Of all the problems that currently beset the world, a lack of people doesn’t, at first glance, appear to be one of them. After all, the world’s population is more than 8 billion, and the UN predicts it will reach almost 10 billion by 2050. That seemingly ever-expanding number consumes ever more resources, which are linked to climate change, pollution, arguably warfare, and the destruction of natural habitats: the World Wildlife Fund says that the Earth has lost 73% of its wildlife population in the past 50 years.
Yet according to a leading British demographer, the world is on the brink of a catastrophic fertility crisis. In No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children, Paul Morland argues that humanity is “staring into a demographic abyss”. The problem, he writes, is that “the global rise in human numbers is about delaying death, while less and less is about the creation of new life”.
That means that across the world we see ageing populations that have fewer and fewer people of working age to support the elderly. New Zealand returned a record low fertility rate last year of 1.56 births per woman (56,955 live births). That was down from 1.66 in 2022. The replacement rate needed to maintain the current population long term is 2.1.
Like women across the developed world, and in an increasing number of countries in the developing world, New Zealand women are having children later in life. The median age of giving birth is 31.3 years old. In the 1970s, it was around 25. As Rebekah Hennessey from Stats NZ has delicately put it: “If women start having children later in life, they may have fewer children.”
Morland notes that New Zealand is more fertile than his home country, the UK, where in 2023 the fertility rate declined to 1.44 children per woman, also the lowest figure since records began.
The UK has had more deaths in recent years than births, and yet the population continues to grow. The reason for this is immigration, which also helps support the New Zealand economy and many others across the developed world. Last year, there was net migration to NZ of 126,000.
But, says Morland, “immigration is really a short-term Ponzi scheme”, in which more and more immigration is necessary to prevent a collapse in the labour market, not least because immigrants adopt the same fertility rates as the local population and themselves grow old and in need of support.
He says the scale of migration required is such that by the end of this century, almost half of the UK’s population would be foreign born. Similar patterns would recur throughout the developed world.
For campaigners who would like to see the global population drop, immigration is a sensible solution to labour shortages, because it’s a redistribution of people, not an increase in numbers.
Morland rejects this analysis because, he says, mass immigration has already fuelled the rise of Donald Trump, Brexit in the UK and the growth of far-right parties in Europe. And it’s likely to trigger more alarming reactions if it continues at its present rate. “However liberal and cosmopolitan you might think you are,” he says, “if we’re going to live in democracies, we have to take account of the people who don’t want mass, endless ethnic change.”
In any case, he says, the countries from which migrants come are themselves experiencing lower fertility rates. So siphoning off their most dynamic and well-qualified citizens for the developed world’s labour markets is a modern form of colonialism that has a deleterious effect on countries in the developing world that desperately need to retain people with skills and energy.
He believes politicians and economists often overlook the issue of fertility, which has an enormous impact on the key markers of a nation’s performance, like GDP and indebtedness. In crude terms, the more people you have of working age, the more potential tax revenue, while the more people you have of retirement age, the greater the burden on spending.
Immigration is really a short-term Ponzi scheme, in which more and more is needed to prevent a collapse in the labour market.
There is a measurement called the old-age dependency ratio (OADR) that identifies where nations are balanced on that particular axis. In 2020, New Zealand had an OADR of 24%. That means there were just over four potential workers for each person over 65. It’s estimated that by 2060, the OADR will be almost 50% (two potential workers for each person over the age of 65).
Governments facing the prospect of an increasing number of retirees and a shrinking number of workers have limited room for manoeuvre. They can either tax workers more to pay for the costs of supporting older citizens, import labour from abroad, or borrow money to fill the gap in tax revenues.
Of course, you can do all three, but there’s a limit to how much tax people are prepared to pay for the elderly, and the social tensions that often attend immigration have already been mentioned. Japan has a fertility rate of just 1.2 but it has not opened itself to the global labour market. As a consequence, it has borrowed heavily to pay for its ageing population. National debt last year got down to 255% of the country’s GDP. Its famed economic miracle no longer looks world-beating. A shrinking young population means a decline in creativeness and invention – patent applications have gone from being double the number of those in the US to barely a third now.
“As the absolute number of Japanese students keeps falling,” writes Morland, “we can expect this decline to carry on.”
Greece and Italy have low fertility rates, ageing populations and huge national debt. In Italy in 1950, there were 17 under-10s for every person over the age of 80. Today, writes Morland, “the two groups are matched roughly one to one”.
Nor are these trends restricted to the western or wealthy nations. Countries as varied as Iran, India, Brazil and Thailand are all seeing steep declines in the number of children being born.
But then how else can the world’s population be reduced? In 1968, the American biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which warned of mass starvation and called for coercive population control. The world’s population has more than doubled since then, and with the exception of war-created famine, starvation is largely unknown.
Ehrlich, like many prophets of doom, got it wrong. But there has been a price to pay, not least in human-influenced climate change, which could be damagingly irreversible. Continual population growth and increased consumption cannot go on forever. Even Morland acknowledges that fact, although he dismisses concerns about overcrowding.
“That’s all an illusion,” he says. “First of all, we choose to live in towns and cities. Would you prefer to live in a buoyant, bustling city like London, or somewhere like Detroit, which has lost a very large proportion of its population?”
Indeed, he says, densely populated cities such as London and New York have some of the highest rents in the world, but there’s still enormous demand to live in these places. He maintains that such large conurbations, with their public transport and modern insulated homes, are more environmentally friendly than living in the countryside.
It has to be said that Morland makes this speech from his second home in southwest France in the sparsely populated foothills of the Pyrenees. “I’ve got the best of both worlds,” the father of three beams on our video call. His other home is in London, where he’s been a research fellow at the University of London as well as Oxford. “In the very long term, we will have to curb the growth of population,” he concedes. “I don’t delude myself that we can grow forever.”
Eventually, he says, he thinks there should be a “flattening off” of population, but not until there is advanced AI and robotics to mitigate the drop off in labour.
Unsavoury history
Morland is what’s known as a pro-natalist, someone who is in favour of increased birth. Pro-natalism is not a well-organised campaign, but a fragmented idea with something of an unsavoury history. Governments that in the past have put a premium on women bearing more children tend to be dictatorial (Hitler and Stalin were keen on expanding their populations), religiously motivated or patriarchal, or all three.
Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s nominee to trim the US bureaucracy, is a pro-natalist with 11 living children. “Population collapse is coming … Earth is almost empty of humans,” he wrote recently.
Perhaps the most overtly pro-natalist government in operation today is Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary. According to Morland, it spends 5% of Hungary’s GDP on pro-natal policies (eg, free IVF, generous tax breaks for parents, favourable loans to buy homes), but these initiatives have shifted the birth rate from 1.25 to only 1.5, still some way short of replacement levels.
Orbán is also staunchly anti-immigration, leading many critics to view pro-natalism as just a disguised form of nationalism. However, governments of all political stripes offer what are implicit pro-natalist policies, with tax breaks for parents and subsidies for childcare. Yet while there are nations with these policies that have seen a modest rise in the fertility rate, there are others in which the fertility rate has remained unchanged (though it could be argued that, without the policies, the rate would be even lower).
Perhaps a more fundamental problem for the pro-natalist cause is that there are many aspects of the economy in which government intervention is demanded or welcome, but fertility is not one of them. The decision to have a child or children is a private one, usually restricted to the parents.
“Let’s go to bed and help resolve future labour shortages,” is a romantic gambit, it’s safe to assume, used by no one ever in the history of procreation.
People don’t want to feel socially shamed or politically coerced into making families, but rather they want their choices to be based on their own desires and circumstances. From a historical perspective, women have only recently gained some measure of control over their reproductive systems and liberation from enforced domesticity. The consequence of greater female autonomy and sex equality, it’s fair to say, has to some extent been a lower birth rate. Many feminists are therefore understandably suspicious of pro-natalism, seeing its call for more babies as a means of steering women back into the confines of motherhood.
Yet the truth is a growing number of people are anxious about the very idea of bringing children into the world.
Morland accepts these points, but counters that, according to polling on the issue, women are not in fact getting what they want. In the UK and US, he says, women “have about three-quarters of a child less than they say they would like”.
One reason for this is that children are increasingly viewed as a prohibitive financial expense. Yet, paradoxically, it is the poor who produce most children, which is why sub-Saharan Africa is the only extensive area of the world with high fertility rates, although there are signs that here, too, they are dropping.
In the developed world, parenthood is burdened with a growing weight of expectations that leaves many young people feeling they can’t afford the time or money necessary to raise another child. Alleviating those pressures – both cultural and financial – may help create a more positive story around child-rearing.
Yet the truth is a growing number of people are anxious about the very idea of bringing children into the world, first because of concerns about overpopulation and overconsumption, secondly because of the threat of war, conflict, bigotry and discord, and finally, perhaps, due to a greater sense of individualism, with people more concerned with their own self-actualisation than the responsibility of raising others.
Morland is dismissive of all this kind of thinking, arguing that human ingenuity will deal with the challenges of climate change, that the world is more peaceful now than it has ever been, and that individualism needn’t lower fertility.
“In order to have a high-fertility thriving society, we don’t all need to abnegate ourselves to some sort of collective endeavour. I think we do need to have a robust and highly individuated sense of ourselves within a longer, greater narrative, be that national or communal.”
In any case, he says, if anxiety about conflict is one of the reasons people are having fewer children, why is it that Israel, which has been in near continual conflict since it was founded, is the one nation in the developed world with a higher-than-replacement fertility rate?
There are no clear-cut solutions to arresting the decline in fertility. There is not even a consensus that falling fertility is a bad thing. But it is an issue that will inevitably have an impact on nations across the world, including New Zealand. What we as individuals and societies do to lessen that impact, or to nullify its negative effects, is a subject we will have to get used to thinking about.