The Sky will Fall (eventually)
My Initial Thoughts Before Starting
For some time I’ve been thinking about the fact that Susan and I are not going to have children. What impact does this have to the rest of humanity? I’m not talking about the fact that our genes will not continue on or our shared wisdom (heh) won’t be imparted to the next generation; I’m talking about the impact of not contributing to the next generation of earners, spenders, and taxpayers. I’ll admit it’s anecdotal and my sample size is small but I feel that most of the people I know who are in my general demographic are also not planning on having children or only have or want one or two (not enough to make up for us empty-nesters). I’ve read articles about other countries like Germany and Japan worrying about societal and economic issues due to falling birth rates so I decided to do a little research on my own.
I ended up finding most of my data from the CIA’s World Factbook . From the website:
“The World Factbook, produced for US policymakers and coordinated throughout the US Intelligence Community, marshals facts on every country, dependency and geographic entity in the world. We share this information with the people of all nations in the belief that knowledge of the truth underpins the functioning of free societies.
The Factbook provides information on the history, people, government, economy, energy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities.”
Replacement Level Fertility
What I did first was get the average rates of children born per woman or total fertility rate (TFR) for each country and dump them into a spreadsheet. Then I counted which countries had rates above and below the replacement level fertility. Per the World Resources Institute the “replacement level fertility” is the fertility rate (average number of children born per woman) in which a population exactly replaces itself each generation without migration. This rate is 2.1 in most counties though it varies some with mortality rates . It turns out the majority of reporting countries (119 or 53% of the countries) have TFRs below 2.1. In fact, the average TFR of the countries below replacement level fertility was 1.7. On the other side of the spectrum were 104 countries (47% of the reporting countries) that averaged 3.52 TFR. When I took into consideration the populations of the two groups I found that 52% of the population (3.8 billion) has fertility rates above the replacement level fertility and 48% below (3.5 billion). This makes sense as the world population continues to grow. Next I layered on the GDP per capita .
GDP Per Capita
I found that the average GDP per capita for countries whose TFR is below the replacement level fertility to be $31,125 which is over three times higher than the average GDP per capita for countries above the replacement level fertility ($9,200). This clearly shows that the populations of the richer countries in the world are shrinking while the populations of the poorer countries are growing. To visualize the trend I plotted the GDP per capita and TFR on a graph. What is shown is a clear pattern where countries with higher GDP per capita generally have a lower TFR.
Female Education
What causes lower TFR? From poking around the internet it seems a large part of the consensus is that increased female education levels make the largest impact. From the CIA World Factbook I found the School Life Expectancy for females . It provides the total number of years a female child is expected to receive by country. The data didn’t include all of the countries but it was enough that a chart I created comparing expected female education and TFR shows that countries that educate their females more do indeed have a lower TFR. On average a female child in a country with below replacement levels of fertility can expect to receive close to 4.4 years more education than a female in a country with fertility levels above the replacement level (15.31 versus 10.96).
Just for fun made another chart showing the GDP per capita and female school life expectancy. Unsurprisingly it shows a positive correlation between the two.
So what Causes the Fertility Rates to Fall?
Clearly there is a correlation between lower fertility rates and a higher GDP per capita as well as better educating females. Per Wikipedia there are other causes of lower fertility rates including government population policy, availability of family planning services, infant mortality rate, and more . Generally the more educated, wealthy, and democratic a country is (i.e. more American) the fewer children they produce.
What is the Point?
Well, I started out wondering if Susan and I not having kids would negatively impact society and if our choice was common. There are many articles summing up and speculating the social and economic impacts of low fertility rates on countries. In the short term low fertility rates cause an economic benefit as the costs to raise children are saved or spent elsewhere. In the long term low fertility rates mean a smaller workforce which hurts the economy and a smaller base to tax which puts strain on the existing social infrastructure. Just one couple like us not having kids isn’t a problem on its own as we are statistically insignificant. The problem is that we are not alone and are part of a growing trend in rich countries across the world.
Immigration helps to bolster the populations of countries with fertility rates below the replacement level of fertility. Immigrants generally have much higher fertility rates than even the countries they come from which raises the overall fertility rates in the country they are going to. It should be noted that the second generation immigrants essentially adopt the same fertility rates as the country their parents travelled to. Immigration is the reason the population in America has continued to steadily rise as many European and Asian countries have declined in the last two decades. It’s not all positive as lots of immigration can lead to cultural change and other strains which can upset the existing populace (i.e. Donald Trump). As the world population is currently projected to peak in 2050 immigration can only do so much and for so long.
What gets me is thinking farther out in the future. If economic prosperity, more freedom, and better education lead to negative population growth then is humanity looking at an extinction brought about not by war or a polluted Earth but ultimately by our own desire to improve ourselves?
If the TFR were an unchanging 1.7 for the entire population how long would it take to half our numbers? Using 30 years as the length of a generation and a 19% drop in population due to a fertility rate of 1.7 versus the replacement level of fertility of 2.1 it would take between 120 and 150 years for the population to half. Dropping 90% would occur in around 360 years. Similarly to the compound growth on an investment the compounding decline of the population would happen quickly. This scenario is unlikely though as the fertility rates realistically wouldn’t drop overnight or universally but it does serve to illustrate the potential issue.
Thinking about how one could reverse the trend of falling TFR is interesting to think about. If positive change leads to unsustainable fertility rates does that mean we’d need to implement negative change to save ourselves? Like we’d make it law that women couldn’t be educated or use birth control. Perhaps we’d just need to make sure a few totalitarian countries with large and poor populations stay that way while we would accept their immigrants.
It all makes me wonder if, at its extreme, our pursuit of liberty, happiness, and a better life will ultimately be the end of us.
Oh yeah, Merry Christmas!
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