Should We Care About Birthrates? (And What Happened to Them Anyway?)

Last updated:3 mars 2026

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb famously predicted a Malthusian nightmare of an overcrowded, starving planet. Today, that nightmare has flipped. The existential dread of the 21st century is not one of too many mouths to feed, but one of too few hands to work. The United Nations projects that the global population will peak in the mid-2080s before beginning a terminal decline. Even this may be optimistic, as the UN’s models are widely criticized for being too generous in their assumptions.

Yet the once dry debate over resource management and mathematical projections has now gathered much political interest… On the right, pundits and populist politicians frame declining birthrates as a symptom of moral decay, often spicing up their rhetoric with concerns about « traditional values » or the « great replacement ». The rest of the political spectrum has begun to acknowledge the issue as well. The French government just sent a letter to all its 29-year-old citizens, encouraging them to think about “having babies” and many governments are beginning to run large subsidy and incentive schemes.

There is an expectation that the rapidly declining birthrates could restructure our economy, which the first part of this article will cover. There we also answer the uncomfortable question: in an age of climate change and limited resources, is a shrinking population truly a bad thing? The second part examines why birthrates are cratering in the first place. While economic pressures play a role, they do not fully explain why birthrates are falling in prosperous, high-welfare societies. Furthermore, a decay of cultural values does not explain the falling birthrates in Turkey and the Middle East.

Why should we care?

Our planet’s resources are limited. A declining population could, therefore, free up more resources and facilitate dealing with issues such as climate change. Yet, the main danger isn’t the fall in population per se, but the resulting shift in population composition. Demographics move with heavy inertia. A baby boom 30 years ago will produce a large, productive workforce capable of significantly improving economic conditions. But significantly fewer births today lead to a strong disbalance 30 years into the future, when this smaller workforce needs to support and uphold an out of balance demographic pyramid of retired baby boomers. Furthermore, fertility rates can only be affected by those of reproductive age. So even high fertility among 20–39-year-olds will only marginally increase the total fertility rate if that cohort is small.

Japan had a 30-year head start in fertility decline. Its lost decade of no economic growth is a bit of a misnomer. Japanese worker productivity grew at a similar rate to that of the US, but a shrinking labor force only managed to keep the economy at the same level. In contrast, the American GDP grew due to higher fertility and immigration increasing the working population.

To maintain current living standards, we must, at least, produce as much as we do today. This may not sound too bad to a Swiss person, but most of the rest of the world would probably like to continue developing. Therefore, the main issue of an aging population is the shrinking workforce or the increasing dependency ratio (as seen below) having to keep up or even improve current economic conditions.

What makes this issue worse is that there is evidence that an aging population reduces labor productivity growth. This may be due to physical limitations or older people not working as hard as a young person having to prove themselves. Yet probably most importantly, young people are key drivers of innovation, which in turn can have large impacts on labor force productivity.

This causes distributional issues. One is the alluded conflict between countries, as fertility is falling globally. Richer countries can both mobilize more financial resources to substitute capital for labor and pay higher wages, attracting immigrants. Today’s birthrate of 1.7 in Columbia might not sound so bad, but if in 20 years many of these young people emigrate to the US or Europe, it suddenly looks far worse.

It also causes distributional issues within countries. Baby boomers, living among a very populous cohort, experienced large productivity increases, many of which were kept by that cohort themselves. They had a much higher upward wealth mobility and were able to accumulate large savings. But as they age, spending on the older population increases significantly, which now has to be carried by a much smaller working population. This increases spending on pensions, which then leaves less funding for other needs such as infrastructure, education or research. It will also increase demand for workers and investment in healthcare and social services, binding further capital and labor in sectors only serving a specific share of the population.

In simple terms, there is a very possible scenario where degrowth isn’t a conscious choice but simply a consequence of an aging population, just as it is in Japan. This could lead to a drop in consumption (consumption is spending on all things consumed, including for example healthcare and food) because there just isn’t enough being produced. This could theoretically be somewhat cushioned (or mitigated) by a significant increase in labor force participation, such as an increase of the retirement age. But when that drop arrives, it’s important that it is well timed. A gradual decline could be managed, but if current consumption is being sustained by a lower national savings rate, notably by a high government fiscal deficit, then that drop could temporarily be avoided only for it to arrive hard in the future. This delay would notably be accompanied by a large increase in the return of capital and a decrease in wages. Sound familiar?

The Future is Now

Europe is already a grim example of inter-generational resource conflict. Mario Draghi’s report on European competitiveness has shown that Europe is in dire need of public investment to escape its stagnation. Yet the opposite seems to be happening. John-Burn Murdoch from the FT demonstrates: spending on old people through pensions and social security is rising in European countries, crowding out public investment that secures the future.

Social security is a landmark achievement built on an inter-generational contract where current workers support those that have already worked their share. But that contract is being fulfilled by ignoring the future as can be shown by deteriorating infrastructure in Germany, high debt levels in France or chronic housing shortages in many developed countries.

Public investments sometimes only see returns decades later: renewable energy, high speed rail or R&D are all investments made today that will pay off for the next generation (they can also significantly reduce the costs of climate change). It’s notoriously difficult for humans to correctly determine the present values of future payoffs, so we often underestimate them. Further, if the young are a shrinking electoral block, you don’t stay in power by building a better future; you plunder it instead and let someone else deal with it later.

It’s a moral necessity to protect the elderly from poverty, but spending has taken on ridiculous dimensions. Indeed, in France pensioners essentially enjoy the same income as workers, a staggering imbalance considering that cohort also experienced the greatest period of asset appreciation in history.

(*With Updated Data, France is again below 100)

Source : https://www.ft.com/content/d419bd2d-a6ba-44a5-a93a-1276f3e5d2d7

The absurdity is best captured by programs like the UK’s Winter fuel payment. It’s just a universal lump sum payment for all people age 65 and older, lacking any connection to energy prices or financial need at all, except for its name. When Kier Starmer wanted to introduce stricter requirements for benefitting from the program, saving around £1.5 billion that could be better used elsewhere, he faced immense backlash. Or the US Republicans who proudly announced a “Working Families Tax Credit” which curiously only applies to seniors. All these programs divert resources away from those that need them most to build the future. Today. child poverty in the UK is at almost 30%, whereas pensioner poverty has almost halved since 1995 to 16%. All of that money goes to those that had a whole lifetime to prepare, while the young generation gets left to fend for itself, struggling to even build a future.

The money to finance the older generation has to come from somewhere, but for it to actually be fair, it can’t come at the expense of our youngest. A fundamental result in macroeconomics is that government revenues usually grow in parallel with GDP, and that it can forever sustain increasing debt burdens, as long as the debt grows less fast. But debt burdens are growing much faster already, so slashing funds for the future is the next best option. Both of which are also unsustainable, as we’ve discussed in the previous section and if we continue down this path, we’re in for a rude awakening. Higher taxes, or a solidarity payment through an inheritance or wealth tax could be a potential long-term solution to fund spending on both old people and the future, but politically that is very difficult.

Any fix for this issue has to be nuanced. Raising the retirement age is almost certainly necessary if we want to avoid this rude awakening. But some just simply aren’t able to continue working past 60 or 65. Further, those who are the wealthiest can retire early, get the highest pensions and they’ll live far longer, being a much higher burden on the pension system while those that barely scrape by get very little in terms of pensions and die much earlier. Instead, any true fix must also fix the inequality of older generations. Solidarity isn’t just an inter- but also an intra-generational issue and it’s very hard to create intergenerational equality when there already is no intragenerational equality.

How did this happen?

If the arguments until now were convincing, then yes, we should care about birthrates. An over-aging society brings a lot of challenges, and the current political response doesn’t necessarily inspire confidence. So, to find a solution to plummeting birthrates, one must first identify the causes. As we’ve seen, fertility is falling globally, so all standard right-wing explanations about feminism or cultural values can’t explain the fall in the not exactly secular and progressive societies of Northern Africa or Turkey. But economic explanations struggle just as much. Studies have shown that there is essentially no correlation between motherhood penalty (lower pay & fewer opportunities mothers face in the workplace) and fertility. Furthermore, many governments have launched large subsidy programs for young families to encourage having children and the results have been marginal at best.

Source: Kearney & Levine 2025

The first big clue comes from the reasoning why fewer births happen. John-Burn Murdoch shows that the fall of birthrates in the US, at the beginning, was very much due to families having fewer children. But since the 2010s, another cause has been dominating. Mainly the reduction in coupling. And what went into overdrive all around the world in the early to mid-2010s? The internet and social media.

Alice Evans sees the rise of singles as the primary cause of falling birthrates today. The number of children in a family may be influenced by the increased wealth or changing societal norms such as the nuclear family ideal. But what can drive a fall in coupling?

https://www.ft.com/content/43e2b4f6-5ab7-4c47-b9fd-d611c36dad74

Smartphones and the internet increase the opportunity costs of social activities. Opportunity costs are the cost of the next best thing you could do at any given time. This means that if you are at a bar, a club or a cinema, you could always be on social media, watch a show on Netflix or even converse with an AI chat bot. These things are also significantly cheaper and include less risks. Paying for a bad movie ticket is much more expensive than changing the Netflix show. Going to a club takes time and money; it may induce stress from social interactions and you’re exhausted after. Endless scrolling for dopamine is much easier; you don’t have to leave your bed, and you can enjoy it at any time with significantly less danger of direct negative experiences.

Further social activities have become more expensive while other cheap interaction opportunities, for example youth centers and other cultural institutions, have been gutted by austerity programs. Even routine interactions, such as grocery shopping, can now be fully done from home through delivery services. Needed human interactions are down to a minimum. So, not only have non-social activities become far more fun and rewarding, but social interactions have also become more expensive, skewing the opportunity costs even more.

A Cultural Divergence

Combined with economic hardship, political abandonment and often increased monetary costs of doing these activities, more and more among the younger generations retreat into anti-social pastimes. This leads to less socializing, a mental health crisis and loneliness. If less people go out, it becomes less fun, leading to even fewer people going out. In parallel, an atomized young generation on the internet is easy pickings for radicalization. Fed by the invisible hand of the algorithm, young men have recently become radicalized through far-right influencers such as Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes, who prey on their loneliness. In contrast, young women are moving increasingly towards the left. We see this bear out in elections. Increasingly, the young generations are voting apart. In the recent German election, one third of young women voted for Die Linke (The Left), while one quarter of young men opted for the far-Right AfD. South Korea has even more extremes, where young men are completely falling off the far-right cliff provoking a reaction through the 4B movement. These are wholly incompatible worldviews and only increase the tensions in gender relations, making coupling even more difficult.

In line with nostalgia politics, the solution for birthrates from the right is a return to «traditional values», voluntary or forced if necessary. But these will fail, because going back simply isn’t possible anymore and if the case of South Korea is any indication, forcing traditional roles will only accelerate the decline in fertility.

The reason is once again found in opportunity costs. Under traditional roles today, women would have to give up their career and hard-earned financial independence to have children. For that bargain to work, her partner must offer extraordinary counter-value. Yet patriarchal expectations often leave men contributing little more than DNA and a paycheck. In the past this arrangement was kept artificially cheap, as women rarely came into jobs with a high salary, and, through other restrictions on their rights, such as having a bank account didn’t have as much to lose. So, the counter-value that a partner had to offer to offset her opportunity costs was much lower. Further, a period of unprecedented economic expansion made it possible to sustain a family on one paycheck. Nowadays it means giving up a full paycheck, a career, opportunities to travel… all things that are difficult to compensate for by a man with just his paycheck. So, he must bring something else.

Fortunately, it’s simple as to what this should be. It’s much easier to reduce a woman’s opportunity costs than to compensate them. Shared parenting, shared household chores, shared sacrifices in their careers where neither has to fully give up their career are the solutions here. If a woman’s opportunity costs are split more evenly in the form of a more gender equal relationship, the penalty for having a child is much reduced, making the choice of having children significantly easier. In a twist of fate, more gender equality could be an important contribution to the solution of the birthrate crisis.

Nobel Laureat Claudia Goldin comes to a similar conclusion. In her 2025 NBER Working paper «The Downside of Fertility» she writes « The more that men can credibly signal they will be dependable “dads” and not disappointing “duds,” the higher will be the birthrate in the face of greater female agency. […] As in the case of the U.S., the prime driver of low fertility in the nations that developed rapidly is the increased agency of women. It is reinforced by the lack of change among men. »

Conclusion

Nothing about the Future is certain, but to hope for a miracle is rarely a winning strategy. The underlying inertia of population dynamics leaves enough time to address and prepare for foreseeable consequences. But until now little has been done to address it. The overarching problem of plundering the future for the present is that people increasingly lose their hope for a better future. Children are both an investment in the future and a reason to build a future, both of which have fallen away.

It’s why the economic component is so important, even if the decline in birthrates, to a large part, is cultural. If young people have a sense of hope for the future and comfort in the present, that could go a long way. Further economic support for young parents is important as well, as cost associated with having children has grown exponentially. But the main factor very much remains the breakdown in gender relations, especially with recent falls in the birthrate. Such an issue is hard to fix, as it demands introspection and change from men, a group that still does the minority of emotional labor.

And finally, the most important point to take away here, even if solving these problems wouldn’t move the birthrate a single point, they would still be worth addressing. Building towards a better future and improving social connectivity among everyone are themselves a worthwhile goal. As cliché as it is to say: each other is all we’ve got.

Jonas Bruno