Every two years one million Japanese disappear. China’s population will halve by the end of the century, the median age in Italy has reached 48. All around the world birth rates are crashing - Is humanity dying out? What is going on and how bad is it?
For hundreds of thousands of years the human population barely grew at all, haunted by disease, famine and war until the industrial revolution - exponential progress led to exponential growth, pushing our numbers to 6 billion in the year 1999 and 8 billion just 24 years later. And our numbers will continue to rise for at least another 60 years.
But this growth obscures something: People kinda stopped having babies. For a stable populations, every couple needs to have two children on average. If the number is higher it grows, if lower, it shrinks. If it’s well below, it shrinks a lot, and quickly: Like in South Korea, one of the hottest exporters of pop culture. Its fertility rate lay at 0.8 children per woman in 2022, the lowest in the world. This means 100 South Koreans of child bearing age today will have 40 kids, who then will have 16 kids, who then will have 6. If nothing changes then within 100 years there will be 94% fewer young people and South Korea will see a population implosion. That is if things stay the same, we have yet to see if there is a bottom of fertility rates. Although looking at bigger picture and absolute numbers, this population will not shrink that much, it simply returns to the level it once was. In 1950, there were 20 million South Koreans, in 2023 there are 52 million. And by 2100, there will be 24 million again. The issue is not that there will be fewer South Koreans, the issue is the composition of population. In 1950 the median age was 18. In 2023 it is 45. In 2100 it will be 59 - a country of seniors.
And South Korea is far from alone. China may be seeing the steepest population reversal in history, unstoppable at this point. Rapid industrialization, urbanization, rising income meant that the Chinese started to prefer smaller families. That, plus the introduction of the One Child policy which aimed to slow population growth, means that China has had a low fertility rate for decades. With a fertility rate of 1.16 births per woman, within four generations 100 young Chinese will turn into 20. China’s fertility rates are now one of the lowest in East Asia, lower than even Japan’s.
In comparison, Europe’s depopulation is much slower despite low fertility, since unlike Asia, most states have had a steady flow of immigrants. The impact is complex, as a good chunk of immigrants come from other low fertility rate areas, the number of immigrant women who do have a lot of children is not yet high enough to make a big dent and fertility rates of immigrants tend to adjust to the native population within 2-3 generations.
In Eastern Europe, the decline has sped up even more because many young people have emigrated to stronger economies like Germany whose median age is one of the highest in the world at 46.
Latin America fell below replacement in 2015. In the US, immigration is the only thing keeping the population growing substantially.
