern about the “total fertility rate” can make you sound like a villain from The Handmaid’s Tale. Anyway, how bad could it be? There certainly seem to be enough people competing for jobs, houses, slots in colleges, and the like. Well, recently we asked Nicholas Eberstadt, one of the world’s top demographers, and his co-author Patrick Norrick, to cut through all that baggage and give it to us straight. His answer was much direr than we had previously understood. On any given day, this is not the newsiest story. But on every given day, it just might be the biggest story we are all ignoring. Are we about to hit peak humanity? Or have we already? And what will come next? —The Editors
We are in the midst of a headlong global birth crash—a plunge underway all around the world, in rich and poor regions alike, very possibly presaging an indefinite global depopulation, with our “peak human” moment coming much sooner than almost anyone imagined even a few years ago.
This is not what demography’s experts long predicted. For decades, demographers simply assumed that the postwar drop in worldwide birth rates would lead to an eventual equilibrium, with childbearing converging in one region after another at a little over two births per woman, the level required for long-term replacement. They envisioned a mere slowing of the explosive worldwide population growth from the 20th century, the extraordinary period in which human life expectancy more than doubled and the global population nearly quadrupled (from 1.6 billion to over 6 billion).
Instead it is now apparent that we are witnessing a worldwide march into the terra incognita of prolonged sub-replacement fertility, with no hints yet of how far humanity’s birth rates will ultimately fall—or when they will recover, if ever.
