What if those in authority declared an apocalypse—but the wrong one? The trans-Atlantic establishment preaches that the most important problem facing the world today is global warming, but meanwhile the fertility growth rate in the U.S. and Europe has collapsed. From a radical environmentalist perspective it may be a good thing that fewer people are having kids, which is why so little effort has been made at reversing the trend. And yet, most people, even educated Westerners, still report that they do want children, and population growth—plague upon the planet though we humans may be—remains indispensable for economic growth. So it is worth considering how we got here and what kinds of policies might support family formation and population growth.

In the U.S. and Europe, fears of the “population bomb” leading to overcrowding and mass starvation, coupled with concerns about the environment, made anti-natalist attitudes prevail on the left starting in the late 1960s. Just as familiar on the right has been alarm about a too-generous welfare state allegedly encouraging welfare-dependent single mothers to have children out of wedlock. At the same time, many feminists have been not only hostile to husbands and fathers—“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”—but also to children, viewed as inconvenient obstacles to personal self-realization in paid careers outside the home.

But the world has changed, even if the anti-natal conventional wisdom of Western elites has not. The population bomb fizzled. The global fertility rate has dropped to slightly above 2.1 children per woman, needed for stability. In most of the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa, TFR (total fertility rate) has been below the rate needed for national replacement for some time. In 2023 the fertility rate in China is 1.705, only slightly higher than the rate of 1.66 in 2021 in the U.S. In Iran, the fertility rate is just at replacement and in long term decline.

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