Best of: Is the World Ready for the Population Bust?

0:00Kanishk Tharoor:This week, we're pleased to bring you some of the best conversations from our archives. Last year, we spoke with the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt about the global crash in fertility rates and the looming prospect of depopulation. That subject has become even more prevalent in the past year. The United States, for example, recorded its lowest ever birth rate in 2024. I hope you enjoy our conversation with Nicholas Eberstadt. We'll be back next week with a new episode. I'm Dan Kurtz-Falen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview. It seems to me there are a lot that human beings and their governments and civil institutions can do to adjust to shrinking and aging populations, just the way we adjusted to a growing world when we have a population explosion.

0:48Kanishk Tharoor:Over the past century, the world's population has exploded, surging from around 1.6 billion people in 1900 to roughly 8 billion today. But according to the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt, that chapter of human history is over, and a new era, which he calls the age of depopulation, has begun. In a recent essay for Foreign Affairs, Eberstadt argued that plummeting fertility rates everywhere from the United States and Europe to India and China point to a new demographic order, one that will transform societies, economies, and geopolitics. Senior editor Kanesh Tharoor spoke with Eberstadt about what is driving today's population decline, why policy cannot reverse it, and how governments can reckon with a shrinking world.

1:37Nicholas Eberstadt:Nick, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

1:39Kanishk Tharoor:Well, thank you for inviting me.

1:42Nicholas Eberstadt:You wrote in our recent issue what is nothing short of a monumental piece titled The Age of Depopulation, Surviving a World Gone Gray. And in this piece, you make the case that due to the collapse of fertility rates around the world, the world's population is going to begin shrinking. Now, some estimates place that happening as soon as 2053, some in the 2070s or the 2080s. But whenever it might be, it seems to be inevitable. And when this does happen, it'll be the first time that the world's population has shrunk since the Black Death of the 14th century ravaged Eurasia. There's a ton of ground to cover here, but let's begin by sketching some of the trend lines.

2:27Nicholas Eberstadt:In your piece, you take us on a tour of the globe to show how fertility rates are plunging pretty much everywhere. What are some of the surprising things we learn when we spin the globe in this way?

2:38Kanishk Tharoor:Well, Kanishk, demographers don't really have a toolkit for forecasting fertility accurately. But over the past decade, there's been an acceleration that was entirely unanticipated of the already existing long-term decline in global fertility more or less everywhere. Some of the things which I think are kind of jaw-dropping are to learn, for example, that in Mexico City, the current birth trends imply less than one baby per woman per lifetime, and that Mexico last year had a lower birth rate than the United States of America for the first time since those numbers were ever collected. That Thailand is down to about one birth per woman per lifetime.

3:30Kanishk Tharoor:I first went to then called Calcutta, now Calcutta, almost 50 years ago, and it was teeming with children. Now, officials say the fertility level is down again to one birth per woman per lifetime. And even off of the coast of Africa, which is the last really high fertility bastion in the world today, a place like Mauritius is down to 1.4 births per woman per lifetime. You need a little bit over two for long-term population stability, not just two, but a little over two since not everybody survives two childbearing years. It's not impossible that the world has already fallen on a planetary scale below the level of childbearing necessary for long-term population stability.

4:22Kanishk Tharoor:We can't tell if that's actually happened yet, but if this has not happened already, it may happen much sooner than people expected. We know that at least two-thirds of the world's population was living in sub-replacement venues before the pandemic. We may be up to three-quarters of the world's population in such places now. It's happened with staggering speed.

4:50Nicholas Eberstadt:It is really striking. And, you know, just to underline one of the points you raised in India, which is the world's most populous country by most estimates, India has now become a sub-replacement country. And in Calcutta, the city that you described, and the city I've spent a lot of time in, I grew up there a little bit, the numbers are staggering in that now, according to West Bengal officials, women have on average one birth in their lifetime. The only place where fertility seems to be fairly high is sub-Saharan Africa, but even there we're seeing dips. What's going on as far as we can tell in sub-Saharan Africa?

5:30Kanishk Tharoor:Absolutely right. In the sub-Sahara, as best we can tell from the more limited statistical evidence that we have, the overall birth level is probably 100 % above the replacement level. So on current patterns, on current trends, that would mean the doubling of each generation. That's pretty fast population growth. What we've seen, however, is that even in the sub-Sahara, there's been a pronounced and perhaps now accelerating decline. overall fertility levels in the sub-Sahara have dropped by more than a third since the late 70s early 80s in southern Africa fertility surveys are all pointing towards lower fertility so the only question really I think at the moment is will these continue will these accelerate how long is it going to take till sub-Saharan Africa is no longer the global exception

6:40Nicholas Eberstadt:We're only a few decades, well, let's say six, seven decades removed from a time when people around the world were worried about the explosion of population, right? In the middle of the 20th century, there was this concern that human populations were growing far beyond our capacity to sustain them. And it is striking when you take a step back and look at the 20th century. The 20th century, we began at around 1.6 billion people on the planet. We ended at 6 billion people, which is an enormous jump. And I wonder, you know, just to think particularly about the 20th century, that, you know, if some time from now, future historians, or indeed, alien historians picking over the bones of our vanished species, might find that the 20th century was incredibly anomalous in human history.

7:31Kanishk Tharoor:Well, it clearly was anomalous because there had never been such a jump in human numbers in so brief a time span. There'd never been any sort of proportional increase at tempo like that before. What was missed by many during the population explosion panic was that this surge in human numbers was generated entirely by improvements in health, by pervasive plummets in mortality, by explosive increases in life expectancy, and really by about a doubling of planetary life expectancy at birth between 1900 and the year 2000. Look what happened. When you had this health explosion, human capabilities increased so much.

8:30Kanishk Tharoor:Per capita income over the course of the 20th century soared. We didn't eliminate all extreme poverty, but we made huge inroads in it. literacy improved virtually everywhere skills improved virtually everywhere and availability of food outpaced this jump in human mouths rather handily so when we look back at the population explosion i think one of the most fascinating aspects of it will be how badly so-called experts misassessed its significance and its likely consequence.

9:13Nicholas Eberstadt:That gets us into one of the braver contentions of your piece. You do come down a little bit definitively in this piece to identify why we are seeing such widespread collapses in fertility. And you attribute that to the simple fact of what people want, of how many children they want to have. And around the world, it seems that men and women just want to have fewer kids. You write, volition is why even in an increasingly healthy and prosperous world of over 8 billion people, the extinction of every family line could be only one generation away. I think this topic of low fertility rates and shrinking numbers of children is much discussed these days.

9:59Nicholas Eberstadt:And when you hear familiar answers for why this is happening, a lot of material explanations are offered. It could be that it's now very expensive to have children. So some couples are reluctant to have more than one child or any children at all. It could be that we're seeing a decline in teenage pregnancies that might be also influencing the lower number of children around. Why are explanations of that sort insufficient? And why should we think purely in terms of desire?

10:33Kanishk Tharoor:Well, I think maybe I should start by a differential diagnosis, at least addressing the question of whether there may be an increase in infertility, in infecundity, which might be the constraint that we're seeing here, a sort of a precursor to Petey James, children of men or whatever. There's no reason to think that this couldn't eventually happen through estrogen in the water or microplastics or all sorts of other potential contaminants. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that the big declines in fertility we're seeing yet are due to environmental factors. They do seem, for the most part, to be driven by changes in human behavior and, most importantly, by changes in desired family size.

11:28Kanishk Tharoor:Why do I say that? There are a lot of things that correlate with declining fertility, including income, education, contraception. You can go through the entire modernization litany. Problem is there are always exceptions there. And one of the exceptions that I mentioned in the foreign affairs piece, for example, is what we're seeing today in Myanmar in Burma, one of the most impoverished countries in the world. Myanmar has below replacement fertility as well in a non-catastrophic setting. So you don't have to be an affluent society to have parents choosing very small families. Now, the question of what considerations go into this choice is an inescapably human one and thus a tremendously nuanced personal one.

12:24Kanishk Tharoor:And the reasons for choosing two children or less than two children, I would guess would be rather different in rural Burma from affluent Seoul and South Korea. What I think we can be pretty confident about is that these new patterns reflect choices that parents have made.

12:48Nicholas Eberstadt:If I may just sort of press the point a little bit on particular explanations, what about, say, declining levels of religiosity? Does that inform fertility rates? And then I suppose one of the bigger explanations that you hear more often is levels of female education. Isn't it broadly true that the higher the level of education a woman attains, the fewer children she's likely to have?

13:15Kanishk Tharoor:I tend to think that religiosity and fertility track rather closely. I don't find that a surprise since, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition and perhaps in all of the Abrahamic faiths, there is this injunction to be fruitful and multiply. And there's this view of the hereafter where you have a connection to the hereafter through your children and your descendants. And as for education, there has generally been a correspondence between greater educational attainment and smaller family size, but that doesn't hold everywhere anymore. We've got fascinating exceptions also to the overall patterns of modernity, such as the increase in fertility for Israeli Jewry, well above replacement, in affluent, highly educated society in the Middle East.

14:16Kanishk Tharoor:And I think that that further reinforces the importance of volition.

14:20Nicholas Eberstadt:It does seem broadly true that having fewer kids is the price we have to pay for a world in which we have fewer teenage pregnancies, women have greater access to public life, to employment, potentially to individual fulfillment and accomplishment. And if that's the case, is that such a bad thing? Is it not good for women and for men to have greater control over their lives and pursue the forms of accomplishment that are meaningful to them, if indeed that includes not having children?

14:53Kanishk Tharoor:I was one of the contrarians way back when who was arguing that governments and NGOs and others didn't know better than the parents in question how many children they should be having in low-income countries. That was during the population explosion era. I feel the same way now with sub-replacement fertility. I don't think that there are outsiders or experts who know better than the parents in question how many children the parents should be having. The alternative seems rather terrifying.

15:28Nicholas Eberstadt:To talk about those outsiders, so to speak, sub-replacement fertility has been a problem in certain societies for a long time now. Think of Japan, for instance, where the phenomenon of the emptying village and the countryside is almost a cultural trope there. But what we've seen is that governments have not been able to institute policies that in any reliable fashion can encourage the birth rate to go up in a meaningful way. You would think that by offering incentives, subsidies, other kinds of welfare provisions and benefits, government policy could have an effect in encouraging people to have children.

16:08Nicholas Eberstadt:But by and large, it doesn't seem to be the case. Why is that?

16:12Kanishk Tharoor:I think this gets back to the whole question of volition. It gets back to the whole question of human agency. I kind of find it reassuring to find out that we're not rabbits and we're not robots and that we can't be cheerled into having a different number of children from what in general we'd want. We can't be bribed into having a different level of childbearing than we'd want. The record of pronatal policies around the world, as I read it, is that it's very expensive to get really marginal or tiny fractional changes in long-term childbearing. So from my standpoint, at least from my perspective in looking at this, it seems to me there are a lot that human beings and their governments and civil institutions of all various sorts can do to adjust to shrinking and aging populations just the way we adjusted to a growing world when we have a population explosion.

17:16Kanishk Tharoor:and that the emphasis should be on making the most for human flourishing, for the human beings that exist, rather than trying to count chickens that are never going to hatch.

17:31Nicholas Eberstadt:Right. I mean, some people have a rather apocalyptic view of depopulation. They imagine that societies will crumble, anarchy will reign. That doesn't seem to be your view. You write, the problems that depopulation raise are not necessarily tantamount to a catastrophe. Depopulation is not a grave sentence. Rather, it is a difficult new context, one in which countries can still find ways to thrive.

17:58Kanishk Tharoor:Just look at it in the mirror of the population explosion. Look how wrong so many of the experts were about what its consequences would be. It's quite clear that a shrinking, aging world is something that we're intuitively almost completely unprepared to encounter. Because all of our experience in ways that we don't even think about has been framed by a growing world population. We don't know how to cope with this yet. But human beings are very good at coping. We're very good at coping. We're very good at adapting. And given the foundations that we put into place in the 20th century for routinizing improvements in health, routinizing improvements in education, routinizing improvements in scientific advance and technological progress and innovation.

19:01Kanishk Tharoor:It's not as if we are in a tightly, relentlessly worsening straitjacket. We've got an awful lot of opportunity to help us deal with these inevitable social changes that we'll be confronting.

19:20Nicholas Eberstadt:Well, let's talk a little bit about those social changes. The major one being that a depopulating world where there are fewer children is invariably going to be an aging world. You'll have more and more older people and fewer and fewer young people. What would it be like to live in such a society? And specifically in the U.S. context, what new problems would we face that we have not yet encountered?

19:45Kanishk Tharoor:Well, certainly aging and shrinking societies will require very different approaches to government policy. But they're also going to require different approaches for corporations, for communities, for families, for individual behavior. One of the most obvious government policy challenges, financing of social programs. We came up in the 20th century with this contrivance of pay-as-you-go social programs. You have current earners financing the retirement or the medical care of current retirees. When you live in a world where there are five or six current earners for every retiree, that's great. You're getting social benefits on the cheap.

20:33Kanishk Tharoor:As soon as that population pyramid tilts, you're in a doom loop. You just can't do it. And we know enough about how population trends are going to unfold over the next couple of decades because all of the workers for 2040 have already been born, for example. We know enough that we should already be preparing for a set of social guarantees that transcend this old-fashioned pay-as-you-go model. It's not going to be all sugar and light because some particular group, some particular birth cohort is going to be the one that kind of loses out on the musical chairs. They'll have to both start financing their own retirement and they'll have ended up paying for somebody else's.

21:23Kanishk Tharoor:The way that I think humane and intelligent government policy ought to be working with something like that is to help compensate that particular group. So you come as close as possible to an overall situation where there are winners without losers.

21:38Nicholas Eberstadt:At the risk of inviting your optimism, what will be the mark of a country that's dealing with depopulation well? And then conversely, what will a country that's struggling to deal with depopulation look like?

21:50Kanishk Tharoor:Well, this inescapable challenge of dealing with depopulation is going to be a problem for the entire world economy. Who's going to deal with it well? the governments and the societies that have the foresight and the social trust to start thinking about how to recalibrate, to be nimble and timely in this. There may well be a learning curve and the early pioneers in this may be the ones who have to take the licks on this. But certainly having a four-sided government and having enough social trust so that there can be complex cooperation in the face of a pressure that's going to require immense complex cooperation.

22:47Nicholas Eberstadt:What sorts of policies at the national or indeed intergovernmental level could be put in place now to better prepare the world for a future of dwindling national populations?

22:58Kanishk Tharoor:Everybody will be better off with more money. When you've got more money, you've got more options. So I would say policies that encourage countries to get rich as fast as they can sustainably can't hurt. I would think of those as being efforts to improve health, efforts to improve skills, efforts to increase research horizons and knowledge production. People are going to have to pay much more attention, I think, to personal savings and to personal conduct, especially when we get towards the upside down population pyramid. And that includes looking after one's own health. I expect that we're going to see a world in which longer living peoples also are longer working peoples.

23:53Kanishk Tharoor:And I can tell you as a very happily employed senior citizen that there are a lot of great benefits to working past the technical retirement level.