Quantity of Life

Now, birth rates are below the replacement rate in North America, Europe, Russia, and China—and populations are already dropping in 30 countries, including even India and elsewhere in the developing world. Europe’s average birth rate is now about 1.5 children per woman; in South Korea, it’s 0.7. For the first time in human history, people across geographies and cultures have started wanting smaller families.

Meanwhile, governments all over the world have been trying to counter this trend, enacting policies designed to encourage bigger families—by providing longer parental leave, more and cheaper childcare options, and even direct tax incentives. But so far, the desire for fewer children seems nearly impossible to change. Why?

Jennifer Sciubba is a demographer, political scientist, and the author of 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World. For Sciubba, there’s no single factor driving the trend. Some reasons for people’s decisions on whether, when, and how many children to have are economic; some are cultural; some are technological; and they vary tremendously from region to region. Identifying them all, let alone weighing them all against one other, is difficult business. Still, researchers increasingly see one driver standing out among all others globally: a shift in social mores—in values. And as Sciubba says, values are highly resistant to change.

“In a lot of countries with low birth rates, marriage remains a prerequisite for having children, and marriage rates are declining, as well. And here, many demographic researchers trace this decline to the cell phone, actually. Their perspective is that these devices reorient people toward highly individualistic, non-tactile relationships. And so, these researchers say, parasocial relationships—one-sided interactions between a media user and someone they know only through technology—are replacing actual relationships. Demographers will need to do a lot more research on this, but it makes some sense intuitively—and it fits with a lot of the year-by-year data on increasing cell-phone usage and declining fertility and marriage rates.”

“Demographers usually focus on policy making at the country level, but there are small communities around the world that have seen some reversals in very low birth rates—as in Italy or Japan. These places worked hard to create family-friendly cultures, where children are part of social life. I think we’re going to see more research on these places—and that we might find some interesting answers there.”

“We say in demography that you can show two people the same data and get two opposite reactions. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing with the data on lower birth rates. Some groups are celebrating it, even saying it’s not low enough; others are calling it an existential crisis, spelling the end not just of their country but even of humanity. The truth could wind up at either extreme, depending on how we respond to everything driving these changes.”

Generals and Rebels

In October 2021, the military seized power from a civil-military council that had ruled Sudan since 2019, when the longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir was overthrown. A month after the coup, James A. Robinson examined the obstacles to a successful transition from autocracy to democracy in the country.

As Robinson explains, Sudan’s military had long controlled much of its economy, as armed forces in many developing countries do—making the leadership uninterested in economic reform. Which, it turns out, is a problem for everyone. Across dozens of countries that have tried to pull of political transitions in recent decades, Robinson says, a common cause for failure has been an inability of the coalitions that depose autocrats to build political and economic institutions that can include and attract their countries’ vested interests—not least the military.

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