The awful truth about our falling birth rate

Governments can do little to make a real difference and immigration does not offer a long term solution

Here’s the bad news: the world is running out of people. Five decades ago, Paul Ehlrich’s book The Population Bomb triggered global hysteria over “mass starvation” due to overpopulation, and offered such controversial solutions as adding chemicals to drinking water to sterilise the population. Now, as Professor Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde of Pennsylvania University warns, if you’re 55 or younger, you might witness something humans haven’t seen for 60,000 years: a sustained decrease in the world population.
We are far from immune: the latest data show Britain’s total fertility rate (TFR) fell to 1.44 last year, down from 1.94 in 2010. Even assuming it doesn’t fall further, and absent migration, we’ll lose around a third of our population within a century. It’s led some economists to warn that a declining worker to pensioner ratio in Britain could result in stagnating living standards – that the welfare system and NHS could buckle, taxes will soar, asset prices will fall.
In response, the Right are calling for greater cultural value to be placed on motherhood and changes to the tax system. The Left want more “free” childcare and higher paternity pay, to nudge men to take on a bigger share of the parenting. Both sides assume that, because surveys indicate fertility intentions are higher than the birth rate, easing the cost of living will help us course correct. This is doubtful.
One need only look overseas to see just how impotent governments are at reversing this long-term trend. South Korea, a nation which at the end of its war in 1953 had a TFR so high the government launched policies to bring it down, has spent more than £200 billion in areas such as childcare subsidies since 2006.
But this has failed to overcome the socioeconomic factors, including evolving familial norms and extremely high levels of social competition, which are contributing to its plunging birth rate. The Japanese government has offered lump sum payments to women who have babies and covered the cost of fertility treatments, yet its TFR is just 1.2. Viktor Orban is spending 5 per cent of GDP on pro-natalist policies – yet Hungarian women are on average still only having around 1.5 children.
We cannot put the female emancipation genie back in the bottle, nor should we want to. Across much of the world, women are more educated, liberated, able to access contraception than at any time in the past. The opportunity cost of having children has increased and, given the choice, many won’t take time out of the workplace to raise babies. Many more will only be willing to do it once or twice. Then there’s the attraction of lifestyles – travel, new experiences – not open to most women in the past. And there are other issues almost unique to Britain: a society which no longer thinks responsibly about care and old age, but assumes the state will step in. Where children are no longer part of the family but the centre of it, to be coddled and cushioned such that parenting is becoming a full-time operation.
Now here’s the good news. Left to itself, the economy can adapt. Wages will rise amid labour shortages, as they did in the aftermath of the Black Death. This, in turn, will accelerate technological advances, such as the substitution of labour with AI and machines. Consumer priorities and choices will change, with the emphasis shifting towards higher savings, delayed retirement, new living patterns. Governments can facilitate this – by letting go. Deregulation can boost our flatlining productivity. Allowing market forces in healthcare could finally give us a first-world service, better equipped to treat an aging population.
But we should not fall for the idea that immigration will alleviate our demographic woes. It’s a short-term fix – migrants grow old themselves and tend to quickly adjust to the native birth rate. And the numbers required to increase our fertility rate by 0.7 births per woman would be vast. By 2080, 80 per cent of the people living in South Korea would need to be immigrants or their children in order to keep the population constant. Surely no nation can absorb such numbers without social unrest.
As Prof Fernandez-Villaverde reminds us, this is a global issue. Every Australian who moves to Britain eases our problem but aggravates Australia’s (where the TFR is 1.5). There are 23 countries where the population is predicted to halve by 2100, whose needs are greater even than our own. Instead, we should be brave enough to accept we may not escape this crisis, and let human ingenuity chart a way out. Then again, perhaps we could learn something from Prof Ehrlich. Before the Second World War, there were panicked predictions that our population was plunging; after, we experienced 20 years of baby boom. We’ve been wrong before. We could be wrong again.