The Big Babybearing Bribery Blunder
The year I turned 9, a new book showed up on my family’s bookshelves. The cover of The Population Bomb included this warning: “While you are reading these words, four more people will have died of starvation. Most of them children.” The book, written by Stanford professors Paul and Anne Ehrlich, warned of massive global famine unless nations took collective action to reduce population growth.
The scare tactics in this 1968 book worked. Maybe too well.
The mass starvation never happened – since then, population has doubled, but agriculture has beome five times more efficient per acre -- but the book galvanized a conversation, and both governments and individuals slowly increased efforts to contracept and conserve to slow down growth. By the mid-1990’s almost no one was worried about too much population growth.
Today nations are facing a different problem; not a population bomb, but an implosion. And it has them scrambling to find ways to convince families to have more children – soon.
Without continued growth, they worry, their populations will get older, sicker and less competitive, with fewer and fewer working people supporting more and more retirees. Businesses won’t be able to find productive workers; retirees and the infirm won’t be able to find medical help; government support systems will get upside down. As Elon Musk told the Wall Street Journal in 2021: “If we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps to expand a little bit, civilization is going to crumble.”
Musk is not alone – economists and government leaders across the world are with him on this one.
Here’s the number that has everyone worried: 2.1.
That’s the number of children families must produce, on average, to sustain the population (it’s called, inelegantly, the “replacement rate.”) And every year the global average number of children is declining, from 5.0 in 1968, the year The Population Bomb was published, to 2.3 today. Projections now show the world population will peak at 10 billion around the year 2060, before beginning a steady decline, settling in at around 6 billion humans by around 2160.
But many countries are already averaging well below 2.1 children per family. All of those countries are getting older; some are already beginning to lose population. And the prospect of aging and shrinking populations has them throwing everything they can think of at the wall to try to convince families to have more children. Here are just a few of the efforts underway:
· Singapore has partnered with Mentos to produce a rap video encouraging couples to eat a mint to improve their breath, then get busy and “make Singapore’s birth rate spike” (sample lyric: “Let’s not watch fireworks; let’s make ‘em instead.”);
· Russia gives a one-time bonus of $7,000 to families who have more than two kids;
· Italy and Greece give per-child baby bonuses;
· South Korea offers tax incentives and free day care for families having children;
Over a 35 year period, more than 3800 South Korean schools closed due to declining birthrates. This one was adapted to become an art gallery.
· Denmark offers 12 months of paid parental leave, subsidized day care, and free IVF treatment for mothers under age 40, as well as a promotional campaign for potential mothers (“Have you counted your eggs today?”) and fathers (“Do they swim too slow?”);
· Japan’s government has sponsored singles mixers for singles;
· Taiwan has offered free pets to families choosing to have children;
· Austria offers 2.5 years of maternity leave to mothers;
· Hungary offers couples a $30,000 loan upon marriage, forgiveable if they have three or more children;
· Iran has banned abortion in an explicit effort to drive more births;
· Prior to their election, both President Trump and Vice President Trump floated incentives to potential parents, with Trump referring to a potential “baby bonus” and Vance suggesting parents with children might have their votes count more. US House Speaker Mike Johnson has highlighted increased fertility rates as a benefit of a national abortion ban.
Which of these approaches across the world has been most successful? Well, none of them (not even the Singapore Mentos rap video).
Here’s a selected list of countries and their current fertility rates from the UN Population Fund’s 2024 list (remember the target to maintain population is 2.1 children per family):
India 2.0
Vietnam 1.9
Mexico 1.8
Denmark 1.7
US 1.7
Iran 1.7
Austria 1.5
Hungary 1.5
Canada 1.5
Italy 1.3
Greece 1.3
China 1.2
Singapore 1.1
South Korea 0.9 (lowest in the world)
What’s going on?
Broadly speaking, the wealthier and more educated a country gets, the lower its fertility rate drops. Rates are highest in poorer, less-educated countries (west and central Africa’s rate is 4.8; the rate in the “least-developed” countries across the world is 3.8), but beyond that explanations vary by country.
In China, low fertility rates are clearly in part a hangover from the country’s “one child” policy (1979-2015): it became a cultural norm to either forego children or pour all resources into a single child.
In Denmark, extensive studies have determined that childbearing has simply taken a backseat to other priorities: ambitious careers, fun hobbies; exciting travel. Dr. Soren Ziebe, former head of the Danish Fertility Society, told The New York Times what he consistently hears in interviews: “Young people say, ‘Having children would be the end of my life,’” and “’I have so many other things I want to do.’”
In the US the decline in fertility appears to be broadly related to our decline in religiosity – fertility rates are still high among Mormons, Mennonites, and Orthodox and Hassidic Jews – and our perception of economic instability. Among poorer residents, rising housing prices, health care costs and educational debt bring more uncertainty to prospective parents. Among wealthier potential parents, “workism,” the compulsion to buy more stuff and seek fulfillment and validation through work delays marriage, giving them fewer years to be having children (the average age for a US woman to get married now is just over 28, compared with just over 20 in 1960).
The waning interest in having children is hard to reverse, Phillip Cohen of the University of Maryland recently told the podcast Radiolab:
“No country that has ever dipped below replacement rate has ever come back above. There really is no success story out there. Nobody has ever turned this around.”
What might reverse the population implosion?
But there is a solution of sorts, at least for a country like the US: immigration. Between 2020 and 2024, the latest US Census Bureau’s report finds that 90% of the nation’s US 387 metropolitan areas grew larger, and 100% experienced net positive international migration. In fact, immigrants accounted for 2.7 million of the growth of 3.2 million new residents (about 84% of all growth) during that time. That’s not a long-term solution, obviously (by 2100, 97% of countries are projected to be experiencing declines so there won’t be many immigrants available), but in the meantime, maybe if we’re real friendly and open our arms, new immigrants could extend the period of time before “our civilization is going to crumble.”
-Leslie
Notes:
Key arguments of The Population Bomb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
Worldwide efforts to increase interest in child-bearing: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/opinion/sunday/capitalism-children.html;https://www.vox.com/23971366/declining-birth-rate-fertility-babies-children
Singapore’s Mentos babymaking rap song: https://www.wsj.com/video/mentos-ad-taps-make-love-for-singapore-campaign/26757FF0-6B96-47C5-88AB-E250BFB560CD
Trump on “baby bonus”: https://www.c-span.org/program/campaign-2024/former-president-trump-speaks-at-cpac/624800
Vance on electoral differentiation for parents: https://youtu.be/jBrEng3xQYo?si=aufjizpvbFQ-sspB
Johnson on fertility decline as a reason for national abortion ban: https://newrepublic.com/post/176437/new-house-speaker-johnson-blamed-abortions-social-security-medicare-cuts
US explanations: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/health/fertility-births-vance.html
Global fertility rate: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate; https://ourworldindata.org/global-fertility-has-halved
The coming population plateau: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/briefing/american-population-slowdown-immigration.html
Age of US marriage over the years: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/ms-2.pdf
Musk on population expansion: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/07/elon-musk-civilization-will-crumble-if-we-dont-have-more-children.html
South Korean school conversion: https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/culture/2021/07/703_312029.html
Radiolab story on future population decline: https://radiolab.org/podcast/growth
Impact of immigration on future US population growth: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-census-projections-show-immigration-is-essential-to-the-growth-and-vitality-of-a-more-diverse-us-population/
New US Census figures showing international migration percentages: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/population-estimates-counties-metro-micro.html