Why the Baby Bust Is Making the World More Unequal
The world’s fertility crisis is more severe than is commonly understood. Last year, humanity’s total fertility level dropped below what demographers call the replacement rate—that is, the average number of children that a woman must have to keep a population constant over the long run. This has never happened before. There have been periods when the human population declined because of wars or epidemics, such as the Black Death, in the fourteenth century, or the diseases brought by Europeans to the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But now, simply as a function of their choices, humans will see the world population peak around 2055 and then begin to fall.
The story of the coming decades is not simply one of dwindling and aging. There is a great deal of variation in the baby bust. The most surprising trend may be one that has overturned basic assumptions about fertility rates. Where once it was thought that people—and, by extension, countries—with higher levels of income and education would have lower fertility rates than those who were poorer and less educated, the inverse is increasingly true. Many wealthier people and countries boast higher fertility rates than many poor people and countries.
The inversion is revealing of why governments have had a hard time coming to grips with the fertility crash. The best explanation for why people are no longer having babies is that child-rearing at the scale necessary to maintain populations is fundamentally at odds with the structures of modern life and modern societies. Once an economic necessity, children are now an economic luxury. That portends a world in which economic inequality is accentuated by demographic inequality, with widening fissures within countries and among them. The whole world is grappling with a decline in fertility, but in many different ways. And those differences will stoke further divisions, tensions, and even conflict.
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