Can the global economy handle a world with fewer kids?

0:00Spin through NPR's archives and you'll find a whole bunch of stories that are variations on a theme. Birth rates in the European Union are so low that the population of the continent is declining. Japan's birth rate has plummeted. Unless things change, the population soon will start shrinking. It's a picturesque island in the middle of Casco Bay, a 90-minute boat ride from the coast. And its population is shrinking. Whether it's a continent or a country or an island off the coast of Maine, lots of places have faced the same question. What happens when the population goes down? There are different reasons for the declines.

0:38In China, it was decades of a government-enforced one-child policy. In 2015, a year before that policy was canceled, a village Communist Party secretary named Chen Jeru told NPR about how he used to have to be on the lookout for pregnant women.

0:59Having a second child wasn't allowed, so we had to work on them. swayed them to have an abortion. At the time, our work as a village cadre revolved around women's big bellies. Russia's population started to shrink in the 2010s, a delayed effect of fewer people choosing to have kids in the turmoil that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gyané Sufarova put it this way to NPR back then. The number of potential mothers is not big, so we can't expect the growth of the number of births in the future. For all of these places, an aging, shrinking population means big economic challenges. And the phenomenon has spread.

1:43Consider this. People around the world are having fewer children. That could shake the foundations of the global economy.

1:55From NPR, I'm Juana Summers.

2:06It's Consider This from NPR. Here is a dramatic statistic. Worldwide, the number of children born to the average woman has dropped by more than half since the 1970s, according to the latest United Nations data. NPR's Brian Mann has been exploring the consequences of this change, and he found that it's challenging basic ideas about capitalism. Thinking about something this big, how the world's population is changing, how that's transforming the global economy, is overwhelming. So I want to start really small with just one person, Ashley Ivancho. My degree is in finance, and I work in financial services.

2:45Ivancho is 32, lives in a suburb of Buffalo, New York, and she's built a great career thinking in practical ways about the economy. A few years ago, she and her husband Nick decided it was time to have a baby. Their three-year-old daughter, Sophia, is a joy. But Devancho says they also reached another decision. I don't need another one. I don't want another one. I love having only one child. It is, I think, a very elegant choice because I still feel like I have balance in my life. That choice was deeply personal, but it's also one tiny part of a massive shift. Families across the U.S. and in a lot of other countries are having too few children to maintain a stable population, a trend that's been deepening for decades.

3:26Melissa Carney is an economist, at the University of Notre Dame. This demographic issue is poised to potentially remake so much of our society in a way that people just don't seem to be thinking about. To get a sense for how this can play out in a community and a local economy, I traveled to another upstate New York town, Malone, near the U.S.-Canada border. The main street is lined with handsome brick and stone buildings, but many of the storefronts are empty. The decline that you can see started a long time ago. Jeremy Evans is in charge of economic development for Franklin County, which has lost roughly 10 percent of its population.

4:06So few babies are born here, the hospital closed its maternity ward. Sitting in his office, Evans tells me he's worried. Our population will continue to decline. More worrisome to us is the decline in population of younger people. There are actually plenty of jobs in Malone, Evans says. And he thinks more companies would come here. But there aren't enough workers. His biggest economic goal is trying to stabilize and rebuild the population. If you're an entrepreneur and you want to grow and you can't find employees, that can be really, really frustrating. Our number one mission is 18 to 39-year-olds.

4:43A growing number of economists say this could be the future for much of the U.S. In the 1970s, the average American was 28 years old. Now the average is 39. Every expert I spoke to said America's working age population will continue to gray and eventually shrink, a pattern that will accelerate if the U.S. maintains sharp new limits on immigration. Lant Pritchett is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. It's hard to maintain the dynamism of the economy. I mean, you know, you can't get people to do all kinds of work from electricians to plumbers to everything else. Pritchett says the impact of this population shift would be big, even if it were only hitting the U.S., the world's largest economy.

5:24But families in other G7 countries, the world's other big economies, they're shrinking even faster. I'd say if you live in Europe or parts of Asia, this is everything. Economists say many of the basic assumptions of modern global capitalism evolved when countries were seeing rapid population growth. Businesses could count on a constant increase in young workers, new consumers, and bigger markets. That helped governments shore up pension and public health programs. But now deaths already outnumber births in at least three of the world's biggest economies, China, Italy, and Japan. Pritchett says it's not clear how economies will work as populations age and shrink in more countries.

6:05Hard to tell what's going to happen when things that have never happened before happen. We just don't have any example of countries doing this successfully. The place where this population shift is already happening on an almost unbelievable scale is China, the world's second largest economy. Researchers say over the next two decades, China's working age population will plunge by more than 200 million people. We met Mia Li, who's 20, outside a bustling shopping mall in Beijing. She doesn't have children, and she worries motherhood would be expensive and risky. Having children requires financial support, but if the economy goes down, how can you possibly afford to raise them?

6:44In this crowded city, it's hard to see the scale of depopulation and rapid aging already underway. But Li works in China's sagging real estate industry, and she says she's already feeling the change. Housing prices will fall and the number of homebuyers will decrease as well. Economists say most people around the world still aren't aware of the scale of this population shift, which is overshadowed in most people's lives by short-term concerns, everything from unemployment and inflation to trade wars and immigration. And some experts, including Claudia Golden at Harvard University, say they're not worried about the impact of an aging, shrinking population on the world's economy.

7:22I am not worried about that. Scarcity is everywhere. Trade-offs are everywhere. There is no optimal birth rate. Golden thinks much of the concern about population is a backlash against high rates of immigration and the empowerment of women. But a growing number of economists think the impacts of these demographic changes will grow. Melissa Carney at Notre Dame worries the world faces a future where the cost of having kids, everything from lost career opportunities to high daycare prices, will encourage more couples to opt out of parenting altogether. The more we become a society that's moving away from one oriented towards children, then the cost of having kids go up and the benefits of remaining childless and pursuing a childless life, the expectations of the workforce, all of that pushes towards amplifying the trend we're already on.

8:13After talking to economists all over the world about this population shift, I wanted to check in again with Ashley Ivancho, the financial planner and young mom in Buffalo, New York. She doesn't think families will get bigger again. Couples and women just think differently now about their lives and careers, Ivancho says. And that means fewer kids. Today, there are options. We have education. We have the ability to make our own choices in life. Motherhood is not the only option for us anymore. And that's okay. Ivancho says the economy and whole societies may have to adapt to what for many families is a new version of normal.

8:52NPR's Brian Mann. This story is part of a broader NPR reporting project looking at the causes and implications of the global trend towards smaller families. You can find a link to the series in the episode notes. This episode was produced by Paige Waterhouse and Connor Donovan with audio engineering by Jimmy Keeley. It was edited by Andrea DeLeon and Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan.

9:23It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers.