The decline in fertility has occurred in almost every country in the world. Furthermore, notes the Nobel-laureate Claudia Goldin, in her 2023 paper “The Downside of Fertility”, every OECD member (bar Israel) has a total fertility rate (average number of children per woman in a lifetime) of less than 2.1 (the replacement rate). Moreover, this is not at all new: “low levels of fertility have existed in many currently developed nations since the mid-1970s.”
This transformation in fertility is the opposite of what Thomas Malthus foretold in his Essay on the Principle of Population. Humanity is unprecedentedly well off and yet has far fewer children relative to its numbers than before. I considered the causes in May 2024, in “From the baby boom to the baby bust”. One is that a far higher number of children survive into adulthood, reducing the need for multiple births. Another is that we have managed to separate the joys of sex from the burdens of child-rearing. Yet another is that people came to prefer a few “quality” children (in each of which they invest more) to a large quantity of them.