Fertility Free-Fall

It's not just South Korea -- and it's not just the developed world either

Ross Douthat rides a regular hobby-horse of his in his latest column, pointing to the astonishing collapse in the South Korean birth rate, where the Total Fertility Rate has fallen to a projected 0.72 children/woman based on the first three quarters of this year. Much of the column details the perfect storm of factors that has driven South Korean fertility so low, but he ends by asking whether a similar collapse is in our future:

[T]hese descriptions [of the drivers of South Korea’s fertility collapse] . . . read not as simple contrasts with American culture so much as exaggerations of the trends we’re experiencing as well.

We too have an exhausting meritocracy. We too have a growing ideological division between men and women in Generation Z. We too are secularizing and forging a cultural conservatism that’s anti-liberal but not necessarily pious, a spiritual but not religious right. We too are struggling to master the temptations and pathologies of virtual existence.

So the current trend in South Korea is more than just a grim surprise. It’s a warning about what’s possible for us.

I feel weird saying this, but Douthat’s formulation strikes me as insufficiently alarmist given the latest data—for two reasons. First of all, while I don’t know of any major country that has seen fertility drop to South Korea’s catastrophically low level, quite a number of countries are seeing fertility drop to well below replacement levels—and not only countries in the highly developed regions of Europe, North America and Northeast Asia. Second, while the big-picture drivers of lower fertility—a collection of societal changes including the rising economic importance of education, increased urbanization with its higher housing costs, and the rise of women’s ability to control their own fertility—have been at work for decades around the world, something new has happened in the past few years to cause the bottom to fall out in country after country, both developed and middle-income.

Take a look:

The data comes from here, and I can’t vouch for the methodology behind it, because I haven’t dug into that methodology at all. But spot checking a couple of numbers, it corresponds reasonably well to what I’ve seen from other sources. And the picture it paints overall is of a widespread and accelerating decline.

• China, the phenomenal economic success story of the past two generations and the country that aims to end American hegemony, abandoned its often brutal one-child policy in 2016. Ironically, its fertility has completely collapsed since then, dropping from 1.75 children/woman in 2015 to 1.16 in 2021 and a projected 1.06 in 2023—an 8.6% decline in just two years and a 39.4% decline over the whole period. The absolute rate isn’t as low as South Korea’s, but the decline is comparably precipitous.

• Russia, the poster country for nationalist revival, which has been actively aiming to boost its fertility for some time (with some initial success, coming off a very low base), saw its TFR drop from 1.78 children/woman in 2015 to 1.51 in 2021 to a projected 1.41 in 2023. That’s a 6.6% decline in just two years, and a 20.8% decline over the whole period. So much for self-conscious nationalism as a spur to fertility.

• Scandinavia, which historically had been one of the highest-fertility regions in Europe, which was long touted as proof of the benefits to fertility from a strong welfare state and gender equality, saw its TFR drop from 1.76 children/woman in 2015 to 1.62 in 2021 to a projected 1.41 in 2023, a staggering 13.2% decline in just two years, and 20.0% over the whole period. So much for a robust welfare state promoting fertility.

• Iran, an actual theocracy, saw its TFR drop from 2.14 children/woman in 2015 to 1.61 in 2021 to a projected 1.54 in 2023, a 4.3% decline in two years but a 28.0% decline over the whole period. Increasingly-Islamist Turkey looks similarly, with its TFR dropping from 2.16 in 2015 to 1.70 in 2021 to a projected 1.59 in 2023, a 6.5% decline over two years and a 26.4% decline over the whole period. Meanwhile Poland, the most Catholic country in Europe (and with its most restrictive abortion laws), saw its TFR collapse 13.5% in just two years from 1.41 children/woman to 1.22. So much for traditional religiosity as a guarantee of robust fertility.

The story is similar in the major countries of Latin America and Southeast Asia. There are exceptions, of course. Hungary, another country deploying nationalism ideologically and spending real money to boost fertility, saw a modest uptick in its TFR between 2015 and 2021—but it has already fallen most of the way back over the past two years. Portugal is bucking the trend a modest uptick right now; we’ll see how long it lasts. Neither country has gotten anywhere close to replacement, however. More notably, Israel remains a rare highly-developed nation with well above replacement fertility. As well, the various countries of Central Asia—not just basket cases like Afghanistan, but more solidly middle-income countries like Kazakhstan and Mongolia—have extremely robust and stable numbers well above replacement. But these are exceptions to a very widespread general rule.

The question is what is driving it, and what can be done about it. It is hard to blame culture for a phenomenon sufficiently cross-cultural to encompass Finland and Iran, Brazil and China. But by the same token it’s hard to blame economic conditions when these are equally variable across time and between countries. Housing costs, for example, may plausibly be a driver of fertility decline in the UK—projected 2023 TFR: 1.42, down 20.2% from 1.78 in 2015. But what about Japan, the poster country for the YIMBY movement? Its TFR has declined 16.6% over the same period, from 1.45 to 1.21 children/woman. As for America, low fertility during the Great Recession could plausibly be blamed on economic hardship. But the period since 2015 is the first in recent American memory in which wealth inequality has declined and real wage growth for lower-income Americans has outpaced that of upper-income Americans—both factors that should facilitate family formation. Nonetheless, American fertility dropped 12.0% over this period, from 1.84 children/woman in 2015 to a projected 1.62 in 2023.

I’ve written pessimistically about this subject before. I’ve questioned the plausibility of Chinese hegemony in the Western Pacific given the gale-force strength of its demographic headwinds. Five years ago, I noted that America’s already-historic fertility decline was actually just evidence that our TFR had never been as high as we had thought; much of the fertility boost during the 2000s that made us seem an exception to global trends was just a statistical artifact caused by the timing of immigrant fertility. More recently, I investigated two exceptions to general fertility trends—France’s fertility decline starting in the mid-18th century and Israel’s fertility revival starting in the early 1990s—to see whether they offered any insight to the contemporary global situation. And one of my favorite pieces I have written for this newsletter was about our increasing lack of a sense of a future, and how that may be a deep cause of fertility decline.

None of these pointed to very plausible policy levers to solve the problem—and it is a problem; a modestly below-replacement fertility rate is probably no big deal, but the kinds of very low rates we’re starting to see are economically and socially unsustainable. The more I’ve thought about it, though, the more I think this piece, which discusses parenthood (and motherhood especially) through the lens of Baumol’s Cost Disease (another hobby horse of mine), comes closest to the crux of the matter. Much of the work of running a household has been successfully automated or subordinated to the division of labor. Parenthood, though, remains an inherently labor-intensive activity, which means that its cost should rise as a consequence of productivity increases elsewhere. And, since the labor of parenthood is generally uncompensated, that makes children an especially expensive luxury good. There’s a lot of griping out there now about the high cost of child care, which is a direct consequence of the tight labor market and the rise in wages generally. Those high wages are also what stay-at-home parents are foregoing. The opportunity cost associated with parenthood is just extraordinarily high and rising—and, per Baumol, this will not only still be true in periods of rising wages and increasing wealth, it will actually get worse.

That still leaves room for Douthat’s fretting about secularism and meritocracy, the yawning gap between the sexes and the appeal of virtual reality—all of it legitimate. Personally, I’m tempted to blame much of the fertility drop since 2015 on smart phones, because they make such a great universal scapegoat for any ominous development, from the rise in traffic fatalities to the youth mental health crisis to the decay of democracy. Why not the collapse in fertility as well?

There’s something deeper at work though, a powerful tide that even societies that are determined to are finding it increasingly hard to swim against. Indeed, right now, at a time when there are lots of reasons to imagine that fertility would be at least modestly recovering, countries all over the world are getting absolutely swamped by that tide. It deserves attention, and not just from those who think it validates their ideological proclivities.