Global birth rates are falling…phones are a big reason why

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0:17Good morning from the Financial Times. It's Tuesday, May 26th, and this is a special edition of your FT News Briefing. Declining birth rates and shrinking populations have become huge topics for politicians all around the world. Today, we're digging into what's contributing to it, the economic consequences of it, and whether we need to stop it. The fundamental issue here is that when countries have very low fertility rates, you have big problems coming down the trial. I'm Victoria Craig. Let's get into it.

0:58Five days after he was sworn in as U.S. Vice President in 2025, J.D. Vance spoke at the anti-abortion March for Life rally in the nation's capital. Let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America. But he focused less on the topic of abortion and more on the importance of growing a family. Now it should be easier, easier to raise a family, easier to find a good job, easier to build a home to raise that family in. The benchmark of national success is not our GDP number or our stock market, but whether people feel that they can raise thriving and healthy families in our country.

1:44Vance is hardly the only politician or even business leader ringing alarm bells about birth rate trends in America. Billionaire Elon Musk has labeled it, quote, the biggest risk to civilization. And while declining birth rates are not a new phenomenon, the trend is accelerating in countries all over the world, from high income to low income ones. The FT's chief data reporter John Byrne Murdoch has been crunching the numbers and talking to experts on this issue. He joins me now to suss it all out. Hi, John. Hello, thanks for having me. Well, it's great to have you. Thanks for being here. So just walk me through some of these numbers to get us started.

2:23How significant is this shift? So one thing to emphasize straight out of the gate here is that birth rates have been declining for decades or even centuries over most of the world. But during the latter part of the last century and this century, They were actually stabilizing in most high and middle income countries. But then what is striking is that over the last 15 years or so, that stabilization has become a decline, which applies in the US, it applies in the UK. The one that I think really jumps out to me is that Mexico, significantly poorer than its northern neighbor, the US, Mexico now has a lower birth rate than America.

3:06And that's also true now for Brazil, Tunisia, Sri Lanka. It's even true for Iran, which is an incredibly different country in terms of both economic development and culture to the countries we usually associate with this. Okay, so when we're talking about this idea of birth rate decline, what exactly does that mean? So demographers talk about this number, the replacement rate, which is when a society sees women having an average of 2.1 children. That means that without immigration, your population is going to be relatively stable. and the number of countries that are now below that replacement rate, that is now two-thirds of the world's countries.

3:48And in 66 countries, the average number of children each woman gives birth to is now closer to one than two. Within a small number of cases, the most common number is now zero. I want to dig into why this is happening because I think politicians sometimes like to boil this down simply to modern society, a change in gender roles, more women, you know, going to universities, starting their own careers, becoming more independent. But John, I wonder how much of this change in demographics is really down to women's decisions? On some level, whether or not to have kids is entirely on decision that women make, and as it should be.

4:25But there are so many factors at work here. Several parts of this could come under the economics tag. So housing is a big one, right? And unsurprisingly, if young adults are finding it harder to transition into secure, stable, long-term housing, that can be a barrier to secure, long-term, stable relationships where you might have kids. I did this analysis where we say, right, if young adults still owned homes at the same rate as they did in the 1990s, what impact would that have on their birth rates? And in all likelihood, people would be having more children. However, people who own their home today are having fewer kids than those who own their home 30 years ago.

5:08And the same for renters. So housing is part of this. It's definitely not all of this. I think one of the really interesting parts of your piece is that all of these sort of traditional reasons that we might think of, like you just said, jobs, housing, sort of economic security are one part of it. But technology is a really big driver and particularly phones, the devices that we all have in our pockets every day. Walk me through how that's affecting some of this? Yeah, so this is another one where I should just say, you know, everything we're talking about here, there are theories, there are arguments.

5:41Some evidence seems stronger than others, but none of this is completely watertight. But the reason that a bunch of the researchers I spoke to are starting to point the finger more at technology and devices is that this is a simple question of time use. if the age groups that would typically be the ones settling down and having kids are spending significant amounts of time on their phones, that is time a lot of which might previously have been spent hanging out face to face with their peers. And we have hard evidence on this, that the amount of time young people spend socializing in person has fallen very steeply from the late 2000s in high-income countries through to the present day.

6:27The deep, strong relationships that lead to things like marriage, perhaps children, are the result of a lot of time hanging out with people to get there. You hang out with a lot of people to find the right person, and then you hang out with that person long enough to settle down. And if we are simply hanging out a lot less, by some measures half as much as we used to, then that process is going to take a lot longer if it happens at all. The thing is, we've had technological innovations over the centuries throughout history. What makes this particular shift to more smartphone usage worse than other technological shifts?

7:06Yeah, it's worth mentioning that these theories are not actually new. People have been talking about this and finding evidence of this for a long time. So in the 2000s, there was some really interesting research done looking at the impact of televisions. and several different researchers using different methods found that the number of televisions per person in a country was a stronger predictor of its birth rate than simple measures like economic development or female education. You then had additional studies that showed that even within couples, those that had televisions or more televisions had fewer children or had less sex than others.

7:46Another study found that people who watched TV shows centered around families that had few children had fewer children themselves. So this is not some kind of exotic smartphone-specific theory. It's something that people have been talking about and finding evidence for for a long time. That's fascinating. So what happens, John, if we don't reverse this demographic decline? How could all of this affect economies of the world? The fundamental issue here is that when countries have very low fertility rates, so in the sort of 1.5 and below range that a lot of these countries are now in, you have big problems coming down the track.

8:28Living standards are a function of how much stuff is being produced in your economy, divided by the number of people in that economy. Now, if you start having fewer people born, you will then have fewer people working. the share of your population producing stuff in crude terms is going to get smaller. And that means even if the amount type quality of work that all your workers are doing stays the same, the amount of stuff to be shared out across your population will go down. So Japan is really the canary in the cold mine here. Japanese workers produce just as much today as they did 30 years ago.

9:06But there are significantly fewer Japanese workers as a share of the population than there used to be. And that has put significant downward pressure on Japanese living standards. And that is the result that could be coming to a huge number of countries, not only in the rich world, but now in middle income world as well. All right. So, John, going back to this J.D. Vance example, you know, often people will say that the solution to all of this, despite the technological innovation looks like more job opportunities, more affordable housing, more child care for families. Is that the right solution?

9:38Are those policy changes the fix here? Or is it simply just less screen time that could go quite a long way to helping reverse this trend? None of these policies are likely to get us back up to people averaging two kids per family, but they are maybe able to stop the decline going quite as steeply. if people are currently struggling to juggle work and childcare, and anything we can do to make that juggling act easier is clearly a good thing. And there's good evidence as well that these policies do have positive impact. But more broadly, I do think it will be interesting to look at the medium term impact of some of the policies reducing screen time, for example, to Australian teenagers who are currently going through those restrictions.

10:26What do their lives like? their relationships, their social lives, everything else look like in 10 years. So the screen time argument, I think policy is directly targeted at that. Everyone is watching those. But the broader policies that seek to make it easier for people to juggle child rearing with the rest of their lives, those are probably things we should be doing, regardless of whether they simply slow the decline of birth rates or send them back upwards. This is such a fascinating topic. John Byrne Murdoch, our chief data reporter. Thanks so much for walking us through it. Thank you so much for having me.

11:04Well, we've only scratched the surface on this topic. You can find a free link in our show notes to read John's full story. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Check back tomorrow for the latest business news.

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