Fertility and Culture: A Deep Dive
After many years of low fertility and policy efforts to raise births in various countries, many pundits conclude that nothing works. They're wrong.
NOTE: Daniel Hess’s work on the growing demographic implosion — and what to do about it — is excellent. Be sure to follow him on X. — RDM
by Daniel Hess
January 29, 2024
Those of us who have been thinking hard about demography understand that civilizational progress has been intertwined with growing population. We know that technological progress and even social justice depend on prosperity. We see Japan’s 30-year stagnation, Europe’s 15-year stagnation, and China’s current troubles and understand that this is the result of low birthrates, a shrinking workforce, and the declining innovation that comes with an aging society.
It is obvious to us that a thriving world needs people. We know that all of the predictions in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb were wrong. We know that actually Julian Simon, writing The Ultimate Resource, had the correct view, and won their bet by showing that humanity doesn’t compete for fixed resources but creates more resources through innovation when there are more smart people working together.
We think about the fall of Rome, and we know that low birthrates over centuries was central to why Rome declined and fell, and to us it is common sense that if people don’t have enough children to replace themselves then society will eventually start declining.
After many years of low fertility and policy efforts to raise births in various countries, many pundits conclude that nothing works. Hungary has been trying for years to get people to have more children. It’s most recent TFR figure is 1.52 births per woman. Japan’s fertility for 2022 was 1.26 births per woman after decades of focus. Germany and Sweden have worked for years to develop pro-family policies. Both countries have fertility rates around 1.50, and if the goal is reaching above-replacement fertility, they are not succeeding.
Here are some headlines that reflect this sentiment. The tone is always resignation! This is not a solvable problem, we read. Buckle and get ready for decline! Civilization-wise, it’s time to wind down our affairs, because we aren’t coming back.
The folks who wrote these articles make sense. If you follow the trendlines, things look very bad. The brilliant pro-natalist couple Malcolm and Simone Collins (@SimoneHCollins), who I got to know well and whose company I enjoyed at the Austin pronatalist conference, spends much of their time thinking about how to re-assemble a remnant of civilization after the inevitable demographic collapse, which they see as inevitable.
Professor @robinhanson, a writer, economist, and futurist thinker beyond compare, whom I had the pleasure of meeting and whose writing I have admired for many years, has a similar view. Humanity has a few decades of technological progress left, he says, before tech progress ceases and a long winter of stagnancy lasting centuries takes over.
My friend @StephenJShaw, whom I first got to know during my September visit to Japan and whose BirthGap documentary is a must-watch for every policymaker and ordinary concerned citizen, is likewise grim. One of the top data analysts around, Shaw understands how far along we are on this road of demographic decline because of the awful math of negative compounding. He sees how small the youngest generations are in most developed countries, compared to those that are leaving the workforce. And Shaw does not sugar-coat things. He often tells how no country has ever escaped low fertility. His logic is hard to argue against.
With some of the deepest thinkers in the nascent pro-natalism movement having such a dark outlook, am I wrong to have hope?
Low fertility is not an accident: Fifty-five years after The Population Bomb was published, anti-natalism is our dominant culture. If you are reading this, you have probably known for a long time that low birthrates are a crisis. You assume that because it is obvious to you, others will see too.
But we economists, demographers and science writers live in a kind of bubble. So, I looked at the comments sections of some articles on the subject. In the New York Times, a fairly neutral article from 2022 reported a 1% uptick in US births during the pandemic. In response, I counted 3 pro-natal comments and 43 anti-natal comments among the ‘Reader Picks’, along with a handful where I couldn’t find a slant. In a Yahoo News article from 2023 conveying alarm at China’s birth rate collapse, I counted 3 pro-natal comments against 45 anti-natal comments. The comments on a related Newsweek article were similarly skewed against having children, though by a little less. Here is a random sampling of highly ranked comments at the NYT:
Aside from the fact that one commenter can’t tell the difference between millions and billions, and another believes that 3C of warming would wipe out all life on Earth, the conclusion is unmistakable.
Overwhelmingly most people still believe overpopulation is our crisis, never mind the data.
Japan has been below replacement longer than most people have been alive. Germany has been below replacement for most of the last 100 years. Almost every one of us already lives a country with a fertility rate far below replacement, and more countries join the club every year. Don’t they see?
No, they do not. We live in a world with a billion Paul Ehrlichs! Any one of these comments (and the majority of comments in the New York Times and Yahoo News on birthrate articles) could have fit neatly into Ehrlich’s book.
Paul Ehrlich’s ideology doesn’t explain Asia, does it? East Asian fertility rates are even lower than in Western countries. Actually, it does. East Asian countries all adopted population control propaganda at around the same time as Ehrlich’s book and still haven’t recovered their previous pro-child cultures.
When Ehrlich wrote his book in 1968, global fertility was around 5 births per woman. Now fertility rates globally are falling below replacement, if they haven’t already. But for most of the environmental movement, which has been the loudest voice in the fertility debate, it is as though nothing has changed, and the year is still 1968.
Feeling gloomy upon getting out of my bubble and realizing how anti-natal the culture really is, I spoke to a family member who has always embraced environmentalism but ignored the negative messages and is raising two young children. She (age 42) reminded me that in her world, messages of environmental alarm and impending catastrophe have been constant since youth, and she empathizes with all those comments.
So how anti-natal is modern culture? So anti-natal that when @StephenJShaw tried to show his BirthGap documentary at St John’s College, Cambridge last May, protesters shut down the event. Apparently even a movie talking about the low birthrate crisis too offensive to even be allowed!
Religion and fertility, a fresh look
Back in 2011, long before global fertility collapse was getting the attention it is getting today, Eric Kaufmann (@epkaufm) published Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-first Century. Because birthrates were low among everyone but religious people, he said, the religious would be the last ones standing.
His thesis is looking pretty solid. In 2024, there are virtually no countries in the world, and no groups within countries, that have above-replacement fertility which are not religious. And if you look at fertility by church attendance, things look pretty stark, in America and around the world.
But then, remember that New York Times comment section! Almost all anti-natal!
Religious groups have higher fertility almost by default, just by presenting an alternative to a modern culture that (via zealous environmentalism) is against having children.
Naturally the groups that maintain highest fertility (the aforementioned Amish, Ultra-orthodox Jews etc.) are the ones that maintain greatest separation from broader society. But it’s not that those groups are weirdly pro-child. It is that the broader culture is weirdly anti-child.
No wonder such diverse nations as Korea and Chile, Finland and Thailand, all have very low fertility. We live in a strange time when the default global culture, or a big chunk of it, is just against having children.
Obviously, the comment sections or the New York Times and Yahoo News don’t reflect all of culture. But they reflect a big slice of it. Simone and Malcolm Collins calls this the urban monoculture. The views of Paul Ehrlich, that humanity is a scourge on an otherwise pristine planet, have become the views of vast numbers of young people in most countries.
We have to pause and reflect how bizarre this is. In almost every culture in the world until recently, motherhood was extolled, and children were seen as a blessing. The outlier in a historical sense aren’t churches that celebrate babies, but our modern culture that doesn’t.
Perhaps for some the answer is to flee to the countryside, join a pro-natal religious sect if they will have you, do your best to avoid contact with the outside world and hope your descendants manage to do the same, forever.
Or how about we call out the society’s crazy anti-natalism and overturn that destructive ideology before it brings down tech progress, social progress and everything that we love?
The Occam’s Razor Answer
There are many causes of low fertility and @MoreBirths has been intensively focused on identifying all of those causes and how they can be addressed. Housing and urbanization, long schooling, OB-Gyn care, gender relations, excessive focus on work and too-high parenting expectations are a few of the many factors @MoreBirths discusses.
But what if we are ignoring the simplest answer of all? If there is an ideology that says there are too many people and they are wrecking the planet; and if a huge share of young people -- even a majority in many places -- believe having children is bad, then low birthrates will be the outcome.
Let’s look at some several examples, present and historical, of higher-birthrate cultures and how simple pro-natalism is explains things.
Israel
The Rosetta-stone for understanding fertility, Israel is wealthy, educated (with women having more education than men on average), dense and urban, technologically advanced and incredibly expensive. That description also fits South Korea nicely.
And yet Israel’s fertility (close to 3 births per woman) is 4x that of South Korea (0.72 in 2023)! What explains the difference? The thing that has the most explanatory power is simply pro-natal belief, intensely held.
On the last day of 2023, I was fortunate to be a guest in the home of a well-known rabbi in Maryland. The rabbi had just passed on and had been buried in Israel, home to a majority of his ~150(!) descendants. As I talked with two of his grandchildren, my perspective was amply confirmed; this family, more than maybe any other I had met, believed in the value of having children. His granddaughter, a young mother herself, was building support network for other mothers in the first few months after childbirth.
Mongolia
Mongolia (known historically as Outer Mongolia) has a TFR of almost 3 births per woman. Meanwhile the adjacent part of China that includes Inner Mongolia has a fertility rate similar to South Korea.
What explains this vast difference? Culture of course. But more exactly, pro-natal belief. While the areas under Chinese rule were suffused with China’s population control propaganda and laws, Mongolia was in the Soviet Sphere. And over the seven decades of Soviet alignment, celebration of motherhood and having children was constant.
To this day having children is considered the patriotic duty of Mongolian women. Mothers who have six children are awarded the "Order of Glorious Motherhood" and those who have four get the "Order of Glorious Motherhood, second class". It is no mystery why Mongolian women have a lot of children. That’s the culture Mongolia has developed, over many years.
America to 1900
From the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to 1900, America exploded from 3 million to 76 million people, in what may be the fastest sustained population growth in world history. Around 1800, American women averaged 7 children each.
Why is that? Puritan and Protestant beliefs encouraged large families. Children were seen as a blessing from God.
Pro-natal beliefs? Yep, and America experienced several waves of Great Awakenings in this part of its history.
Victorian England
Family sizes in Victorian England were quite large. Queen Victoria had nine children. Charles Darwin had ten. Neither was especially religious, but they were products of their culture, and we know that Victorian culture was intentionally very pro-natal. How? A big clue is the Besant and Bradlaugh Trial of 1877, where two people were prosecuted for spreading knowledge of birth control. Trying to avoid having children was very bad in Victorian England. Not something that would happen today, but it shows what culture was like then.
We can contrast the pro-natal attitudes of Victorian England with the comparatively opposite attitudes of 1800s France (due to French secularization after the French Revolution). Confirming this vast difference in natal beliefs in the 1800s, England saw its population quadruple while France barely grew at all.
Summary
Birthrates are collapsing around the world. Is modern life fundamentally incompatible with having children?
Of course not. The problem is our global culture, permeated by sixty years of alarmist warnings on climate change and the environment, makes us unsure if kids are even good to have any more.
There is a saying that fish don’t know they are in water. We’ve hardly noticed that we have slipped into a world that is anti-natal. But anyone who could visit from an earlier era would be shocked. “Wait, you guys think babies are bad? Who the heck thinks that? No wonder you guys have a problem!”
Of course, there are some parts of the world that struggle to provide for children. It is reasonable to sometimes judge that conditions aren’t right to have children. But that isn’t the issue here. It isn’t those who are poor, struggling to survive, who are wondering if people should exist at all. This is, as they say, a rich world problem.
This idea that society should simply stop having children is not just another viewpoint. It is an ideology that is misanthropic, sociopathic and destructive, and it threatens to pull down economies and civilizations.
If we want to save the world from collapsing fertility the first step is that societies must orient back, clearly and confidently, to the normal view that humanity is precious, and children are treasures. The idea of overpopulation seemed rational in the 1960s, but it is incredibly damaging now, with birthrates at their lowest in history almost everywhere.
— This essay originally appeared on X. Be sure to follow him there as well as on Substack at .