“Demography is destiny.”
—Attributed to Auguste Comte
“Milton Friedman joked that if you put the government in charge of the Sahara Desert, there would be a shortage of sand. It turns out that if you put communists in charge of China, there will be a shortage of people.”
—Dominic Pino, Morning Jolt, August 7, 2023
Demographic change is constant, but recent decades have seen an unprecedented worldwide decline in fertility rates and prospects for future growth. The potential effects are massive, but they also vary according to local and national contexts.
Nicholas Eberstadt examines “the prospect of global depopulation and its far-reaching implications” in a recent research paper.
Richard Gunderman tells the deplorable tale of Chinese population policy. Having created a demographic mess through its draconian controls, the state is shifting gears—sort of. “Predictably, it is not decentralizing decision making and relying more on the discretion of individual couples and communities. Instead, it is doubling down on centralized expertise.”
Reuters finds a small reversal in South Korea, where fertility rates are rising—but only from a base of 0.72 children per woman, the world’s lowest. In a marker of contemporary moral norms, the story notes, as though it’s a peculiar characteristic of South Korean culture, that “marriage is often seen as a prerequisite to having children.”
Focusing on the United States, Mark Warshawsky reports on Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections and warns, “Our society, businesses, cultural institutions, and governments need to adapt to these trends soon.”
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde also sees urgency, arguing that the “implications of declining fertility in the US are the most crucial economic issue of our time.”
In another piece, Kelly Hanlon interviews Fernández-Villaverde, permitting him to expand on the reasons behind and potential solutions to demographic problems. “When we go to these women, and we try to figure out what is happening, . . . the main issue is that they are not building families. They are not getting married, setting up an independent life as a new household, or even wanting to have children at all. . . . A big part of the problem right now is the absence of good husbands.”
In a different vein, Joseph Holmes contends that demographic change is even affecting the entertainment market. “In the future, families and religious families are going to be overwhelmingly just two ways of saying the same thing. This means that movies appealing to families will increasingly just be a synonym for appealing to religious families.”