The World's Suicide Attempt

If you hate human beings your day has come. At present rates the human population will peak in around thirty years. Then start plummeting.

In the greatest crisis to ever face the human race the birth rate all over the world is plunging and it will leave the world with vastly fewer people and the attendant catastrophes that go with population collapse.

Other than the possibility of an all-out nuclear exchange the declining birth rate all over the world is the greatest threat to humanity. Consider the words of Mads Larsen, the Norwegian demographer: “It is the most severe challenge the West has ever faced. It is worse than volcanic eruptions, worse than World War II, worse than the Black Plague, worse than any climate crisis. We got through all those enormous challenges of the past. I guarantee you, with mathematical certainty, that we will not survive shrinking fertility.”

There are over a 100 nations with a population of nearly 3 billion who are under replacement rate. What is the replacement rate? It is a little over two babies per woman to take account of the slight imbalance in male and female births — slightly more of the former are born. Also, not all girls survive until reproductive age.

If a nation is under replacement rate the women in those societies are not having enough babies to keep their populations stable. What happens to those nations? Let’s use China as an example. Her birthrate is about 1. At that rate China would lose half her population in the next 60-70 years, or about 700 million people. Last year China lost 13 million people. So the downward spiral has begun. You read online these days lots of people saying this is going to be the Chinese century. If China is going to be dominant they better get with it. For the next fifty years China will be aging rapidly so she would have an ever increasing proportion of elderly in her population.

 

About 80 countries are around 1.5 babies per woman. Those nations will lose half their population in the next 100 years. Without immigration the U.S. would have 100 million fewer people by the turn of the century.

John Shelton in World magazine: “The moral order of the universe, as the Chinese Communist Party is painfully and all-too-slowly discovering, is not a set of suggestions for enlightened living. It is an iron law with fearsome consequences. It is not only nature’s law but God’s as nature’s Creator. And as Paul warned the Galatians: “God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.” So, too, it seems, do nations.”

 

Consider the United States. This from the Daily Wire: “Recent projections from the Congressional Budget Office warn that, beginning in 2033, there will be more deaths reported in the United States than births. After 2032, U.S. population growth will be entirely dependent on net immigration, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s projections. The United States recorded just 514,000 more births than deaths in 2025.”

Demographic collapse becomes increasingly worse because every generation is going to be a third smaller if women average 1.4 offspring. If we fall down to South Korea’s rate of 0.7, every generation will be two-thirds smaller. That means that in just three generations, you would have lost 96% of your children. To put it another way if we have 100 children starting school today, in three generations there are going to be four.

 

The modern world is moving towards self-eradication. 

And consider the trend in some big countries with fertility rates still above replacement levels: India: 2.3 today, down from 4.0 in 1990; Indonesia, 2.3 today, down from 3.1 in 1990; Argentina, 2.3 today, down from 3.0 in 1990; Mexico, 2.1 today, down from 3.5 in 1990. Africa is the only continent where high fertility remains the rule, but it is dropping there as well: the average fertility rate is now 4.2, down from 6.0 in 1990. Since 1950 the birthrate for the entire world has been cut in half.

What are the Consequences of the birth dearth?

A falling birthrate threatens economic and social stability. Mads Larsen gives the example of Norway. With a lot fewer children being born, there will be a lot fewer children in elementary school, then later in high school and universities. So every part of society is just going to keep shrinking. 

And then when they enter into the workforce, Larson observes,  Norway will not have enough workers to uphold those structures. There won’t be enough nurses, teachers, etc.

The first and immediate impact of the birth dearth is the gradual and ongoing aging of the population. 

A 2020 paper in the British medical publication, The Lancet, looks ahead to the year 2100 and sees a shrinking global population: according to the study’s projections, world population will peak at 9.7 billion in 2064 and then fall to 8.8 billion by the end of the century. In that world, the populations of Japan, Thailand, and Spain will have dropped more than 50 percent; China’s population will also have been nearly cut in half. The U.S. will be able to break even but only because of immigration. The U.S. birth rate is way below the replacement level—just like every other developed country in the world.

Another interesting consequence, and one that should put fear into the hearts of liberals, is the emergence of vast birth-rate differences across the nation’s red state-blue state political map

Based on estimates derived from Census data, the average woman in the city of Seattle will have about 1 kid over her lifetime while her Dallas counterpart will have 2.23. You can imagine what that would do to voting dynamics in another generation. Children tend to vote like their parents.

In America Red states have a lot more children than blue states. Christians have twice as many children as atheists. That will obviously affect voting patterns and elections in the future.

A further consequence:  Longterm population decline would make federal programs like Social Security and Medicare unsustainable. Those programs are something of a Ponzi scheme now, dependent on young men and women to enter the system in order to prop up their aging elders.

 

The aging problem the U.S. is beginning to face is already a gigantic problem for China. Who will care for the elderly? Right now China has about five working adults to support one retiree. In 20 years that's going to crash. China will have 1.6 working adults to support one retiree. That is obviously unsustainable. I remember watching a film fifty years ago called Logan’s Run. In it, when people reached the age of 30, they were killed off. That dystopian science fiction world is threatening to become reality.

Another problem that may not have occurred to you: Demographers warn that the birth dearth will lessen innovation as creative young adults become scarcer.  Youth obviously have more energy but they also take more risks and are more likely to come up with new ideas.

Even today foolishness abounds. More people worry about over-population than the birth dearth. That’s insane. Over-population is a non-existent problem and always has been. I am fascinated by the kind of rhetoric even Christian writers use. People blather on about over-population without ever bothering to define it. And far more people worry about climate change—another non-existent problem. But even if catastrophic climate change were a real problem it wouldn’t matter much if there are no people in the world.

An aging population slows economic growth. For example a 10 percent increase in the share of the U.S. population 60 years and older reduces per capita GDP by 5.5 percent.  People become less productive as they age.

One of the tragic, unforeseen consequences of suppressing population is gender imbalance. Mei Fong, writing for NPR, says: "China has 30 million more men than women, 30 million bachelors who cannot find brides. ... They call them guang guan, 'broken branches,' that's the name in Chinese. They are the biological dead ends of their family." She says the one-child policy also led to forced abortions and the confiscation of children by the authorities. My own daughter, who has lived in China for nearly twenty years, had a colleague at her university forced to have an abortion.

The Nobel economist Amartya Sen estimated there were about 100 million missing women, women that were never born or who were killed or aborted across Asia.

The birth dearth causes many tragedies you would never think about. For example, lots of the elderly across the world are dying alone. I remember reading about authorities in Japan entering the apartment of an elderly man who had died. His finances had been set up so that he automatically received his pension and all his bills were paid electronically.   He had been dead three years. No one knew he existed and no one knew he had died.

One of my favorite demographers is Mary Eberstadt. She says, “As has been pointed out ad infinitum, not everyone can start a family, and not everyone wants to. As has not been pointed out and needs to be: a world of falling birthrates shrinks the extended family more than ever, rendering everyone…more vulnerable to loneliness than before.”

She further observes: The people on whom modernity depends are failing to reproduce themselves, which means that modernity itself is failing to reproduce itself. Most voters have no idea that this is happening. Nor do most politicians. 

A proverb often attributed to Confucius says that those planning for the year ahead should plant rice, those planning for 10 years should plant trees, and those planning 100 years ahead should “plant” children.



In Genesis 1:28 Almighty God commands us to be fruitful and multiply. Disobeying Him is creating the greatest crisis mankind has ever faced.

 

More: The collapse of the birth rate: why have rich people stopped having children? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhI4hV-nZyk

What are the long-term effects of the baby bust? John Shelton in World

 

The Spectator: The crisis is here; https://thespectator.com/topic/global-fertility-crisis-already-here/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Especially bad for liberals: https://www.city-journal.org/article/deep-blue-birth-dearth?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cjdaily

Global fertility collapse: https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/the-global-fertility-collapse

World population statistics: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/

The impact of the one-child policy: https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-child-policy-led-to-forced-abortions-30-million-bachelors

Mary Eberstadt: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/08/the-baby-bust-isnt-just-political-its-personal

Modernity’s self-destruct button: https://firstthings.com/modernitys-self-destruct-button/

How Bad is the birth dearth? https://www.ncregister.com/interview/tadie-mads-larsen-demographic-crisis-threat-to-west

 

World magazine wonders where have all the babies gone?  https://wng.org/opinions/where-have-all-the-babies-gone-1744268585?mkt_tok=NzEwLVFSUi0yMDkAAAGZven1nw9rJCIf7_76fWkGi494jLNoeRLVMkaVvDLtB4cvrtre3X0Y9JO-Klcq88fsDiBzzqHINuVrALCaL_eYybtZBOE1-l8qAxo-lNd_mRnLdg

Earth’s population through history: https://historyfacts.com/world-history/article/world-population-through-history/?lctg=584ed6f0-eb99-4cba-b4f4-a58c7edb29dd

America is on track to literally die off: https://www.dailywire.com/news/america-is-on-track-to-literally-die-off-new-fertility-data-warns?utm_content=17635473&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=iterable