We humans, we have a lot to concern us. The geopolitical situation is unstable; China and Taiwan are eyeing each other warily across a few miles of open water, Japan is dialing its military back in, and North Korea is still developing longer and longer-ranged rockets to carry its nuclear warheads. Iran's mouths are still writing checks their butts can't cash, and Cuba is on the brink of collapse.
Here at home, we're concerned about gas and oil prices, we're worried about grocery prices, and we're outraged at the billions in fraud that's being dragged into the light of day.
There's a bigger problem, though, than all of that; an existential problem that vexes the whole world. Namely, we, as a species, aren't having enough kids. Independent journalist Derek Thompson has some cogent thoughts on that.
Why has the number of births declined everywhere, all at once?
This was the subject of last week’s Plain English episode and a new blockbuster report from the Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch. In fact it feels like just about everybody has been taking a crack at this question recently.
Some blame it on technology. One week ago, my feed was flooded with a viral video of Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, speaking about the sterilizing effects of modern technology. Among his friends, “no one’s having kids,” said Leahy, who was 30 at the time. “Do you know how hard you need to abuse a mammal to make them not have children?” If you asked Leahy what the explanation was, “my answer is technology,” he said. “My answer is social media. My answer is AI.”
Some blame this on a sort of modern-day ennui:
Others blame a kind of 21st century weltschmerz—a world sadness about the state of the world and our uncertain future in it. A long essay in the New York Times by Anna Louie Sussman, entitled “Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All,” an excerpt from her forthcoming book Inconceivable, argued that we have “overlooked” the pervasive sense of existential uncertainty among young adults. Between climate change, rising housing costs, political instability, AI, inflation chaos, doomscrolling, and declining social trust, today’s generation is too anxious about the future to make the irreversible commitment of having a child.
I don't think either of those is quite it, but first, let's dig into a couple of interesting measurements of population growth and decline, excepted from the full one-hour Plain English discussion.
Read More: Russia's Hidden Crisis: Demographics, Debt, and Defeat
The Dying Village: Why Are We Having a Massive Decline in Birth Rates?
First, birth rate: This is, simply put, the average number of kids each fertile woman is producing. And that number has been dropping; here's a chart from Mr. Thompson's piece, and his interview with University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, and some of the results are surprising:
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) May 21, 2026
Birthrates are declining worldwide. In every major region. Even Africa, which is rather startling.
More importantly, though, is the replacement level; that is, the birthrate people have to achieve to avoid a population decline, generally considered to be about 2.1 live births per fertile woman. Why 2.1? Some women die before reproducing. Some are incapable of reproducing. And, human live births have a slight advantage towards boys, roughly 105 to 100.
Here's where we're seeing trouble with countries below the replacement rate.
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) May 21, 2026
Note in particular Asia: China's birthrate is nothing short of catastrophic, with a birth rate of 1; South Korea is worse, at 0.8. This is national and cultural suicide. And it's not just Asia; most of the developed world, including North and South America, is poised on this cliff.
So why are we still seeing global population increase? I'll let Dr. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde explain that:
Thompson: In your Miami speech, you said “peak child” might already be behind us. I want you to explain what that means and why, if peak child is already behind us, the global population isn’t already falling.
Fernández-Villaverde: Let me start with the second and come back to the first. In demography there is something called momentum.
Momentum means the population will keep growing for 15 to 30 years after you fall below the replacement rate. Let me give a simple example. Imagine you have a spouse and only one kid. You are below replacement rate, but you are two. You have two parents, your spouse has two parents. You are not replacing yourselves, but your parents have not died yet. The fact that you have one kid still increases the population. The problem is when your parents die, we have not replaced them.
During the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of women were born on the planet. They had their kids in the 2010s, and that’s why the population is still growing. The grandparents of these girls have not died yet. What will happen is that when these grandparents, the generation born in the 1950s and 1960s, start dying, that’s when the population goes down.
The crash, in other words, has already begun.
This isn't a challenge that can be easily addressed. Incentives, as always, matter, and while only a hundred years ago, in a world in which a far higher percentage of the population was working in agriculture, the incentive was to have children; believe you me, kids are used as free labor on farms, by their parents and their grandparents. I know I was. But in our increasingly urbanized population, the incentive runs the other way. Children are an expense, a lot of work, and so the incentive is to have fewer of them, and make up for it by lavishing attention on them rather than treating them as "free-range" kids, who learn early on to do things for themselves, how to deal with other people, and so forth. In biological terms, from a slightly r-selected species, which has many offspring and depends on numbers to maintain an adult population without a lot of parental effort, to a slightly k-selected species, which has fewer offspring but lavishes a great deal of parental care to keep up the number surviving into adulthood. That's a blatant oversimplification, but you get the idea.
What can we do about it? I don't see a way out of this. Our population isn't going to magically de-urbanize. Barring some major crisis, that's a trend that's only going to continue.
The future, as the saying goes, belongs to those who show up for it. Globally, except for a few places in the Third World, people appear to be opting out. And if that's not the most alarming notion you encounter today, I don't know what might be.
You can watch the entire one-hour Plain English discussion here:
