Among other things, the unlamented former autocrat Viktor Orban was one of the leading proponents of pro-natalist policies, and more open than most about the racist underpinnings of his view. However, like others who have tried to raise birth rates, he wasn’t particularly successful. To understand why not, it’s useful to consider the question: how many babies do we want. In particular, since their choices are the relevant ones, how many babies do young women want?
Three distinct concepts are relevant here: the ideal number (a normative answer to a survey question), the intended/expected number (what respondents plan to have or think they will actually have), and the actual number (completed fertility). These diverge in systematic and informative ways.
Start with the ideal. Across most high-income countries, around 50-60% of young women report an ideal family size of two children, with a smaller group preferring 3 and another, smaller group preferring 1, Only a small number see childlessness, or large families of four or more children, as ideal. This has been relatively stable for decades, despite large changes in education, labour markets and gender roles. In Australia, Europe and North America, the modal response is still two, with a minority favouring one or three, and very few choosing zero as an ideal. However, there has been a gradual decline in the mean ideal family size over time, with more women reporting an ideal size of one or zero.
Next, consider intentions When young women are asked how many children they intend (or expect) to have, the number is consistently lower than the ideal, typically by about 0.2–0.5 children on average, and the gap is larger for the youngest cohorts. That is, as ideal family size has declined, expected family size has declined slightly faster. Most importantly it has been below replacement, at least since the 1990s. Expectations are also more sensitive to circumstances. They fall when housing costs rise, when career paths become more uncertain, and when partnership formation is delayed. In other words, expectations embed a constraint set: they are a forecast conditional on anticipated economic and social conditions.
Two further patterns are worth noting. First, the gap between ideal and expected fertility is larger for more educated young women, reflecting steeper career–family trade-offs and later partnering. Second, the share of young women expecting to remain childless has risen, even though very few state childlessness as an ideal.
Finally, actual fertility. This is where the big drops have shown up. Completed fertility for recent cohorts in most OECD countries is now around 1.5–1.7 children per woman, and period TFRs are often lower still, especially after the post-GFC and pandemic shocks. Australia has moved from around replacement (near 2) in the late 2000s to roughly 1.6 or below in recent years. For women currently in their twenties, completed fertility will almost certainly end up below both their stated ideals and their early expectations, unless there is a substantial reversal of current trends. For a while it seemed as if births were merely being postponed, but this does not seem to be be the case any more.
In short, when young women are asked how many babies they want, they still mostly say two. When asked what they expect, they say something less. And what actually happens is less again. For policy, the distinction matters. If the objective were to raise fertility, measures that relax constraints—housing affordability, childcare, predictable career paths, and support for combining work and parenting—are the natural levers.
Changing society to make it more child-friendly is difficult but feasible. Given the massive monetary and labour cost of raising children, no subsidy is going to have a significant effect on ideal or planned numbers. But the removal of constraints like the absence of childcare can reduce the gap between palnned and actual births.
Other constraints are harder to fix. Most importantly, plans for having children commonly anticipate a stable life partnership, which cannot be guaranteed. The same is true of fertility problems. Finally, for some parents, the experience of having a first child is traumatic as a result of health problems, postpartum depression or the failure of the transformative experience of parenthood to offset the loss of freedom it entails. The result, often, is a decision to stop at oen
With better institutions and economic policy, it might be psssible to reverse the increase in the gap between intentions and outcomes that has occurred this century. That might raise births by between 0.2 to 0.3 children per woman. That’s not enough to push fertility above replacement. But it would rule out the collapse scenario we see in places like South Korea, where the combination of patriarchal norms and a modern economy makes childbearing an unappealing choice for most young women.
{ 44 comments }
MisterMr 04.14.26 at 1:58 pm
So, personally I don’t thonk that right now we have to worry too much about denatality, because the world is quite overpopulated; OTOH at some point, say in 2060 or 2100, denatality has to stop or humanity will go extinct.
Thgis leads to a pair of questions that for me are interesting, although I don’t expect to be answered nor that we need to answer them now:
First, is there a way (even just in line of principle) to determine what is the ideal amount of population?
and
Second, once we know what that number is, is there a way to align incentives so that the population will somehow stay there?
In past times, the total amount of population was regulated by a lax form of malthusian limits; lax because in reality people didn’t really live at the brink of starvation, various systems such as delayed family formation existed, but overall things worked like a malthusian system with a sort of moderate buffer.
Malthusianism sucks in various ways, so what exactly can take its place (upper limit)?
And perhaps the reverse effect can work to push population up (lower limit)?
engels 04.14.26 at 7:58 pm
is there a way (even just in line of principle) to determine what is the ideal amount of population?
Once more into the breach…
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
Alex SL 04.14.26 at 10:19 pm
MisterMr,
Not sure why you think it would be as early as 2060 or 2100? Assuming each woman has only one child on average, assuming a generation time of 30 years, for simplicity of the calculation counting only people 1-30 years as “the population”, and starting with a “population” of, say, two billion, there would still be 62.5 million people 1-30 years in 2180. And again, that means there would be considerably more people if we add the 31-90 year-olds that would logically have to exist at the same time. Even by 2300 there would still be millions of people. Sure, even I would say that such hypothetical population reduction could stop somewhere at hundreds of millions, but tens of millions in ca. 2200 is nonetheless very far from extinction.
Then, of course, a world of only tens of millions of humans would be so deeply transformed that expecting the economic structure, social mores, and preference for number of children per family to be the same as today seems unrealistic. More realistically, economic and social changes will take place because of the impacts of climate change and resource overuse. (Just a few days ago I read an article summarising a recent study of unsustainable groundwater use. The near-term future for the Middle East and the triangle Mexico-California-Texas looks particularly bleak, but Europe’s doesn’t look great either. Because of this, entire agricultural regions and urban centers of tens of millions of people will be abandoned in the next few decades even if climate change were to be arrested tomorrow, which it won’t.)
It seems highly unlikely to me that once our descendants have gone through the (from a European and North African to Indian perspective) third ‘dark age’ of population collapse, implosion of organised states, and mass migration, they will find themselves in a world of stable career paths for women who get to decide that they only want one child. I do not want that world that I foresee coming. I do not say, don’t worry, those women will get back into the kitchen soon, haha. I wish we would get a socialist solarpunk utopia with free childcare instead. I am merely saying that where we seem to be headed based on current trends is not going to be scenario where realised preferences remain at one child per family until the last human on the planet turns the lights off.
Tm 04.15.26 at 7:07 am
“around 50-60% of young women report an ideal family size of two children”
What is meant by “ideal family size”, as opposed to the “intended”? It’s not quite clear to me. What does it mean to say “I think 2 children would be ideal but I’ll rather just have 1”?
An interesting survey question for older respondents would be “in retrospect, would you rather prefer to have had more or less children than you actually have”?
D. S. Battistoli 04.15.26 at 11:40 am
Orban supported state-sponsored efforts to increase total factor fertility, but so too have French governments from across the political spectrum.
But I get what John is saying. I think that part of the challenge might be that declining birth rates have lately tended to drive (or at least consistently precede the fact of) rich countries to vote for the far right, which in turn supports pro-natalist policies (which may be among the less heinous things they support.
A lot of it seems to be a matter of comparative birth rates, which might not be surprising for students of the Franco-Prussian and First World Wars. Support for Marine Le Pen, notwithstanding her racism, is suprisingly high in the majority-minority French outremer. In Mayotte and French Guyane, some beneficiaries of the total set of policies of the French state look less than kindly their high-birth-rate neighbors from less -wealthy countries, many of whom do not believe that the accident of birth on one or another side of a border should be this determinate of lived trajectories.
We can point out that the Orbans and Vances of the world want their concitizens to make more babies, among other strange desires that they may have. But viewed from the Global South, watching the greater North Atlantic grey and thrash about against the dying of the light is not just unpleasant: it has negative effects on the lives of people from Global Majority countries.
I wouldn’t mind if the northerners either started having more kids, or learned how to let go of the collective complexes that seem to come with low TFF.
Nathan Lillie 04.15.26 at 4:34 pm
Reducing the human population via birth rates falling short of replacement is the best option we have, because the alternative is for the death rate to increase, due to resource depletion. The fewer people there are, the less drain on the world’s resources from human activity will occur, and we will eat the planet up a little more slowly.
Assuming this is even an issue (assuming we don’t go extinct from our own stupidity), in a couple of centuries our great-great-great grandchildren maybe should start to think about pro-natalist policies. Or not. That’s really their decision.
I am more worried about the what this says about optimism for the future in contemporary society. Young people understand very well that their idiot elders are destroying the planet they are meant to live on, hoarding all the resources for themselves, and that they’ll have to compete with AI and robots to earn a living to raise children who will probably just die in the hell world of the future. So low birth rates could be seen as a rational response to the gloomy future we all face. Is it moral to bring a child into this world? I am not sure it is.
MisterMr 04.15.26 at 7:54 pm
@engels 2
I have strong doubts about the “repugnant conclusion”; some day ago I read in some pop article that some scientist determined that the long terme sustainable level of world population at present levels of consumption is of roughly two billions and one half, but I don’t know how they calculated that number nor what is meant by “sustainable”.
However certainly the number can’t be “infinite” as per the repugnant conclusion because at some point you reach a situation where you have and “Easter Island” ecological collapse (yes I know the Easter Island story is dubious).
@Alex Sl
I was assuming a target desired population of about 2.5 billions, that from a peak of 12 billions takes only 2 generations if each generations halves.
But, I don’t know exactly how tò determine the “target” number. I don’t see why we should be going as low as you say, since at some point denatality has to stop, and stopping it at any point of the curve poses all the same problems, there is no reason to go below whatever the sustainable population number is, and It can’t be much lower than that (we reached one billion around 1800 and even of you want tò go lower than that it only takes other 2 generations).
Tm 04.16.26 at 6:59 am
Battostoli: “part of the challenge might be that declining birth rates have lately tended to drive (or at least consistently precede the fact of) rich countries to vote for the far right, which in turn supports pro-natalist policies (which may be among the less heinous things they support.”
I too think there is an interrelation between declining birth rates and the rise of fascism, although the causative mechanisms are not clear. I don’t see however that right wing governments really implement (as opposed to talking about the need for) “pro-natalist” in the sense of family-friendly policies. The Trump regime certainly hasn’t. What they do instead is demonize and in some cases terrorize the very immigrants their economies can’t do without, attacking the queer community, and in some cases trying to make abortion and contraception harder to get.
The “white” (for lack of a better word) part of the human family is numerically in decline (both relative and absolute) and this trend is not reversible. White nationalists or fascists or however we call them will continue to rage and raise hell against their demographic future but there is nothing they can really do about it. So they will double down on hate and terror and fascism, thereby making any rational policy response impossible and hastening the decline of the West even more.
The rise of fascism in the 20th century happened in a totally different demographic situation – remember “Lebensraum”? This has important consequences. I think for example that Putin’s Imperial Russian project is already doomed by demographics. Have you looked at that population pyramid?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia
D. S. Battistoli 04.16.26 at 9:35 am
@engels 2
@MisterMr 7
Assuming no industrial-assisted nitrogen-fixing of agricultural lands, I believe the carrying capacity of the earth has been calculated to be 2 to 2.5 billion humans. This is dependent upon the capacity of the earth’s various biomes to naturally fix nitrogen (and other micronutrients, natch) through fallows and intensive inundation.
There are good reasons to assume this to be an optimal solution, not least because needing to fallow large portions of the earth’s territory (fallows periods can range from 3-30 years depending on the location and the crops in play) has positive externalities for the other species on the planet. With industrial nitrogen fixing, we just need to adumbrate a bunch of other rules that would see us be respectful of our fellow passengers on the blue marble while also not making it uninhabitable for our descendants (at which we’ve not done a bang-up job to date).
That’s chemistry, geography, and biology. For the repugnant conclusion, I am inclined to follow Ken Binmore’s lead, of which I only just recently learned in a delightful little piece by Lionel Page: that we are at most only ever locally utilitarian, while globally we are vaguely Rawls-egalitarian, that is, inclined to renegotiate any settlement in which we get shafted. Such an approach winks the repugnant conclusion out of existence, while also dealing with the primary objection to Rawls: that people may not be inherently maximin—whether or not they are, outside “the veil,” they will rebel against any non-maximin settlement if they wind up in the min position.
Alex SL 04.16.26 at 9:57 am
Seconding what Nathan Lillie wrote. We are using too many resources from freshwater across phosphate and fisheries to natural gas. We are living unsustainably, and unsustainable means trouble if nothing is done about that. We have two levers we can pull to use fewer resources. First, make people poorer (that is what using fewer resources means in practice). People will not like that. Second, produce fewer people. We are extremely lucky to have accidentally pulled the second lever; accidentally in the sense that we did not do it out of sustainability concern for our collective future. It would be suicidal to try to undo that given that we certainly aren’t collectively willing to pull the first.
MisterMr,
I was responding to your “extinct” at #1, not calculating how long it would take to halve down to a desirable level, however that is defined.
Given that we have world overshoot day around August or so every year, I would suspect that leaving distribution of wealth exactly as unfair as it is right now, 5-6 billion could be just about narrowly sustainable, at least according to those overshoot day calculations. Assuming, on the other hand, that everybody on the planet has the right to a first-world middle class lifestyle, I suspect 1 billion might be pushing it.
Seekonk 04.16.26 at 5:37 pm
@ 6, 9, & 10
Thank you!
From a 1999 Cornell University study: “Democratically determined population-control practices and sound resource-management policies could have the planet’s 2 billion people thriving in harmony with the environment. Lacking these approaches … 12 billon miserable humans will suffer a difficult life on Earth by the year 2100.” http://news.cornell.edu/stories/1999/09/miserable-life-overcrowded-earth-2100
If a nation thinks it needs more people, it should encourage immigration. I think it’s insane to suggest that the earth has too few people.
David, a Bostonian in Tokyo 04.17.26 at 6:36 am
Something not mentioned here is the cost of raising children. It’s humongously expensive if you have even vague ideas of living a comfortable life style. The little blighters don’t leave home until college, often expect financial help therewith, and when college is over, often come home unemployed. So families who think that two or more is the right number of children, may suddenly realize at their first child that even one is essentially unreasonable. (I have friends in exactly this state here in Japan.)
And those of us who don’t have kids get bent out of shape if tax rates are insufficiently progressive that we feel that we’re paying for other people’s kids. (Not me personally, but I’ve heard grumbling about even the most sensible parts of Japan’s latest proposals. Personally, I think governments should support rasing kids (so families can have as many as they want), but should pay for it by taxing the livin’ bejesus out of the rich.)
And for a Japanese joke: at the last election, the main opposition party here formed a coalition with a religous cult that had been in a coalition with the LDP for 20 years, and despite the desire of the population to vote in a real opposition party, there was no longer such a party to vote for, so the LDP now has a supermajority in the lower house. And is frantically pushing through super-obnoxious right-wing bills. The fine print of their efforts to support women to have more chldren turns out to be horrifically punative to women who have less than three kids, in particular, it doesn’t provide college tuition support to a given kid unless you have two more younger kids coming along. You basically have to keep coughing up kids your whole life. And pay for the last two yourself. Nice!
D. S. Battistoli 04.17.26 at 8:53 am
@Tm 8:
I believe that Hungary put significant budgetary resources behind its pro-natalist agenda. The United States has tended to be more libertarian in this regard. And of course the far right across the Global North often opposes many reasonable policies that might increase birth rates and that are supported by the left and center, like paternal leave, state-sponsored childcare, and familial benefits being enjoyed by queer people.
I quite appreciate your point that demography and ideological position on a left-right spectrum are not inextricably linked when looked at in a diachronic perspective. Thanks!
engels 04.17.26 at 7:17 pm
Fwiw the repugnant conclusion doesn’t say limitless growth is optimal; DSB thanks for the link.
I think the “babies vs immigrants” debate gets a bit over-egged. Immigration is basically rich countries outsourcing baby production to places with lower costs: increasingly economically rational no doubt but not clearly less expansionary overall than “grow your own”.
Alex SL 04.17.26 at 10:07 pm
David, a Bostonian in Tokyo,
The original post has a sentence starting with “Given the massive monetary and labour cost of raising children”. I would roughly estimate that cost is most of what underlies the entire conversation, plus career interruption, which is also a kind of cost, plus health considerations. (Bearing and birthing children is a significant risk for the mother, and some health effects are not even risks but effectively unavoidable.)
John Q 04.18.26 at 12:05 am
For those who missed earlier discussion of the repugnant conclusion
https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/30/against-the-repugnant-conclusion/
https://crookedtimber.org/2026/01/14/utilitarianism-it-all-went-wrong-with-sidgwick/
novakant 04.18.26 at 9:19 am
Regarding costs, I am certainly not denying these as I have children myself. That said, I am in awe of families (often but not only with an immigrant background) who somehow manage to raise 3-5 children in London. It’s all relative.
novakant 04.18.26 at 9:29 am
For a critical look at the ethical pitfalls of government mandated population regulation take a look at this documentary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Child_Nation
The goverment has a duty to provide all children with at least adequate services. This is not easily squared with a policy trying to increase or decrease the population, so the government should not pursue any such policies.
joeyjoe 04.18.26 at 1:12 pm
“is there a way (even just in line of principle) to determine what is the ideal amount of population?”
That is answered in the original post.
“In particular, since their choices are the relevant ones, how many babies do young women want?”
i.e. what women want is the ‘relevant choice.’ Ergo, what women want is , in line of principle, the answer to what the ideal population is. And women want 2 children per women. So, the ideal population is slightly less than replacement (2.1), so the ideal population is slightly less than it is now.
joe
MisterMr 04.18.26 at 9:49 pm
@joeyjoe 19
If this was true aleays, this would lead to the extinction of humanity (after a lot of time, but it would). Extinction of humanity is intuitively not a good result.
If (more likely) this is due to specific conditions (e.g. women want 2 childs because there is not enough free childcare / the career loss is too big / whatever) then the question is “when should we modify the conditions so that women want more children”, so the answer “what women want” is a non-answer.
Also, I’m not sure why you think that male preferences are completely irrelevant, either in current natality levels (maybe some women want childs but their partner disagrees) or on the evaluation of what the ideal is (why would male opinion count nothing).
If, as is the general consensus, we should go against the traditional roles where husband works and wife cares for the children, and we excpect husband to care for the children too, then logically husband’s opinion should also be relevant on way or the other (sure husband cannot force a woman to get pregnant, but he can ask her to have or not have children).
engels 04.18.26 at 10:07 pm
There’s also this:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/women-men-femosphere-new-statesman-poll-b2958208.html
<
blockquote>According to the poll carried out by Merlin Strategy for the New Statesman, young women “don’t care for” young men… and citing an over-focus on sexual motivation and a lack of care about political issues…
<
blockquote>
Looks up from the marxists.org How YOU doin’?
Alex SL 04.18.26 at 10:20 pm
joeyjoe,
One of the premises of the conversation is that infinity humans cannot be accommodated, because the planet has fewer than infinity resources, and no other habitable planets are in reach. That means that if women hypothetically wanted an average above the replacement rate, their preferences could not be realised, at least long-term, and not even in the sense of laws but in the sense of reality intervening via ecological and social collapse and starvation. But yes, it doesn’t appear to be the women who insist on having many children, it is just that in most societies across most of history they weren’t empowered to decide.
J-D 04.19.26 at 5:48 am
It is certain that I will die. I try to do some things which I hope will give me some protection against injury and disease, but it would not make sense for me to shape my decisions around a plan to extend my life span forever.
It is certain that humanity will become extinct. It is reasonable for people to try to find ways to provide humanity with some protection against various causes of mortality, but it would not make sense to advocate for shaping our collective decisions around a plan to extend the existence of the species forever. Nobody knows how the extinction of humanity will come about, but if it does happen to come about through people choosing not to have children, that’s wouldn’t be such a bad way for it to happen.
Doug Muir 04.19.26 at 1:57 pm
“I believe the carrying capacity of the earth has been calculated to be 2 to 2.5 billion humans.”
— world population hit 2 billion in the 1920s, and 2.5 billion around 1950 or so. Split the difference and say 1940. In 1940 most of the world’s population was agricultural, and was not using nitrogen fertilizer.
The focus on nitrogen seems… odd. Yes, you can substitute crop rotation and other techniques. But then you’re using three times as much land!
This feels like a holdover from the days when most nitrogen fertilizers were derived from fossil fuels. But the Haber-Bosch process doesn’t care where the energy comes from. Wind, solar, hydro, whatever… if you have enough watts, you can fix all the nitrogen you’ll ever need.
Doug M.
steven t johnson 04.19.26 at 2:01 pm
It seems a little premature to insist that we predetermine the natal policy of a healthy society before we actually have one. To my mind, it seems prerequisite to have practical projections of any strains on environmental carrying capacity. That would imply some sort of managed ecosphere, aka planning (a dirty word indeed, but, still…)
John Q 04.20.26 at 2:48 am
Extrapolation tells us that the Net Reproduction Rate can’t stay above 1, or below 1, indefinitely. Either we will run out of standing room or we will go extinct. But since neither of these is going to happen for thousands of years, this doesn’t tell us anything. To the extent that our individual and collective choices make a difference, it will be how many billions of people will be around in 2100. And within the plausible range (say 6 billion to 12 billion) the fewer billions there are, the better off the average person will be.
Tm 04.20.26 at 7:34 am
David 12:
“The fine print of their efforts to support women to have more chldren turns out to be horrifically punative to women who have less than three kids, in particular, it doesn’t provide college tuition support to a given kid unless you have two more younger kids coming along. You basically have to keep coughing up kids your whole life. And pay for the last two yourself. Nice!”
This sounds like a strong incentive against having children. No reasonable person would have more than one child under such a policy. Unless I misunderstand the scheme.
Little anecdote, back in the days Germany had the rule that only 2 sons from a family were called up for military service. I was a fourth son and benefited from that somwhat unfair rule. I don’t think anybody changed their reproductive behavior based on that policy, though.
DBS 13: “I believe that Hungary put significant budgetary resources behind its pro-natalist agenda. The United States has tended to be more libertarian in this regard.
Afaik most European right wing parties, not to mention he US Trump party, are fanatically neoliberal and really oppose the welfare state, in part because they don’t want “those people” to benefit from it. Perhaps Orban (and PiS in Poland) was an exception from that rule (and perhaps Hungary doesn’t have so many “those people”, or he has found ways to exclude them), although I find it telling that Orban doubled down so heavily on culture war stuff instead of running on his material political accomplishments (if he has any). Hungary’s TFR moderately increased during Orban’s reign, from 1.23 in 2010 to 1.6 in 2021, now back down to 1.3.
engels 14: “Immigration is basically rich countries outsourcing baby production to places with lower costs”
Except that rich countries are putting up heavily defended fences and walls against those “cheap babies”. Maybe you should make up your mind whether promoting birth control or promoting immigration is the morally more repugnant policy (from the proper Marxist POV). The reality is that the governments of rich countries don’t have much influence over poor countries’ reproduction, and they also don’t have much influence over their own people’s reproduction. They can only choose to respond to reality rationally, or make everything worse by grounding their policies in racism and natalism.
novakant 18: “The goverment has a duty to provide all children with at least adequate services. This is not easily squared with a policy trying to increase or decrease the population”
Why do you think so?
engels 21: You might find this study interesting. Young Americans were asked to pick three out of 13 options of what they consider important in life. Republican men said having children was number 1. For Republican women, it was priority nmber 6, for Democratic men number 10, and for Democratic women number 12 out of 13. Right wing men are really quite an outlier, and it will be interesting whether they manage to find women who share their priorities, and we’re all curious how they’ll divide the care work.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-gen-zs-gender-divide-reaches-politics-views-marriage-children-suc-rcna229255
Doug 24: “This feels like a holdover from the days when most nitrogen fertilizers were derived from fossil fuels.”
You mean a holdover from the days of… 2026?
Tm 04.20.26 at 8:13 am
It seems to me that many contributors here still have a very distortet idea of where humanity stands demographically. The fact that some parts of the world now have sub replacement fertility doesn’t change the fact that globally, we are still growing at a historically high rate; global TFR by most estimates is still above 2, the latest UN estimate was 2.3 in 2022 although some experts think UN estimates are too high. Birth rates and fertility rates have recently quite sharply declined in some parts of the world. China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Europe and a few others register more deaths than births, and much of the world (including Brazil, Iran, Turkey, India and Indonesia) does have TFR below or close to 2. But people tend to underestimate population inertia and composition effects. Countries with high fertility rates are not just increasing their population, they are increasing the absolute number of births.
A quick back of the envelope calculation. Let’s assume the world population is at steady state with an average life expectancy of say 80. The total population will be stable at around 80 times the annual number of births.
UN estimates that number of births peaked (hopefully) at 144 million in 2012 and declined to 132 million in 2022. It will be a bit lower now. The cohorts born between 2008 and 2017 all number more than 140 million. This means that the most populous cohorts in history are just now reaching reproductive age. And if we would continue to produce 130 million new humans per year, 80 times that would be above 10 billion. If we want a stable global population of 8 billion, the number of births needs to fall to 100 million. We are very far from that! And population inertia means that even if we come down to that number, population will continue growing for decades!
To get to the 2.5 billion mentioned by some commenters, it needs to come down to about 30 million, less than one fourth of the status quo. To worry about this far-away prospect is, frankly, a luxury we can’t afford.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_world#Vital_statistics
engels 04.20.26 at 1:12 pm
rich countries are putting up heavily defended fences and walls against those “cheap babies”
I didn’t say it was popular (like offshoring generally, often it isn’t) but from a business perspective it’s a no brainer. You’ve invested billions training everyone in your country with a high school diploma to write ad copy and design drones: why task those people with refereeing backyard baseball games and reading bedtime stories? Comparative advantage, duh.
Anyway, the point of bringing this up was that the babies are getting made in the same numbers regardless of where. It’s like the debate about whether a country should or should not import the fossil fuels it uses: lots of reasonable (and emotion-driven) arguments on both sides but if you think it will make a lick of difference to climate change then could I pitch you a bridge?
D. S. Battistoli 04.20.26 at 2:00 pm
@Doug Muir 24
You are partly right: entirely right in that I am referring to the population growth enabled by the Haber-Bosch process, and intriguingly wrong that I might be referring to fossil fuels (I mean, they’re a decent scapegoat for a lot of things, so yours was a high-probability guess). BASF and the other companies that underwrote the development of that process were intentionally acting in advance of what they saw as a coming shortage of fully natural fertilizer.
Now as to “using” three times as much land: I mean, I guess, if we presume that everything else about the global development of political and legal systems were to have been identical under a scenario with a 60% lower global population. That is, if we assume an anglophone common-law system of land titling, each landowner whose real estate is used in cultivation would need to own three times as much land (in humid temperate climates; more like 10-15 in the Amazon, which would likely have had no route to exchanging its role as the world’s largest carbon sink for another as the world’s largest source of soya and other agricultural products).
But just as you noted that most of the world’s population was not practicing industrialized agriculture at the dawn of the twentieth century, so too were they not operating under Western European land-management schemes. If you’re the same Doug Muir who is the king of counterfactual causative claims in other posts, you might see in the decades-long multinational effort that resulted in the adumbration and scaling of Haber-Bosch a dual-Nobel-winning historical turning point that might even approach that of a Scottish joint-stool for historical importance.
Where you and I are in agreement is that pretty much the entire last century of human history would be impossible if humanity had not figured out a way to fix nitrogen.
Also @Tm 28
Now, I should be clear, I am not advocating turning back the clock. In my original post, I talked about all the special conceptual rules folk are trying to figure out about how we’re supposed to respect nature. I agree that there is no reasonable path back. So I think I agree with you that the increasingly pressing search continues for an alternate equilibrium that doesn’t toast the atmosphere, boil the oceans, and kill off untold non-human species.
D. S. Battistoli 04.20.26 at 2:43 pm
@John Q 16
One of the points that I only glancingly saw touched on in those earlier Repugnant-Conclusion posts is that the post-Sedgwick durability of RC-susceptible utilitarianism (henceforth, RCSU) may in part due to some more-proximate repugnant conclusions to which RCSU is immune:
By assuming that larger populations always have greater utility, we obviate any debate as to whether forced sterilization and birth control are acceptable (obviously there are non-population-maximizing arguments against these, but the assumption that more people is always better doesn’t call for much investigation of these). Similarly, if we believe that booked or projected increases in population may risk denting total welfare, some non-RCS utilitarianisms might be open to letting certain wars or other population-depressing violent acts trim the margins. Same goes for the moral question of whether we should intervene to stop deadly epidemics.
The Repugnant Conclusion is a very abstract conclusion, the acceptance of which enables utilitarians to almost never be monsters in the here-and-now. But this isn’t just a susceptibility that’s down to overreliance on the textual abstracts of one British philosopher.
Not so incidentally, RCSU allows analytic philosophers to stay in lockstep with the dominant, Endogenous Growth Theory (the “growth is always good” school) of economics, which often uses GDP as a proxy for well-being. Since Paul Romer’s 1986 publication of “Increasing Returns and Long-Run Growth” and more explicitly Michael Kremer’s 1993 “Population Growth and Technological Change,” economics has put itself in a position that easily parallels longtermism, which is partly how someone like Will McAskill can become the intellectual bosom-buddy of hedge-fund and tech billionaires with their often silly basket of desires associated with variations on the idea that more is always better. EGT sees no diminishing marginal returns to any kind of growth, including population growth. It acts as though the Repugnant Conclusion does not exist (and, as a result, swerves the same set of debates that RCSU does).
There’s an interesting move being now made by some folks in the field of development economics, looking to excise from their field everything that is not the study of how to maximize economic growth (as far as I can see, almost entirely from an Endogenous Growth Theory perspective).
Whereas in my most recent comment, I talked about the environmental impacts of embracing the Repugnant Conclusion, here we can see some social-policy impacts: a person-centrism to accepted policies that is welcome, but which comes with serious long-terms costs (unless you’re McAskill, in which case those costs get sideloaded on what Tyler Cowen memorably described as an express “train to crazy town”).
Tm 04.20.26 at 5:04 pm
engels: “the babies are getting made in the same numbers regardless of where. It’s like the debate about whether a country should or should not import the fossil fuels”
This is actually… not a good analogy and it’s also not related to reality. Most babies in high fertility countries stay where they were born or if they migrate (often due to war), most of them by far move to other high fertility countries. There is in fact relatively little migration from (poor) high fertility countries to (rich) low fertility countries because the rich countries take ever more extreme measures to prevent it, although of course racists think it’s a lot and it will always be “too many” for them. You may be correct that this isn’t very rational “from a business perspective”, but that’s the world we live in. Also note that war refugees from Ukraine – the biggest group to be allowed into the EU in recent years – were an exception, and Ukraine is a low fertility country. That we took in a relatively large number of Syrians was another exception but that won’t be repeated. Not any time soon.
novakant 04.20.26 at 8:34 pm
Why do you think so?
The operative phrase here is every child. If you want to decrease the population you are necessarily discriminate against families with a lot of children, cf. China, while pronatalist policies fail to address and often excacerbate structural injustices amongst other disadvantages. The top-down approach is morally wrong and doesn’t work. The focus should be on the children and their needs.
Doug Muir 04.20.26 at 9:41 pm
TM @ 26 “You mean a holdover from the days of… 2026?”
— Fair cop; I got out over my skis there. I should have said, “a holdover from the days when nitrogen fixation was /only/ done by fossil fuels”.
Right now, about a third of the energy for ammonia production is coming from non-fossil sources. But that’ll almost certainly rise to over 50% in the next decade or so.
D.S. @ 30 “Now as to “using” three times as much land: I mean, I guess, if we presume that everything else about the global development of political and legal systems were to have been identical under a scenario with a 60% lower global population.”
What? No.
Most of the world wasn’t using a European-style model of crop rotation. Tropical and subtropical rice, for instance, didn’t rotate because it fertilized through irrigation. Rice paddies gradually and slowly fix nitrogen, so you don’t really need to rotate them. Also, rice farmers added a variety of fertilizers — night soil, soybean waste, seaweed, what have you. Japan’s late Tokugawa / Meiji population boom was built on improved rice production, which in turn was built on commodification of fish meal fertilizer.
But to bring it back: your original point was “Assuming no industrial-assisted nitrogen-fixing of agricultural lands, I believe the carrying capacity of the earth has been calculated to be 2 to 2.5 billion humans.” Putting aside the question of calculated by whom, based on what — why would we ever give up industrial-assisted nitrogen-fixing?
Doug M.
engels 04.20.26 at 10:20 pm
why would we ever give up industrial-assisted nitrogen-fixing?
We already have?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15710999/Steve-Keen-fuel-crisis.html
D. S. Battistoli 04.21.26 at 6:39 am
@ Doug Muir 32
It is my sense that you are quite misreading me. In reply to a comment in which I wrote, “Now, I should be clear, I am not advocating turning back the clock. [. . .] I agree that there is no reasonable path back,” you ask, “why would we ever give up industrial-assisted nitrogen-fixing?” Yours is a good question: both you and I would agree that it should be posed to someone who wants to give up industrial agriculture today.
On rice, it seems that you are referring exclusively to Oryza sativa, originally cultivated mainly in Asia, and within that constraint, you are right. O. glaberrima has historically been planted in shifting cultivation which, pace your most recent claim, is a form of agriculture attested in pre-colonial Africa and the Americas.
You also seem to be persisting in the assertion that prior to the Haber-Bosch process, nitrogen-fixing fertilizer was made from fossil fuels. While for some decades in the nineteenth century, some was made with ammonium oxide left over from coal production, this window largely closed before Haber-Bosch’s opened, due to steel production formulas. Regardless, the utilization of natural gas extracts in Haber-Bosch today dwarfs any prior utilization of fossil fuels; pre-Haber-Bosch, nitrogen-fixing fertilizers were overwhelmingly biological in their makeup, from things like bat guano.
Now, it is my sense that you misread me rather aggressively, often introducing new inaccurate statements along the way. Perhaps I am doing the same to you, and this is what inspires your particular habits of response. In a smaller world, I might invite you to a Zoom call to clear the air, as I don’t actually think we’re either philosophically or factually that far apart. But as it is, I am torn between a strong appreciation of your attraction to the topics that interest you and a frequent sense of disagreement with how you engage them. At the heart, however, my appreciation for your intellectual preoccupations does win out.
David, a Bostonian in Tokyo 04.21.26 at 7:12 am
Tm writes: “Unless I misunderstand the scheme.”
My guess here is that the folks who proposed the scheme didn’t understand it, either. Said folks’ overall intention is to penalize having less than three kids and encourage more than three. An attempt at replicating the late Meiji population boom that was one of the drivers of Japan’s expansionism in that period. But being rightites, they’re more into penalization than encouragement.
Tm 04.21.26 at 12:06 pm
People interested in demographic data, here’s a fantastic high resolution study of the population change in Europe (EU plus UK, CH, NOR) since 1961. For no particular reason…
https://correctiv.org/aktuelles/2026/04/21/die-haelfte-der-europaeischen-gemeinden-hat-weniger-einwohner-als-vor-60-jahren/
engels 04.21.26 at 8:44 pm
Btw it feels like there’s an obvious way to approach questions like this:
since their choices are the relevant ones, how many babies do young women want?
…that isn’t exactly the way this discussion has unfolded.
Doug Muir 04.21.26 at 9:02 pm
D.S. @36, yes, it does appear I’m not understanding you. I think it goes both ways? i.e., I don’t understand why you think I think I am “persisting in the assertion that prior to the Haber-Bosch process, nitrogen-fixing fertilizer was made from fossil fuels”. I’ve never made that assertion.
But I’m more puzzled than actually annoyed. You seem a decent fellow; let’s try to give each other the benefit of the doubt.
Doug M.
engels 04.26.26 at 1:29 pm
A hitherto neglected angle (afaics):
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/26/toxic-exposure-climate-crisis-study
David, a Bostonian in Tokyo 04.27.26 at 6:06 am
Since this thread is still going, here’s a tad overmuch video on Japan’s situation.
(Some of its numbers are wacky. Sure, the average price of new condos is crazy, but real folks don’t live in new condos. Also, Japan did just fine with a population significantly smaller than the current population, so I just don’t see worring about a perfectly reasonable (by historical standards) population level 50 years from now making any sense whatsoever.)
My opinion here is (of course) that it’s all economics, and the specific economic problem here is the median income. In Japan, it’s been going down since the early 1990s. People can’t afford to go on dates, let alone get married.
That video points out that married Japanese women are producing 1.91 babies on average, which is better than overall levels for other industrialized countries, but that many Japanese don’t get married.
Japan’s “lifetime employment system” was always a bit of an overstatement: it only applied to “regular employees” at large companies (companies with over 300 employees). But the “Koizumi reforms” allowed those companies to use a much higher percentage of non-regular (i.e. part time) labor. With lower wages, fewer perks, and fewer legal protections. So the number of those already rare tasty jobs went down. And most people without “regular employee” status simply don’t have the income or income stability to make marriage and childbirth reasonable life options.
(Aside: I think that that video overstates how obnoxious Japanese work life is. Sure, I only worked in a Japanese company for 2 years (a long time ago), but the local engineers didn’t seem too unhappy with it. Now, that was a BIG company, and the Japanese workers I (occassionally) hang out with nowadays are largely Sloan B-school grads. So maybe I’m more out of touch than I think…)
Hilariously, although the previous incarnation of the LDP actually passed laws limiting overtime (since “death from overwork” was a legally recognized thing that actually happened), the new supermajority-in-the-lower-house LDP is working to revoke those overtime limitations (which also reduced accidents caused by exhaused truck drivers).
The current PM (IMHO, a complete idiot) is gung-ho for everyone working 60 hours a week or more, with “Hatarake, hatarake, hatarake!” (WORK WORK WORK!) being her favorite slogan. But she herself has family things she does and also claims to have medical issues that prevent her from doing some official things occassionally.
Tm 04.27.26 at 11:40 am
engels 41 from the link: “Shanna Swan, a co-author on the new paper, co-produced a groundbreaking 2017 study that found sperm levels among men in western countries had plummeted by more than 50% over four decades. Human fertility has been diminishing at a similar rate, other research has shown.”
If they say so I guess they must have evidence for it. But I’m confused. That 2017 study would cover the epriod from the 1970s to the 2010s. Here are TFR data for some western countries.
Germany (FRG): TFR peaks in 1966 at 2.54, then plummets to 1.38 in 1978. Since that year, fluctuates between 1.28 (1985) and 1.6 (2021). 2025 level was 1.39. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#Vital_statistics)
Italy: TFR peaks at 2.70 in 1964, falls below 2.0 in 1977. The decline here takes longer, 1.19 is reached in 1995, then recovers to 1.44 in 2009. 2025 level was 1.14.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Italy#Vital_statistics)
In France, the peak was also in 1964 at 2.9. Below 2.0 in 1975. Here too, a low is reached in the 1990s (1.66 in 1993) and then the rate recovers to 2.02 in 2010. 2025 level is 1.56.
What can’t be overlooked is that while there are broadly similar trends in these countries, the actual fertility levels are very different. Second, there is always a steep decline in the 1960s and 1970s that is easy to explain with the availability of reliable contraception. Third, after the initial baby bust (“Pillenknick” in German), fertility rates have tended to fluctuate within a relatively narrow range for decades, without a clear downward trend, even temporally recovered considerably. This seems to strongly contradict the “environmental toxins” theory. And fourth, there has been another decline over the last 10 years, resulting in record low fertility rates in many countries, but not
China: from 1.7 in 2016 to 0.93 in 2025.
EU: from 1.57 in 2016 to 1.34 in 2025.
USA: from 1.82 in 2016 to 1.58 in 2025.
Also interesting Argentina: from 2.49 in 2008 to 1.23 in 2024.
Another note, East European fertility rates are dominated by the cliff of 1990, which is really jaw-droppingly unprecedented afaik.
MisterMr 04.27.26 at 12:39 pm
The video from David @42 is interesting, but Japan is not the only country with denatality.
Apart from South Korea, wich has super-low natality (much worse than Japan), also Spain and Italy are more or less at the same natality levels of Japan (here), plus some other smaller countries.
How many of the problems affecting Japan are also affecting Spain and Italy?
BTW: I checked the page for ours worked per worker by country (here) and has very weird results, Japans has lower hours than Italy (?!?), maybe they don’t count the famous hidden overtime?
Also: “Greece ranked the highest In EU with 1886 average hours per year, while Germany ranked the lowest with 1340 average hours worked respectively.”; tch, those lazy Germans.
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