It turns out technology isn’t the future. Fertility is.
Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.
Such are the opening lines of PD James’ novel, The Children of Men, set in a fictional future where an epidemic of infertility has struck the world. For reasons unknown, no more babies are being born.
That might sound like pure dystopia, but fiction can be eerily prophetic, and glimmers of James’ novel can be seen in a real trend: collapsing fertility rates across the planet.
South Korea is often in the news for having the lowest fertility rate in the world, at .72 children per woman in 2023, but a recent article published in the Lancet medical journal predicts that by the mid-2040s, the total fertility rate or TRF almost everywhere in the world—except sub-Saharan Africa—will drop below the magic number of 2.1 children per couple.
2.1 is the minimum needed to maintain a population. And by 2080, even sub-Saharan Africa is projected to drop below 2.1.
According to the Lancet, fertility rates are expected to remain low even under successful implementation of pro-natal policies—meaning politicians won’t be able to reverse the trend by offering incentives to have bigger families.
I’ve previously written about falling birthrates, but most of the emphasis here at Pilgrims (and at
where I also write) has focused on the impact of technology on human flourishing. And certainly technology gets far more hype in popular culture. Yet it might not be the most formative force this century. Not compared to the imploding population numbers.The result, according to the Lancet, will be fewer youth, a shrinking economy, a smaller tax base, poorer health and social services, and the use of migrant workers to help sustain economic growth in low-fertility countries—even though that can have “devastating effects on the economies these workers leave behind.”
This forecast coincides with Gaya Harrington’s predictions about the potential “collapse” of society in the coming years, involving a likely halt in the growth of welfare, food, and industrial production by approximately 2030, and then an overall decline in these areas. Harrington’s modeling also takes into account a shrinking or plateauing population, meaning that societal decline still happens even though less resources are being used, likely because overall resource consumption per person remains unreasonably high. The Lancet article similarly observes that “increasing consumption per capita…could offset the benefits of smaller populations”.
In short, we consume far too much.
The impact of a dwindling population won’t just be economic and demographic. It’s also going to change the values and lifestyle of Western “modernity”. Louise Perry, writing in this month’s First Things, points out that:
Put bluntly: The people on whom modernity depends are failing to reproduce themselves, which means that modernity itself is failing to reproduce itself. Most voters have no idea that this is happening. Nor do most politicians. But it is happening nonetheless, and we are experiencing its early stages in the form of diverse political crises across the modern world.
Perry observes that cultures which become wealthy create the preconditions for their own demise. Once a certain threshold of GDP is crossed—$5000 USD in GDP per capita—fertility rates move toward sub-replacement levels. “And those whom affluence loves most—the urbanized, the secular, and the educated—are those it sterilizes most aggressively.”
Paradoxically, success breeds sterility.
Yet affluence may mask another (more subjective) factor leading to low fertility rates: human agency—and especially women’s agency. Nicholas Eberstadt, writing in this month’s Foreign Affairs, notes that
the economist Lant Pritchett discovered the most powerful national fertility predictor ever detected. That decisive factor turned out to be simple: what women want…Pritchett determined that there is an almost one-to-one correspondence around the world between national fertility levels and the number of babies women say they want to have. This finding underscored the central role of volition—of human agency—in fertility patterns.
And because people tend to imitate what other people do, the choice not to have children can lead others to make the same choice:
Many women (and men) may be less keen to have children because so many others are having fewer children. The increasing rarity of large families could make it harder for humans to choose to return to having them—owing to what scholars call loss of “social learning”—and prolong low levels of fertility.
Historically, Louise Perry points out that the total fertility rate in Britain peaked at 5.56 in 1820—which is much higher than the magic number of 2.1—the minimum number needed to replace a population. The TFR in the USA was 7.0 in 1835, one of the highest in the world at the time.
And what is the effect of having so many young people, according to Perry?
Explorers, scientists, and business founders have always been overwhelmingly drawn from the youthful male population, and empirical analysis of the career trajectories of eminent scholars and inventors reveals that creative output of all kinds begins to surge in one’s twenties; by the late thirties or early forties, it has peaked. Medical science may have allowed us to extend the human lifespan, but we have not managed to extend this crucial period of life, characterized by both useful dynamism and reckless aggression. The more young people you have, the more of this energy you have.
While Perry highlights the historical role of young men, her conclusion can be generalized across gender. Quite simply, youth means energy. Every parent knows this, of course; the relentless curiosity, the drive, the openness to new experiences, the powerful yet ever so fickle emotions, and a mind whose processing speed is as fast as it will ever be around 18 or 19 and then begins its inexorable decline.
A world that is relatively low in youth and relatively high in seniors is not a bad world, but it’s a less enterprising world, and probably a more tired world. It’s also less technologically innovative. More from Perry:
We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” is the phrase coined by Peter Thiel to describe the nature of twenty-first century innovation, or the lack of it. Digital technology gives us the impression of explosive growth, but it is a false impression. As Thiel wrote…:
When Boeing introduced its flagship 707 jet airliner in 1958, the power to cruise at 977 kilometers per hour did more than enable routine transcontinental commercial flights. It fed the optimistic self-understanding of a society proud to have entered the Jet Age. More than sixty years later, we are not moving any faster. Boeing’s latest plane, the 737 MAX, has a cruising speed of just 839 kilometers per hour—to say nothing of its more catastrophic limitations.
As a civilization, we are running on the fumes of the accomplishments of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
The idea that digital technology has given us a “false” impression of growth suggests something else as well. Airplanes are tangible things. So is the automobile, the hammer, the wheel, fire, and a lot of other inventions that have transformed our world. They are things that have their own existence—which is very unlike the digital world.
The digital world is a represented world. It’s a world of data and pixels. In the real world, we take raw materials like wood and stone and we manipulate them to create actual things, like homes. In the digital world, we manipulate symbols. We move words and images around. Whether its hours spent on social media or other online diversions, we can feel like we’re actually “doing” something, yet often we come away feeling empty and drained. As if we’ve really done nothing. Strangely, the declining fertility of our population correlates with a quality of impotency in our most popular technologies.
Will there be exceptions to the trend of declining fertility in the human population?
Allan Carlson suggests that some of the most robust growth in population will happen in certain religious groups. These would include Mormons, Haredi Jews, certain Muslim groups, and various Christian groups, including Old-Order Anabaptists (Amish and Mennonites) “Quiverfull” Evangelicals, and the Laestadian Lutherans of Finland and Sweden, all of whom take literally the command to “be fruitful and multiply”.
Louise Perry makes a similar observation:
At present, social conservatism and religious belief predict fertility very strongly in low-fertility societies. The greater the frequency of religious service attendance, the greater the number of children a couple is likely to have, and some hyper-religious and conservative groups have extraordinarily high fertility rates. The Amish, for instance, have a TFR at least as high as that of early nineteenth century Britons, and also enjoy low child mortality rates because they are surrounded by a high-tech culture that artificially suppresses infectious disease. If they maintain this level of growth, the Amish could soon come to dominate America, given the dwindling fertility of the rest of the population.
I had to smile when I read those last lines. When I was working on my novel Exogenesis, I imagined a future in which Amish and other religious groups, like Catholics and Orthodox, retreated into rural areas and became the future “Benedites”, a traditionalist society that lives by farming, encourages big families, and practices religion. At the same time, a low-fertility techno-progressive society inhabits a nearby megacity, and forcibly sterilizes the youth of the Benedites out of fears they could come to dominate the country due to sheer population growth.
This background to my novel was entirely fanciful. But there might be a grain of truth in it. As our future world begins to shift and change dramatically, people may make dramatic choices out of self-preservation. The traditionalists may seek traditionalists, the progressives may seek progressives. Global fertility rates may fall, and societal decline may be hastened as a result of reduced industrial output and economic slowdown, yet there will be niches of human resilience. Only time will tell if our society will remain coherent despite the diverging subcultures within its fabric. Either way youth will remain the drivers of the future.
If youth means energy, in the sense of the vigor and dynamism of young people, it also means energy for the rest of us. When my own kids were young, they were like natural antidepressants. I might have had a difficult day at work, or a sleepless night, yet their presence was almost always uplifting. Most of my kids are now encroaching on adulthood, yet the energy is still there—if a bit more complicated. Their growth has also brought on an increasing sense of role-reversal: When children are small, we are their foundation. When we are old, they become ours.
That’s the typical human cycle, found throughout history. Yet many of the elderly today and in the coming decades won’t have that foundation—and for anyone hoping that technology will come to the rescue, “care robots” won’t be the solution. They won’t be because they aren’t human and can’t really love us, and even if we don’t mind they aren’t human, the evidence suggests that care robots end up creating more work for caregivers.
By 2034, the number of older adults will outnumber children under 18 for the first time in U.S. history, and globally by 2050 the number of adults aged 65 and up is projected to be more than twice the number of children under age 5 and about the same as the number of children under age 12. Our low-fertility world will be top-heavy with elderly.
There will be fewer youth, and we’ll need them more than ever.
If we’re wise, we’ll do everything we can to cultivate their inherent energies. We can help them limit the time they spend using unhealthy technologies, such as certain forms of social media and device activity, which are at least partly responsible for the decline in youth mental health over the past decade or so.
We might also be wise to discourage social values that distort their inherent energies. Some of these distorting values promote an unhealthy self-focus and sense of entitlement, while others can leave kids safety-anxious. Recently a mother in Georgia was arrested for letting her 10-year-old son walk less than a mile to town by himself. The mother was actually handcuffed in front of her kids and taken to jail. Every parent and society may have somewhat different comfort levels when it comes to children’s independence outside the home. Still, I can think of a lot of things we’re doing to our children that might be deserving of handcuffs, and this definitely isn’t one of them.
When it comes to values, it’s worth remembering Nicholas Eberstadt’s insight that we tend to do what the people around us are doing. If giving priority to children and family can be socially unlearned, it can also be socially learned.
Youth means energy. Youth also means hope. Some of us put our ultimate hopes in ultimate realities, like God, but at an earthly level, it’s the presence of children that energizes our lives, focuses our values and commitments, and helps us look more kindly on the future—and gives us consolation in old age.
Technology and modernity can offer us many things, but they can’t give us this kind of hope.
Links and Further Reading
- ’s article in First Things is an excellent read.
Another great read is The Age of Depopulation by Nicholas Eberstadt.
Machine Antidote 101: How to Apprentice a Human by myself and my wife
takes a closer look at family and extended family.My novel Exogenesis, which explores technology, fertility and the future, is available from the publisher, Ignatius Press, or at The Unconformed Bookshop and various other booksellers. Reviews here.
Camino Pilgrimage Black Friday Special
Come and join Ruth and me on a Pilgrimage out of the Machine on the Camino in Spain in June 2025! You can read all about it here or download the brochure below. There will be an upcoming Black Friday Special: From midnight Eastern time on Friday, November 29, 2024, until 11:59 PM Eastern time on Sunday, December 1, 2024, any new registrants will receive a $250 discount. We would love for you to join us in visiting historic sites, sharing meals, building relationships, all while hiking through a naturally and spiritually inspiring landscape.
