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Birth rates around the world are declining. Women are having fewer children. The question of why this is, is hotly debated. And on Today Explained, we're going to talk to an expert who says she has an answer. You have the option of going out with your friends, getting dressed, coordinating, or you can just relax, chill out on the sofa and watch a film or play a video game. And maybe that's a bit easier, a bit more relaxing when you've had a hard day, you just crash out and
But the movement to get us to have more children publicly led by people like Vice President J.D. Vance and Vice President Elon Musk is also controversial because it is led by Elon Musk, who has as many as 14 children by four different mothers, and by J.D. Vance, who has suggested that non-parents should get fewer votes than parents. What should we make of the pro-natalist movement that's coming up?
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Okay, everybody has been talking about who's having babies. For my money, it's given none of your business. But you've actually been covering this as a news story. What's going on? So there's a few reasons we're hearing about it more lately. One is that birth rates are falling pretty much everywhere, including in some of the countries we used to associate with really high birth rates like India, Brazil or Mexico, and yes, the United States. It's happening worldwide at
at such a fast rate that last year the UN announced the number of people on Earth will probably peak in the next 75 years, which is a pretty big change from even what they were projecting a decade ago when experts thought the population peak was still well over a century away.
And the other main reason people are talking about it in the U.S., at least, is that you have people like Elon Musk and J.D. Vance. They're speaking out about it a lot lately. Musk calls falling birth rates the biggest danger civilization faces by far. If we don't make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization is going to crumble. And J.D. Vance, who opposes abortion rights, notoriously blasted
quote, childless cat ladies. We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. Yes, I do remember. These gents, and they are mostly gents, call themselves pronatalists.
What do they actually want to happen here? Or do they just want to criticize? So pro-natalists, it's essentially this broad ideological movement driven by concerns that the world is not producing enough children and that society should work to change that. Now, not all pro-natalists are politically conservative like Musk and Vance, and not all conservatives are liberal.
particularly pronatalists. Some self-identified pronatalists really support abortion rights. They would never want to force women into having children they don't want. But given the power and influence of people like Musk and Vance, their sort of interest and involvement in the movement has definitely caused a lot of people to feel pretty afraid.
Yes. And it makes you wonder, is there a similar thing happening on the left of the American political spectrum? Not exactly in the same way. Like Donald Trump campaigned for president and said he wanted a new baby boom. How does that sound? That sounds pretty. I want a baby boom. Oh, you men are so lucky out there. You're so lucky.
No Democratic politician is talking like that. And that makes sense because abortion rights remain very much under attack and people want to be really careful in how they talk about both falling birth rates and reproductive freedom. But I think a political change is happening with the Democrats is we are seeing more of an effort lately from them to emphasize being, quote, pro-family.
Too many young parents are forced to exit the workforce because they can't find affordable child care. If we want to grow our population, we must continue expanding affordable child care. This is pro-family, pro-child, and pro-growth policy. Democrats rightly recognize that they don't want to cede all the family-friendly political rhetoric to child
So that was a really big part of the Harris-Walls campaign. They framed a lot of their care policy ideas as being more pro-family than the GOP. For example, extending the child tax credit to help them buy a car seat, to help them buy baby clothes, a crib. Many of us are concerned about climate change, concerned about what human beings are doing to the planet, concerned about limited resources on planet Earth.
And some people choose to have no kids or have fewer kids because of that. So what is the argument that there should be real concern that people are having fewer children? Right. So people do debate whether falling birth rates are problems. And the case for why it is essentially goes like this.
Most people on Earth right now live in a country below what demographers call the, quote, replacement rate, meaning each woman on average would have 2.1 children. That's essentially the mathematical amount of children needed to maintain a population's current size in a generation or two. So...
Whether or not that's a problem, the idea is as the number of babies goes down, the number of workers will shrink too. And that means there can be fewer people paying taxes, fewer people available to do important jobs, less money going into welfare and pension systems. Japan's baby bust is believed to be partly to blame for the nation losing its title as the world's third largest economy. Italy has the highest share of people over 65 years old among all EU member states.
And if the trend continues, it will be very hard to sustain both the pension and the health systems. In the UK, by 2070, the number of workers is projected to rise by a million. The number of pensioners will rise...
by 5 million. And this could lead to all sorts of economic and political challenges, more poverty, less investment. And you can also imagine some real intergenerational political conflict in this situation where there are fewer resources to care for the elderly, but they still have more political power.
All right. So I understand in the relatively immediate term that fewer people means fewer young people, fewer workers, fewer people paying taxes. The pro-natalists seem to think we are heading toward like a near term disaster. Is there any proof of that?
Demographers have been really wrong in the past. There have been population panics the other way, that the world was producing too many people. And that led to really horrible policy responses like mass sterilization campaigns and forced abortions and eugenics. So I think we should be humble in these moments as we're making predictions about the future. China's one-child policy went on for, I don't know, 35 years, and that was a freakout over too many people. Exactly. Now there's
stigmatizing childless women in China and trying to figure out how to get people to have more babies. Do we have data showing that women really want more children and can't have them or are being barred in some way? Or is this just what we want? I think this is a key question.
We know that most women, even those who do really want to be parents, tend to prefer smaller families, which, you know, they're easier to balance with jobs, hobbies, friends, and of course, less expensive. Most people don't really want five to 10 kids anymore. I think the real fundamental question is whether women with zero kids might prefer
Right.
So from that perspective, I think pronatalism has some overlaps with the reproductive justice movement, which says we should build a society that supports people having however many or how few children that they want. But it is complicated. Well, fortunately, the pronatalists in the U.S. now have a lot of power. And therefore, I imagine they can make policy to get us all to have more kids. What policies have they introduced? Well, you know, in the U.S., we do have...
debates around the child tax credit, which is supposed to help ease the burden of raising children. And there's been some efforts over the last 25 years around the world to try and boost birth rates with things like more affordable child care and other sort of family policies. But even in all these countries, including the U.S., birth rates continue to decline. Throughout history, Rachel, having children or not has often been viewed as a very personal issue.
private decision. We're at a time in which the government seems to want to insert itself into that decision to help us make choices one way or the other. The one way being to have more kids. What does it mean for the government to be involved in this decision? I spend a lot of time writing about attacks on abortion rights in the U.S. and attacks on IVF. And I think your question gets at some of the most uncomfortable parts of this whole discourse.
Because if it turns out it's not possible to use policy to voluntarily boost birth rates, politically or otherwise, the question is, will leaders start then to talk about involuntary ways to do it?
And it doesn't seem inconceivable to me at all that if you make the issue of falling birth rates more salient, if you get people really activated around this idea that it's a huge problem and a threat to humanity, that you are going to see some people become more open to old reactionary ideas about controlling women's body. That you might see people saying, oh, women not having more kids are being selfish to human civilization. This, I think, is the real fear that rhetoric like from Elon Musk and J.D. Vance create.
Vox's Rachel Cohen. She covers housing, homelessness and family policy. Coming up, the baby bust isn't just an American phenomenon. Basically, no place in the world is having as many kids anymore. OK, business leaders, are you playing defense or are you on the offense? Are you just excuse me? Hey, I'm trying to talk business here.
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I'm Noelle King with Alice Evans. She's a senior lecturer of international development at King's College London. Her research focuses on gender and babies not having babies. And Alice has been everywhere. From Mexican villages to the Atlas Mountains to Uzbek towns to Korean universities. And by talking, learning from young men, older men and women across the world, I've been able to learn a lot.
I've started to think about, okay, well, why is fertility collapsing? What's going on? And my interviews have really helped me understand this massive global problem. So birth rates are going down all across the world. What are the leading theories as to why this is happening? So I guess there's the right wing, the left wing, and then there's the Alice Evans take.
Okay. I think the conservative right in the US will blame childless cat ladies, right? So they'll say that women are overeducated, they're living with their cats and they're very, very selfish. Correct. But...
Here's the thing. That theory has two major omissions, because the collapse in fertility is happening at vastly different political economies. I mean, in Tunisia and Turkey, female labor force participation is very low, around 30%, and yet their fertility is only 1.5%.
So even in places where women aren't even getting jobs, they're not having kids. You know, in India, extremely patriarchal casteist society. But in Tamil Nadu in the south, it's got exactly the same fertility rate as England and Wales. That's 1.4%.
So it's not just about these overeducated women pursuing their careers. Also, there's also a class-based variation. So the US right tends to blame these overeducated women. In Sweden and in Finland, the rate of childlessness is actually amongst the most disadvantaged people. They're least likely to have children. I wonder if J.D. Vance knows any of this. You should call me up.
All right. So that's on the right. And then we heard earlier that on the left, there's one theory that you often hear is that it's just become too expensive. Women would like to have more children, but they can't afford to. There's not enough support. People aren't making enough money, etc. Absolutely. Absolutely.
So many people across the world experience economic difficulties. And so these could be very high house prices in New York, making it much more expensive to have an apartment with an extra room or the very expensive cost of childcare. You know, when I was in San Francisco, people would say, oh, it might be 30,000. Super, super expensive. And that's prohibitively difficult for many families.
Now, those difficulties are real and governments should take those economic concerns seriously and I'm all here supporting cheaper housing, more affordable housing, greater access to safer accessible childcare. However, I don't think that explanation
is a full story because it won't explain why it's happening everywhere all at once, even at very, very different levels of income. And so that brings us to the Alice Evans theory. Yes, exactly. So what has happened everywhere all at once is that we see a rise of singles. And
And the rise in singles, that is, I mean, people neither being married or cohabiting, and it precisely correlates with the decline in fertility. Now, previously, late from the 1960s, American couples had fewer children. But now what's happening is they're not even forming those couples. So in America, for example, over half of 18 to 34-year-olds are neither in a steady relationship nor living with a partner.
Furthermore, just out from Pew, most single Americans don't feel much pressure to find a partner. Half say they're not even looking. Are we sure that sexy singles are to blame? Because for many years, people have had kids without being married or without living with someone, without being in relationships. Oh, that's a great point. But that's actually going down too now. In America, it's been the least educated who are less likely to marry. And that's where there's been the steepest decline in fertility.
All right. So I'm assuming you looked into why more people are staying single and also saying, I want to be single. What's going on? So here's the thing. I think historically people would have married for one of three reasons. Very crudely, love, money or respect. You know, in conservative societies where singledom is totally stigmatized, then you have to marry for money.
Respectability. You know, in India, where it's so important, lots of aunties and uncles might be pestering people, you know, when are you getting married, when are you getting married? You know, for my grandparents, it was just a done thing to get married. But now, as society liberalises, you know, Miley Cyrus championing flowers, I can buy myself some flowers. I feel you can. Can't love you.
There's more permissibility, so that's one thing. There's also economic convergence. So as women earn their own incomes, they can increasingly be more independent. So compatibility increasingly depends on love, whether people really enjoy each other's company. But of course, there are lots of frictions. You know, people might be manipulative, deceitful, unfaithful. And if there are lots of frictions, they may call it quits.
So that might be one aspect of it, economic convergence between men and women's earnings and cultural liberalisation making singledom more permissible. On top of that, on top of those shifts, I think the big change that we see all across the world, all at very different levels of income, is the massive improvement in hyper-engaging online entertainment. In that TikTok, video games, Call of Duty...
World of Warcraft, Bridgerton, Netflix. You can, you know, browse Blackpink's live stream. Let's kill this love. Or go on Pornhub. I'm going to skip this one. Anything you like. All these technological advances enable instant access to the world's most charismatic, charming...
Or maybe you prefer to do sports bets and gambling. And so why venture out when everything is at your fingertips from Netflix to Zoom meetings? And so we see tracing the data over time that there is growing isolation. Young people are spending much more time alone.
So in recent surveys, 65% of young American men say, no one knows me well. 28% of Gen Z didn't socialize with anyone they didn't live with in the past week.
So we just see this global trend and it is absolutely global. So, for example, last year I was in Mexico and lots of different Mexican little towns. And mothers would say the biggest problem here is that our teenage sons are spending all their times in their bedroom. And I'll hear the same stories in little Indian villages, in Bangladeshi villages, all these people being hooked on hyper engaging media.
Are there any countries that buck the trend? Well, yes, actually. So for example, I was in Uzbekistan for a month last year, and there there's been an increase in fertility. When I'm in Uzbekistan, people typically ask me four questions, and the answer should always be yes.
Do you like Uzbekistan? Do you like Uzbek food? Are you married? Do you have children? And that tells you a lot about people's priorities, about, you know, a strong national pride and also this strong onus that women should be married and have children.
So that's one option. You just pump up the status of marriage and fertility. In Georgia, their Orthodox patriarch similarly did the same of bumping up the status of children and fertility. In Hungary, they tried to give people cheaper mortgages if they promised to be married and have children. But what I'm saying, the Alice Evans theory of the collapsing fertility, is that these pronatal incentives of saying $2,000, $5,000 to have an extra child,
they're simply too small if the prior constraint is that most people are increasingly single. I think that most governments are putting the cart before the horse by focusing on couples rather than realizing this prior constraint. And I think that if I'm right, that the problem is technology, this hyper engaging media distracting us from us and driving this digital solitude, which ultimately prevents people from forming couples,
then we need to think, well, you know, we have various options. Could we regulate technology in some way? Could we introduce further restrictions? Or what can we do in schools to ensure that we're fostering social skills? Because just as we see declining maths and English reading skills across the OECD, simultaneously, my interviews suggest that if people aren't spending time socialising, then they're not necessarily developing the capacity to bond and charm and
You know, if you're not mixing and mingling, then you get a little bit anxious if you go out into a crowd of unknown strangers. Yeah, I know. This is such a good point. And so the question becomes like, what do we do that doesn't simultaneously make us feel like we are losing personal civil liberties? Like the government could take my phone and send me to speed dating, but that would feel like a real invasion of...
A real invasion. And, you know, personal freedoms, people feel pretty strongly about those. So in terms of how we should change the conversation around what went wrong here, what is going wrong here and what we should do about it, what's your best idea? So my message for the world, based on my globally comparative research, is let's focus on the core problem. And that's the rise of singles. Now, how can we address that? Let me do the list of
First and foremost, we need to understand and tackle the problem. Let's have a range of pilot initiatives to build community groups, to build local clubs and societies, to support communities so that people can mix and mingle and fall in love. I'm a great advocate for romantic love, for sharing our life stories, for empathizing and understanding with each other. That's quintessentially what makes us human.
So if we put that problem front and center and start working on that tricky conundrum, then maybe we can, you know, address the loneliness and boost up the fertility. Alice Evans of King's College London. Today's episode was made in partnership with Vox's Future Perfect team. It was produced by Miles Bryan. Edited by Jolie Myers and Miranda Kennedy. Fact-checked by Laura Bullard. Laura Bullard.
And engineered by Andrea Kristen's daughter. Andrea Kristen's daughter. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Support for the show comes from Charles Schwab.
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