Children of Men

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.

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• “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.”

That’s why we look at it the way a detective would: Everything The Signal does starts with good questions, and every answer leads us to more of them.

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Tremors in Tokyo

The new century seemed to bring a new stability to Japan, with Junichiro Koizumi leading the country for five years and then Shinzo Abe for eight. So what happened with Kishida?

News reports have cited corruption scandals: LDP officials held fundraisers but kept some of the donations in secret slush funds—and Kishida largely brushed off responsibility, helping push his approval rating down to 25 percent.

But they also cite polls that show acute anger about the economy. Since the pandemic, the cost of living has climbed dramatically in Japan, where inflation carries a special weight: For decades, the country has struggled with a stagnant economy—including stagnant wages, minimal GDP growth, and prices either holding steady or, in some cases, declining.

You can see the connection to a global pattern that extends far beyond Japan, around the post-pandemic world: Globally, economic turbulence has driven the cost of food, energy, and a lot of consumer goods higher—and a political wave against incumbents wider.

—Michael Bluhm

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