We’ve reached peak baby and the consequences will be enormous
Falling birth rates are good news for the developing world, but less so for countries in the West
Humanity has passed one of its greatest milestones, yet almost nobody noticed. We have reached peak child: the total number of babies in the world is no longer increasing. There will never be more children than there are today: the world’s population will continue to grow, but only because almost everybody is living longer.
We worry about political turmoil, terrorism and technology, and for good reason. But demographics remains destiny, and it is therefore impossible to exaggerate the significance of what is happening.
In 1966, the average woman in the world had five children; today, it is 2.5, an average propped up by still high fertility rates in Africa. The global mean is thus only a little higher than Britain’s 1.81 children per woman. Humanity’s great demographic transition, which began in the UK with the Industrial Revolution, is entering its final phase. We have moved from a poor, agrarian society in which we have lots of children, most of whom die young, to a rich, advanced world where we have far fewer offspring but almost all live to be old. This is one of the biggest, most welcome transformations in human history and an enormous liberation for billions of women.
There were 870 million children under the age of 15 in the world in 1950; today, there are 1.96 billion, according to Max Roser, the Oxford academic who runs Our World in Data. This number won’t now increase – or if it does, only trivially by another
7 per cent or so over the next few decades before falling back, according to the United Nations.
For countries such as Saudi Arabia, whose Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman is visiting Britain, this is a boon. Its greatest challenge is that 70 per cent of the country’s 30 million residents are under the age of 30; its population is too young and had been growing too fast. With the exception of China, where the state-imposed one- child policy was a disaster, the reduction in fertility is almost universally seen as a triumph across the developing world. India is down to 2.4 children per women: the reality is now very different to the outdated perception many have of that country. An economic boom, driven by globalised capitalism, a transformation in hygiene and health standards, and dramatic improvements in educational opportunities for women means the battle against overpopulation has been won. It is a result that is especially worth celebrating on International Women’s Day.
Yet there is an important caveat, and it is to be found in the West. The decline here has gone too far, or at least has happened in the wrong way for many women. In Italy, where the average woman now has just 1.34 children, the population is set to collapse, industry’s need for immigrants is triggering a bitter populist backlash that could take down the EU, and there will be too few workers to pay for pensioners.
In Britain, almost one in five women will not have any children, a much higher rate than for the previous generation. There would be no issue if this were out of choice – the right for a woman to decide not to have children is the hallmark of a free, liberal society – but, tragically, much of this decrease appears to have been involuntary. Far more women, as well as men, who would like to have children are not managing to. There are many reasons: among them, the housing crisis is forcing couples to delay childbearing, sometimes until it is too late; and inadequate state schooling has failed to provide many men with the skills to navigate a post-industrial society.
This is a rich country crisis. In America, the fertility rate has fallen to 1.77 births per woman, down sharply from 2.12 just 10 years ago. Yes, there are fewer teenage and unplanned pregnancies, thanks to improvements in contraception. But fertility rates have slumped far lower than people would like: women, on average, aspire to have 2.7 children, a figure that is now at its highest level in decades. Men want almost as many. Yet the gap between the desired and actual numbers of children is at a 40-year high, as a New York Times article recently noted, implying heartbreak and unhappiness on a massive scale.
More ominously still, Americans are having less sex and spending more time playing video games, on Facebook, Netflix or, of course, on their phones. In Declines in Sexual Frequency Among American Adults, 1989-2014, the academics Jean Twenge, Ryne Sherman and Brooke Wells paint a devastating picture of shifting mores. American adults had sex nine fewer times per year in the early 2010s compared to the late 1990s. This was partly caused by a large rise in singles, who have sex less frequently than couples, but also because sexual frequency declined among those who are married or living together.
Research by W Bradford Wilcox and Samuel Sturgeon, published by Politico, shows that in the early 2000s, 73 per cent of 18-30 year olds had sex at least twice a month; by 2014-16, this was down to 66 per cent. Dating is also collapsing, and not just among the young.
Other societies are following suit. Britain’s National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, while a little outdated, points in the same direction. The explosion in the consumption of pornography has presumably had an impact, as has the increase in depression. The severe social problems engulfing swathes of America, the opioid crisis, the alienation of millions, must surely be other reasons; those pathologies are spreading to other wealthy countries and are directly responsible for reduced fertility. Younger digital natives are finding it hard to engage in real-world, face-toface interpersonal relationships.
There are many questions but few answers. Will the problem fix itself? If not, how can any of this be tackled? Why are people having less sex in a supposedly liberal, permissive civilisation? Do societies with fewer children become older and more conservative, or older and more Left-wing?
What is certain is that the debate is slowly moving on: the problem is no longer that the world is having too many children, but that parts of it are having fewer than they would like. Fixing the first was hard enough; the stark reality is that nobody has a clue where to start with the second.