Best of: Is the World Ready for the Population Bust?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

This week, we’re pleased to bring you some of the best conversations from our archives. Last year, we spoke with the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt about the global crash in fertility rates and the looming prospect of depopulation. That subject has become even more prevalent in the past year. The United States, for example, recorded its lowest ever birthrate in 2024. I hope you enjoy our conversation with Nicholas Eberstadt. We’ll be back next week with a new episode.

KANISHK THAROOR

Nick, it’s a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

Well, thank you for inviting me.

KANISHK THAROOR

You wrote in our recent issue what is nothing short of a monumental piece titled, “The Age of Depopulation: Surviving a World Gone Gray.” In this piece, you make the case that, due to the collapse of fertility rates around the world, the world’s population is going to begin shrinking. Now, some estimates place that happening as soon as 2053, some in the 2070s or the 2080s, but whenever it might be, it seems to be inevitable. And when this does happen, it’ll be the first time that the world’s population has shrunk since the Black Death of the fourteenth century ravaged Eurasia.

There’s a ton of ground to cover here, but let’s begin by sketching some of the trend lines. In your piece, you take us on a tour of the globe to show how fertility rates are plunging pretty much everywhere. What are some of the surprising things we learn when we spin the globe in this way?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

Well, Kanishk, demographers don’t really have a toolkit for forecasting fertility accurately. But over the past decade, there’s been an acceleration that was entirely unanticipated of the already existing, long-term decline in global fertility, more or less everywhere. Some of the things which I think are kind of jaw dropping are to learn, for example, that in Mexico City, the current birth trends imply less than one baby per woman per lifetime, and that Mexico last year had a lower birth rate than the United States of America for the first time since those numbers were ever collected. That Thailand is down to about one birth per woman per lifetime. I first went to, then called Calcutta, now Kolkata, almost 50 years ago, and it was teeming with children. Now, officials say the fertility level is down again to one birth per woman per lifetime. And even off the coast of Africa, which is the last really high fertility bastion in the world today, a place like Mauritius is down to 1.4 births per woman per lifetime. You need a little bit over two for long-term population stability, not just two, but a little over two, since not everybody survives to childbearing years.

It’s not impossible that the world has already fallen, on a planetary scale, below the level of childbearing necessary for long-term population stability. We can’t tell if that's actually happened yet, but if this has not happened already, it may happen much sooner than people expected.

We know that at least two-thirds of the world’s population was living in sub-replacement venues before the pandemic. We may be up to three-quarters of the world’s population in such places now. It’s happened with staggering speed.

KANISHK THAROOR

It is really striking. And just to underline one of the points you raised, in India, which is the world’s most populous country by most estimates, India has now become a sub-replacement country. And in Calcutta, a city that you described and a city I’ve spent a lot of time in—I grew up there a little bit—the numbers are staggering in that now, according to West Bengal officials, women have, on average, one birth in their lifetime. The only place where fertility seems to be fairly high is sub-Saharan Africa, but even there we're seeing dips. What’s going on, as far as we can tell, in sub-Saharan Africa?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

Absolutely right. In the sub-Sahara, as best we can tell from the more limited statistical evidence that we have, the overall birth level is probably 100 percent above the replacement level. So on current patterns, on current trends, that would mean the doubling of each generation. That’s pretty fast population growth. What we’ve seen, however, is that even in the sub-Sahara, there’s been a pronounced and perhaps now accelerating decline. Overall fertility levels in the sub-Sahara have dropped by more than a third since the late 1970s, early 1980s. In Southern Africa, fertility surveys are all pointing towards lower fertility. So the only question really, I think, at the moment, is: Will these continue? Will these accelerate? How long is it going to take until sub-Saharan Africa is no longer the global exception?

KANISHK THAROOR

We’re only a few decades, well, let’s say six, seven decades removed from a time when people around the world were worried about the explosion of population. In the middle of the twentieth century, there was this concern that human populations were growing far beyond our capacity to sustain them, and it is striking when you take a step back and look at the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, we began at around 1.6 billion people on the planet. We ended at six billion people, which is an enormous jump. And I wonder, just to think particularly about the twentieth century, that if, sometime from now, future historians or, indeed, alien historians picking over the bones of our vanished species might find that the twentieth century was incredibly anomalous in human history.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

Well, it clearly was anomalous because there had never been such a jump in human numbers in so brief a timespan. There’d never been any sort of proportional increase, a tempo like that before. What was missed by many during the population explosion panic was that this surge in human numbers was generated entirely by improvements in health: by pervasive plummets in mortality, by explosive increases in life expectancy, and really by about a doubling of planetary life expectancy at birth between 1900 and the year 2000. Look at what happened, when you had this health explosion: human capabilities increased so much. Per capita income over the course of the twentieth century soared. We didn’t eliminate all extreme poverty, but we made huge inroads in it. Literacy improved virtually everywhere. Skills improved virtually everywhere, and availability of food outpaced this jump in human mouths rather handily. So when we look back at the population explosion, I think one of the most fascinating aspects of it will be how badly so-called experts mis-assessed its significance and its likely consequence.

KANISHK THAROOR

That gets us into one of the braver contentions of your piece. You do come down a little bit definitively in this piece to identify why we are seeing such widespread collapses in fertility, and you attribute that to the simple fact of what people want, of how many children they want to have. And around the world it seems that men and women just want to have fewer kids. You write, “Volition is why even in an increasingly healthy and prosperous world of over eight billion people, the extinction of every family line could be only one generation away.”

I think this topic of low fertility rates and shrinking numbers of children is much discussed these days, and when you hear familiar answers for why this is happening, a lot of material explanations are offered. It could be that it’s now very expensive to have children, so some couples are reluctant to have more than one child or any children at all. It could be that we’re seeing a decline in teenage pregnancies that might be also influencing the lower number of children around. Why are explanations of that sort insufficient and why should we think purely in terms of desire?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

Well, I think maybe I should start by differential diagnosis, at least addressing the question of whether there may be an increase in infertility, in infecundity, which might be the constraint that we’re seeing here, a sort of a precursor to P.D. James’ The Children of Men or whatever. There’s no reason to think that this couldn't eventually happen through estrogen in the water or microplastics or all sorts of other potential contaminants. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the big declines in fertility we're seeing yet are due to environmental factors. They do seem for the most part to be driven by changes in human behavior and most importantly by changes in desired family size.

Why do I say that? There were a lot of things that correlate with declining fertility, including income, education, contraception, you can go through the entire modernization litany. Problem is, there are always exceptions there, and one of the exceptions that I mentioned in the Foreign Affairs piece, for example, is what we’re seeing today in Myanmar, in Burma, one of the most impoverished countries in the world. Myanmar has below-replacement fertility as well, in a non-catastrophic setting. So you don't have to be an affluent society to have parents choosing very small families. Now the question of what considerations go into this choice is an inescapably human one and thus a tremendously nuanced, personal one.

And the reasons for choosing two children or less than two children, I would guess, would be rather different in rural Burma from affluent Seoul in South Korea. What I think we can be pretty confident about is that these new patterns reflect choices that parents have made.

KANISHK THAROOR

If I may just sort of press the point a little bit on particular explanations, what about, say, declining levels of religiosity? Does that inform fertility rates? And then, I suppose, one of the bigger explanations that you hear more often is levels of female education. Isn’t it broadly true that the higher the level of education a woman attains, the fewer children she’s likely to have?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

I tend to think that religiosity and fertility track rather closely. I don’t find that a surprise since, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition and perhaps in all of the Abrahamic faiths, there is this injunction to be fruitful and multiply, and there’s this view of the hereafter where you have a connection to the hereafter through your children and your descendants. And as for education, there has generally been a correspondence between greater educational attainment and smaller family size, but that doesn't hold everywhere anymore.

We've got fascinating exceptions also to the overall patterns of modernity, such as the increase in fertility for Israeli Jewry well above replacement in an affluent, highly educated society in the Middle East. And I think that that further reinforces the importance of volition.

KANISHK THAROOR

It does seem broadly true that having fewer kids is the price we have to pay for a world in which we have fewer teenage pregnancies, women have greater access to public life, to employment, potentially to individual fulfillment and accomplishment. And if that’s the case, is that such a bad thing? Is it not good for women and for men to have greater control over their lives and pursue the forms of accomplishment that are meaningful to them, if indeed that includes not having children?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

I was one of the contrarians way back when who was arguing that governments and NGOs and others didn’t know better than the parents in question how many children they should be having in low-income countries. That was during the population explosion era. I feel the same way now with sub-replacement fertility. I don’t think that there are outsiders or experts who know better than the parents in question how many children parents should be having. The alternative seems rather terrifying.

KANISHK THAROOR

To talk about those outsiders, so to speak: sub-replacement fertility has been a problem in certain societies for a long time now. Think of Japan, for instance, where the phenomenon of the emptying village in the countryside is almost a cultural trope there. But what we’ve seen is that governments have not been able to institute policies that in any reliable fashion can encourage the birthrate to go up in a meaningful way. You would think that by offering incentives, subsidies, other kinds of welfare provisions and benefits, government policy could have an effect in encouraging people to have children, but by and large it doesn’t seem to be the case. Why is that?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

I think this gets back to the whole question of volition. It gets back to the whole question of human agency. I kind of find it reassuring to find out that we’re not rabbits and we’re not robots, and that we can’t be cheerled into having different number of children from what, in general, we’d want, and we can’t be bribed into having a different level of childbearing than we’d want. The record of pronatal policies around the world, as I read it, is that it’s very expensive to get really marginal or tiny fractional changes in long-term childbearing.

So from my standpoint, at least from my perspective in looking at this, it seems to me there is a lot that human beings and their governments and civil institutions of all various sorts can do to adjust to shrinking and aging populations, just the way we adjusted to a growing world, when we had a population explosion. And that the emphasis should be on making the most for human flourishing, for the human beings that exist, rather than trying to count chickens that are never going to hatch.

KANISHK THAROOR

Some people have a rather apocalyptic view of depopulation. They imagine that societies will crumble, anarchy will reign. That doesn’t seem to be your view. You write, “The problems that [depopulation] raises are not necessarily tantamount to a catastrophe. Depopulation is not a grave sentence; rather, it is a difficult new context, one in which countries can still find ways to thrive.”

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

Just look at it in the mirror of the population explosion. Look how wrong so many of the experts were about what its consequences would be. It’s quite clear that a shrinking, aging world is something that we're intuitively, almost completely unprepared to encounter, because all of our experience, in ways that we don't even think about, has been framed by a growing world population. We don’t know how to cope with this yet, but human beings are very good at coping. We’re very good at coping. We’re very good at adapting. And given the foundations that we put into place in the twentieth century for routinizing improvements in health, routinizing improvements in education, routinizing improvements in scientific advance and technological progress and innovation, It’s not as if we are in a tightly, relentlessly worsening straitjacket. We’ve got an awful lot of opportunity to help us deal with these inevitable social changes that we’ll be confronting.

KANISHK THAROOR

Well, let’s talk a little bit about those social changes, the major one being that a depopulating world where there are fewer children is invariably going to be an aging world. You’ll have more and more older people and fewer and fewer young people. What would it be like to live in such a society, and specifically in the US context, what new problems would we face that we have not yet encountered?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

Well, certainly aging and shrinking societies will require very different approaches to government policy, but they’re also going to require different approaches for corporations, for communities, for families, for individual behavior. One of the most obvious government policy challenges: financing of social programs. We came up in the twentieth century with this contrivance of pay-as-you-go social programs. You have current earners financing the retirement or the medical care of current retirees. When you live in a world where there are five or six current earners for every retiree, that’s great. You’re getting social benefits on the cheap. As soon as that population pyramid tilts, you’re in a doom loop. You just can’t do it.

And we know enough about how population trends are going to unfold over the next couple of decades because all of the workers for 2040 have already been born, for example. We know enough that we should already be preparing for a set of social guarantees that transcend this old-fashioned pay-as-you-go model. It’s not going to be all sugar and light because some particular group, some particular birth cohort is going to be the one that kind of loses out on the musical chairs. They’ll have to both start financing their own retirement and they’ll have ended up paying for somebody else's.

The way that I think humane and intelligent government policy ought to be working with something like that is to help compensate that particular group, so you come as close as possible to an overall situation where there are winners without losers.

KANISHK THAROOR

At the risk of inviting your optimism, what will be the mark of a country that’s dealing with depopulation well, and then conversely, what will a country that’s struggling to deal with depopulation look like?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

Well, this inescapable challenge of dealing with depopulation is going to be a problem for the entire world economy. Who’s going to deal with it well? The governments and the societies that have the foresight and the social trust to start thinking about how to recalibrate to be nimble and timely in this. There may well be a learning curve and the early pioneers in this may be the ones who have to take the licks on this, but certainly having a foresighted government and having enough social trust so that there can be complex cooperation in the face of a pressure that’s going to require immense complex cooperation.

KANISHK THAROOR

What sorts of policies, at the national or indeed intergovernmental level, could be put in place now to better prepare the world for a future of dwindling national populations?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

Everybody will be better off with more money. When you’ve got more money, you’ve got more options. So I would say policies that encourage countries to get rich as fast as they can sustainably can’t hurt. I would think of those as being efforts to improve health, efforts to improve skills, efforts to increase research horizons and knowledge production. People are going to have to pay much more attention, I think, to personal savings and to personal conduct, especially when we get towards the upside-down population pyramid, and that includes looking after one’s own health.

I expect that we’re going to see a world in which longer-living peoples also are longer-working peoples. And I can tell you as a very happily employed senior citizen that there are a lot of great benefits to working past the technical retirement level.

KANISHK THAROOR

So you’re a vision of the future?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

Well, it’s nothing to be afraid of. Let’s put it that way.

KANISHK THAROOR

We haven’t talked yet about migration, which I think is often raised as a potential solution for those countries where low fertility rates mean they’re going to see a great shortfall in the workers they need. Migration from countries that are growing at a faster clip is often suggested as a possible solution. What do you see as the role of migration in the coming decades?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

Well, migration is going to be a great benefit for those states and countries that can, let’s say, have a competitive migration policy, where they attract talent from abroad and where they can absorb and assimilate that talent into loyal and productive newcomers. I’d say that the history of the United States, of Canada, of Australia, of New Zealand have been pretty good at being able to assimilate newcomers, obviously not perfect, but been pretty good on the whole. But not every country seems to be able or willing to do that in the rich world.

KANISHK THAROOR

In addition to migration, another potential solution that’s often raised is the burgeoning areas of automation and artificial intelligence. Do you see any reason to think that those sorts of technologies might help buffer against the worst impacts of depopulation?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

Well, of course robotics, of course artificial intelligence, of course all sorts of technological innovations offer a sort of productivity multiplier for aging, shrinking societies. Without getting too fancy about it, it’s another form of mechanization. And for a couple of centuries, human beings have been relying more and more on mechanization to increase human productivity. The great concern, as you know, that is voiced today is whether we might see extraordinary displacement of manpower, even in shrinking societies, with radical innovations in AI and machine learning and so forth. I’m certainly not going to say that that’s impossible.

I would observe that it’s much less likely if we skill up in societies all around the world, because in the race between education and technology, it’s the more educated that seem less likely to be displaced in these great transformations.

KANISHK THAROOR

You are actually fairly sanguine about the prospects of the United States in the coming decades. It is true that the United States actually has, by the standards of other wealthy countries and indeed of its principal geopolitical rivals, a fairly high fertility rate—below replacement level, but still fairly high. And you’ve described the United States in the past as an outlier, but why does the United States remain that kind of outlier and how do you see the United States faring in the era of depopulation?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

Long ago, I described the United States as an exemplar of demographic exceptionalism. That was back in the early 2000s. I think this is still the case, but less absolutely spectacularly so than we would’ve seen a decade and a half ago. The United States has a relatively high level of fertility for an affluent society, although now, unlike a decade and a half ago, it’s below replacement. The United States also has been a magnet for immigration from all around the world, including absolutely, extraordinary, uncanny capacity to attract entrepreneurial and inventor talent from around the world, even though they’re a small portion of the overall flow of migrants.

This being the case, the United States is, as an arithmetic proposition, on a trajectory to continue to increase in total headcount, although rather modestly, over the next couple of decades; its working age population to increase rather modestly over the next couple of decades; its population composition to go gray, but more modestly than in some of the other places we might be looking at. And to the extent that those sorts of trends matter, it’s arguably favorable for the United States of America. If this sounds too “Yankee Doodle Dandy” for people, I should also point to the elephant in the room, which is the litany of problems we have in the United States today, ranging from health to slowdown in educational improvement, to the divisiveness in our society, to a uncanny appetite for financing current social programs on public debt.

There are plenty of headwinds to what I’m describing, but in the unforgiving world of power politics, you don’t compare yourself to the ideal; you compare yourself to whatever else is in the field. And although I would like to see those problems in my own country addressed and alleviated, if we’re doing the clinical comparison, we’d have to say that there are some advantages for the United States in this situation looking forward.

KANISHK THAROOR

And I suppose in terms of those advantages, it seems that at least when we’re looking at demographic trends, countries like Russia, China, even Iran and North Korea, are in a much worse state than the United States.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

If we simply look at the human resources, China and Russia are both depopulating societies. China is aging very, very, very rapidly. Russia has a long-standing cough that it can't shake. It’s got this health crisis that began under the Soviets that is still dogging the country. Iran is a below-replacement society, which is going to begin shrinking before people appreciate this. The mullahs, by the way, are very aware of the demographic constraints on the national power there. What goes on in North Korea stays in North Korea, except the troops on the Kursk Oblast, I guess, so we don’t really know what the demographic situation is in North Korea, except that we have seen the supreme leader and living god, Kim Jong Un, declaim in alarmed terms about the low birthrate in this country.

So you’ve got aging and shrinking societies in the largest of these countries. So I argue in this piece that the demographic tides are running against the revisionist dictators of Eurasia. That doesn’t mean that any of these countries is harmless. North Korea has a GDP of approximately zero, and it causes all sorts of trouble in the world. So if you have the second-largest economy in the world, China, run by revisionists, you can expect you’re going to be in perhaps for a rather bumpy ride. But that doesn’t mean that the future is going to be open for the dictatorships from the Eurasian heartland.

KANISHK THAROOR

I’ve seen it said that the way that many on the left perceive climate change as a sort of framing existential crisis, that for people on the right depopulation is beginning to serve a similar kind of function. And we see this in political rhetoric, in the rhetoric of individuals like Elon Musk. What’s it been like for you to see your work and the stuff of your work become such a political flashpoint?

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

P.J. O’Rourke, the late, great humorist, had a chapter in a book of his, a book called All the Trouble in the World. It was a chapter about overpopulation, and I think the subtitle was, “Just enough of us, way too much of you.” And there’s often a temptation when people talk about population to frame it in sort of tribalistic terms like that. During the population explosion, I think there was more than a touch of eugenic talk tinge to some of this, even in seemingly enlightened climes. The prospect of extinction has a way of maybe sometimes clarifying one’s thinking. Sometimes it has a way of inflaming people’s thinking.

I would say that what concerns me the most in the United States about low fertility is not the birth numbers per se, but the array of attitudes that are often associated with these: demoralized, worried about the future, the anxiety, the lack of confidence, the lack of patriotism. And it’s those attitudes, rather than the birth numbers, that may have a formative effect on society. And I argue in another essay that I wrote that the United States may be less prepared for low fertility today than it was in the past, given these changing attitudes that we see in the United States. But I don’t think that has to do as much with the numbers as with other things that we associate with the numbers and maybe shouldn’t.

KANISHK THAROOR

Well, on that note, Nick, thanks so much for speaking with us, and thank you again for writing your wonderful essay.

NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

It was a pleasure. Thank you.