We've had many occasions to discuss the demographic collapse of much of the developed world. Most of the Western nations are facing this problem; from Russia through the United Kingdom, from the Mediterranean to the Barents Sea, ethnic Europeans just aren't having children. The same applies to Japan, China, and most of the developed nations of Asia.
The United States has escaped the worst of the decline, so far, in no small part because of immigration, legal and illegal. But that's likely to change.
In Russia, the situation is well past crisis levels. President Vladimir Putin has been taking steps to encourage Russians to, candidly, breed more, but the steps he's taking aren't likely to be very effective.
In 1999, a year before he came to power, the number of babies born in Russia plunged to its lowest recorded level. In 2005, Putin said the demographic woes needed to be resolved by maintaining "social and economic stability.”
In 2019, he said the problem still “haunted” the country.
Putin has launched initiatives to encourage people to have more children -- from free school meals for large families to awarding Soviet-style “hero-mother” medals to women with 10 or more children.
“Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven, eight, and even more children,” Putin said in 2023. “Let’s preserve and revive these wonderful traditions. Having many children and a large family must become the norm.”
Yes, all this is too little, too late. These plans won't work. Here's why.
A big part of Russia's problem is economic and political instability. Nibbling at the edges of the issue with items like free school lunches and "hero-mother" medals won't have any noticeable effect in a country that is suffering under sanctions from the United States and which is embroiled in a war that is slowly grinding up many of the young men. Russia has been through this before; as recently as the Great Patriotic War (World War 2), the Soviet Union lost as many as 26 million people, including eight million military members. That's a hard thing to come back from, and Vladimir Putin is putting the country through a somewhat scaled-down version of this again. Russia can't afford to lose so many of its young men in this thing, any more than Ukraine can.
But this isn't just a Russian problem. Most of the developed world faces this demographic problem. And the keyword there is "developed."
Only a generation or two ago, most people, even in the most developed parts of the world, worked in agriculture, or in fields that supported agriculture. Today, the population of most of the developed nations of the world is increasingly urbanized. I've spent some time in Japan's rural areas, and it's surprising how many homes and businesses stand empty in the countryside. This matters because in farm families, children are an asset. In urban families, they are an expense.
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The United States has it somewhat better. Our population is younger than much of the developed world. For example, the United States' median population age as of 2023 was 38.8, compared to the United Kingdom's 40.6, Russia's 41.5, Canada's 42.2, Ukraine's 45.3, and Japan's 49.5. Part of that is due to immigration, legal and illegal. Part of it is due to the United States having an economic stability that much of the world lacks.
President Putin's efforts aside, this may not be a problem with an easy solution. A stable, prosperous economy and a hopeful future can make a difference, but the underlying problem remains urbanization. There's no easy way around that. As I noted, "hero-mother" medals are not going to work. Tax incentives will have a limited effect. This isn't just an economic or political problem; it's a technological and societal one, in which our increasingly automated and technological lifestyles don't incentivize large families.
Here in the United States, that may be part of the answer. Our population will peak and start to decline, but it may level off. Americans aren't going to go extinct, in part because legal immigrants tend to assimilate, to become Americans after a generation or two; one can become an American in a way that no one can become Russian or Japanese. Also, the very high-tech lifestyle we live and are likely to see expand will open new economic opportunities, in programming, in engineering, in fields that will become more essential, and which will produce a level of prosperity that will change the parent/child calculus.
Russia likely won't be so lucky. Barring some dramatic change in political leadership, their problem is only likely to grow worse.
Since the 2015 peak, the number of births has fallen annually, and deaths are now outpacing births. There were only 1.22 million live births last year — marginally above the 1999 low. Demographer Alexei Raksha reported the number of babies born in Russia in February 2025 was the lowest monthly figure in over two centuries.
Japan may escape through technology and level off at some lower level of population. Europe is probably already lost, mostly because ethnic Europeans aren't having children, but also because they have encouraged waves of immigration from Muslim-majority nations to make up for the lack; in another generation or two, Europe will be lost to Islam. China? That, again, depends on their political situation.
The future, as the saying goes, belongs to those who show up for it. Russia is opting out. So is much of Europe. Only in the United States does the developed world have much hope. But then, we Americans have been in that situation before.
