The Worldwide Birth Dearth

    I've written quite a bit over the years about demographics and the impending decline in world population. Even the most hopeful estimates indicate that the overall world population will peak in latter half of the century. More conservative estimates put the tipping point earlier at around 2050. And this is assuming that everything continues at current rates. 

    But this is only in reference to the world as a whole: there are individual countries which have already started to see their populations decline, and those declines will become quite precipitous in the next 10 to 20 years. Of course, as the populations decline they will also be growing older, with fewer younger people. The whole process will be destabilizing politically, economically, and militarily. And those countries or regions still experiencing population growth (e.g., India and sub-Saharan Africa) will increasingly flood into the wealthy Western countries, stretching those countries' social services even farther at the same time as there won't be enough resources for the elderly native population.

    Here are some recent articles on the subject:

• "Japan faces population crisis as twice as many deaths recorded as births in 2022"--Human Events. The article reports that "[i]n 2022, it was reported that twice as many people died in Japan as were born, with less than 800,000 births and a staggering 1.58 million deaths, according to The Standard." The article also notes that "the Japanese population has fallen to 124.6 million from a peak of just over 128 million in 2008, and the rate of decline is only increasing," that 29% of the population is 65+.
• "Analysis: Over 15.5M Illegal Aliens in U.S. Costs Taxpayers $150B Annually"--Breitbart.
• "Sweden's 'Conservative' Govt to Make Abortion a Constitutional Right"--Breitbart. Besides the moral issues with abortion, there is the fact that when a nation or country is facing declining birth rates, creating a right to have abortions is just doubling down on stupid.
• "France's baby bust" -- Works in Progress. From the lede:

    In the eighteenth century, France was the China of Europe. But after a thousand years of dominance based on particularly fertile land, she declined over the next 250 years to be just another European power. Around this time, more than 100 years before the rest of Europe, French women began to have fewer children. In 1700, almost 1 in 25 inhabitants on Earth, and one in five in Europe, was French. Today, less than a percent of humanity is French. Why did France’s population decline in relative terms so dramatically, and did it really mark the decline of France?

    The demographic transition is usually thought to be driven by economic forces, but – in France at least – culture came first. Using data from online family trees, my work shows how the loosening of traditional religious moral constraints in Ancien Régime France drove the decline in fertility, setting France off on a wholly different course from England, which was about to see a dramatic increase in its population.

Examining genealogical records, the author discovered that France's demographic decline actually started in the 1760s. 

So, the demographic transition took place exceptionally early in France, but why? In my research, I argue that the diminished sway of the Catholic Church, nearly 30 years before the French Revolution, was the key driver of the fertility decline. Since at least Tocqueville, and more recently Emmanuel Todd, we know that a sustained loosening of traditional religious moral constraints took place in the mid-eighteenth century, at a scale and extent that no other country has achieved.

This actually matches up with more recent research which shows that demographic growth in developed countries is largely restricted to the most devout populations. 

• "The Daily Chart: What a Baby Bust Looks Like"-- Power Line. The article includes a chart on the growth in certain demographic categories based on age over the last few years and includes the following from the Atlanta Fed:

    An aging population is a big reason for the worker shortage that’s helped fuel inflation over the past 18 months. Analysis by Atlanta Fed senior policy adviser John Robertson shows that the working age population has hardly grown over the past three years. Instead, virtually all of the recent increase in the population that’s 16 and older has been among seniors.

    The number of people aged 25 to 54, a group economists call “prime-age” workers, inched up just 40,000 in 2022. Meanwhile, the number of Americans 65 and older jumped by 2 million. That continues a pattern. Since 2019, the prime-age worker population has barely changed while the size of the 65-and-older group has increased by nearly 5 million.

Interestingly, the 55-64 age bracket showed a decline in population--probably due to "boomers" aging into the 65+ bracket. 

• "More than 60% of men in their 20s are single - compared to just 30% of women"-- Daily Mail Online.
• "Single women own 2.64 million more homes than single men in the US despite lower salaries"-- Daily Mail Online.
• "China records 1st population fall in decades as births drop"--AP News. From the article:

    The National Bureau of Statistics reported Tuesday that the country had 850,000 fewer people at the end of 2022 than the previous year. The tally includes only the population of mainland China, excluding Hong Kong and Macao as well as foreign residents.

    Over 1 million fewer babies were born than the previous year amid a slowing economy and widespread pandemic lockdowns, according to official figures. The bureau reported 9.56 million births in 2022; deaths ticked up to 10.41 million.

The article also mentions, however, that "[d]espite the official numbers, some experts believe China’s population has been in decline for a few years — a dramatic turn in a country that once sought to control such growth through a one-child policy."

• "Key facts about China's declining population"--Pew Research Center. An excerpt:

The UN forecasts that China’s population will decline from 1.426 billion this year to 1.313 billion by 2050 and below 800 million by 2100. That’s according to the UN’s “medium variant,” or middle-of-the-road projection. The large population decline is projected even though it assumes that China’s total fertility rate will rise from 1.18 children per woman in 2022 to 1.48 in 2100.

Under the "low variant" scenario, which is more realistic, and "where the total fertility rate is projected to be 0.5 births below that of the medium variant scenario – China’s population is projected to fall to as low as 488 million by 2100." Estimates for the U.S. population in 2100 is between 281 million on the low side to 543 million on the high side. So it is possible that the U.S. could have a larger population than China by the end of the century.

• "China will lose half its population by the end of the century — and the ripple effects will be catastrophic"--Business Insider. Key issues discussed in the article is the resultant shrinking labor pool, which will make it impossible for China to retain its role as the world's factory, and declining real estate values which will hit China hard as 70% of the population's wealth is invested in real estate.
• Related: "The Great People Shortage is coming — and it's going to cause global economic chaos"--Business Insider. An excerpt:

By the end of this century, the global population will have decreased by 1 billion people from its peak, according to a 2020 analysis by researchers at the Gates Foundation, and in the most extreme scenario, the population could decline by almost 2 billion from where it is today, to just over 6 billion.  The German working population will have declined by a third, based on the average scenario from the researchers, and in Italy, Spain, and Greece it will have declined by more than half. Poland, Portugal, Romania, Japan, and China will all lose up to two-thirds of their labor force, according to the projections. The looming population decline is a wake-up call: Instead of the "population bomb" that some have feared for decades, we will face a population drop, and it will have enormous consequences for the world's prosperity. 

• "The Coming Demographic Collapse of China"--The National Interest.

    Provinces and other governmental units have reported data ahead of the census, and births were down more than 30% in some locations.

    The big issue is China’s trajectory. Official media is cagey about a critical figure, the country’s total fertility rate, generally the number of children per female reaching child-bearing age. The official China Daily reports that Lu Jiehua of Peking University believes the country’s TFR, as the rate is known, “has fallen below 1.7.”

    Lu is certainly right about that. The University of Wisconsin’s Yi told TNI that China’s TFR last year was 0.90  and could not have exceeded 1.1. Yi’s estimate is on the low end but is consistent with China Daily’s reporting of 1.05 in 2015.

    Replacement TFR for most societies is generally 2.1 although some think China’s replacement rate is actually 2.2 because of higher child mortality.

    In any event, China’s population will shrink fast. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences projects China’s population will halve by 2100 if the TFR drops from 1.6 to 1.3.

    China’s TFR, however, is far lower than 1.3. If its TFR stabilizes at 1.2—1.2 would represent a big increase—China will have a population of only 480 million by the end of the century.