Global Fertility’s All-Time Low Is Humanity’s Most Pressing Problem

It is a profound irony of today’s world that strong majorities think one thing is humanity’s greatest threat while the complete opposite is true. Just over 75% of the world’s young people believe “the future is frightening” because of climate prospects. And majorities of all adults around the world believe our current global population is “too high.”

But the truth is this: Humans are now living much longer and better lives than at any time in modernity. Child mortality has declined steeply across all income countries. People are breathing cleaner air every day, by significant margins. They are also enjoying greater access to cleaner water. Their daily supply of food is more plentiful across all income groups, and it is being grown on less land per capita. What is more, for all the scary news stories we regularly see, global deaths from all natural disasters, including those from extreme temperatures, have plummeted to all-time lows. All because the resources we need to live longer lives are improving for increasing numbers of people. Most of the world is experiencing superabundance; the phenomenon when material resources grow at a faster rate than the human population.

But there is one vital well-being indicator that is getting worse. Much worse!

Human fertility has been declining precipitously around the globe and this fact is humanity’s most pressing long-term problem. We don’t have increasing improvement tomorrow if we don’t have enough babies today. But this is precisely what is happening.

An All-Time Low Birth Rate

The U.S. Census Bureau reported at the end of July our nation’s fertility rate dropped to an all-time low: fewer than 1.6 children being born to woman of fertile age. In fact, the last year we saw enough babies born in America to simply replace the current population was 2007. Ever since then, our national fertility has continued to plummet sharply to its current historic low. A major economics paper charted the decline this way.

You cannot sustain, much less grow, any nation on such a sharp downward trajectory. Marko Jukic, senior analyst at Bismarck Analysis, explains a sustained fertility rate of 1.6 means 50% less people in a nation in just three generations. A 1.2 rate means an 80% drop. He calls these “mass extinction numbers.” Canada, Japan, China, Ukraine, Spain, Italy, Poland, Thailand and others have generally these rates or below.

In all major parts of the world, total fertility rates have declined and will be declining in the following ways:

In fact, nowhere in the world is total fertility rate expected to rise in any appreciable way from today until 2050 … and into 2100.

Since 1950, global fertility rates have been cut in half. Two-thirds of the world live in a country below replacement level. A stark decline is happening even in low-income countries, as shown here. In fact, the world passed “peak child” about ten years ago, the point where we will likely never see as many children born in a year, ever.

Won’t Fewer People Mean an Increasingly Better World?

A leading Stanford economist, Charles Jones, wrote a sophisticated academic paper testing this popular thesis. His paper is entitled “The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population.” He concludes, based on the groundbreaking ideas of his mentor who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics, “In standard models, [declining populations have] profound implications: rather than continued exponential growth, living standards stagnate for a population that vanishes.”

Jones explains the reasoning is simple: “Other things equal, a larger population means more researchers which in turn leads to more new ideas and to higher living standards.” It means the growth itself spurs technological innovation because of intellectual capitalism: more competition drives fierce consultation and innovation between growing populations at an exponential rate. This is demonstrably true, and it benefits us all.

It is why so many important things that enhance human well-being have gotten so much better at the very time global population has grown so robustly. Of course, this is the exact opposite of what doomsayers like Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich warned. Experience demomstrates that human brains are a stronger blessing than our stomachs are a curse. They innovate real solutions to deadly problems.

Professor Jones warns declining populations will kill this vitally important and compassionate progress. Other fact-based global analysts agree. Jones warns, “With negative population growth, however, the flow of new ideas goes to zero.” He adds in sophisticated economist language, “When population growth is negative, both endogenous and semi-endogenous growth models produce what we call the Empty Planet result: knowledge and living standards stagnate for a population that gradually vanishes.”

And vanishing we are.

An Empty Planet

A group of leading global demographers, funded by the Bill Gates Foundation, has been warning this decline is actually starker than any imagined. In 2020, they explained total population will likely “peak just after mid-century and substantially decline by 2100.” Their math demonstrates this in chilling fashion: “In 1950, 25 births occurred for every person turning 80 years old; in 2017 that number was seven.” They add, in “2100 we forecasted one birth for every person turning 80 years old.” That is the most chilling fact-based stat of humanity’s future you will likely ever read. A 2024 follow-up study by these same scholars confirmed their original warning.

In their very important book Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, social researcher Darrell Bricker and journalist John Ibbitson write, “The great defining event of the twenty-first century – one of the great defining events in human history – will occur in three decades, give or take, when the global population starts to decline.” They add, “Once that decline begins, it will never end.”

They state this will result in “a relentless, generation-after-generation culling of the human heard.” This will halt all human progress solving perplexing problems and bringing people out of poverty and into longer, healthier lives.

Leading demographers and sophisticated economists are telling us God’s first command to “be fruitful and multiply” is still very much in effect. In fact, it is our most pressing need right now. Growing populations stimulate a better, healthier world for billions of people. Thinking we know better by encouraging fewer babies is literally creating our own demographic demise. All this data tells us God is far wiser than we appreciate.

Glenn T. Stanton is the director of global family formation studies at Focus on the Family and author of nine books, including The Myth of the Dying Church.