Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once

Key topics:Global fertility rates falling below replacement in most countriesSmartphone/social media linked to decline in coupling and birthsFewer relationships, housing pressure, and rising youth isolation.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By John Burn-Murdoch.The demographic landslide defining our era is gaining speed — and terrain.In more than two-thirds of the world’s 195 countries, the average number of children born to each woman has fallen below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 that keeps populations stable without immigration. In 66 countries, the average is now closer to one than to two. In some, the most common number of children born to each woman is zero.Both the pace and the breadth of the decline are defying expectations. Just five years ago the UN predicted there would be 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023. That was a 50 per cent overestimate: the real figure was 230,000.While high- and middle-income countries have been wrestling with demographic decline for more than half a century, the phenomenon has markedly accelerated in the past 10 years..Read more:.FT's Martin Wolf: Gender roles to blame for collapse in fertility rates.Analysis of data ranging from population records to Google searches indicates that although many factors contribute to falling birth rates, the most recent plunge appears connected with our use of technology.Almost all of the world is now affected. Until recently, ultra-low and rapidly falling birth rates were primarily a concern for rich countries, but many developing countries now have lower fertility rates than much wealthier ones.In 2023 Mexico’s birth rate fell below that of the US for the first time — as, subsequently, did those of Brazil, Tunisia, Iran and Sri Lanka. Lower- and middle-income countries are now getting old before they get rich.The defining problem of our timePopulation ageing shrinks the workforce and exerts a drag on growth in productivity and living standards — Japan’s stagnation since the 1990s is almost entirely explained by low birth rates that have shrunk its working-age population.Fiscal pressure from ballooning spending on pensions and care also crowds out investment in infrastructure, helping create a sense of decline that fuels anti-system politics.“Fertility decline is the big question of our time,” says Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading researcher on the consequences of demographic change. He argues that almost all pressing problems flow from the collapse in birth rates: “Everything else is downstream.”One does not have to be Elon Musk, who argues that declining birth rates represent the “biggest risk to civilisation”, to see how they may already be exacerbating many of the world’s social and economic travails.Some hope a smaller population could help tackle climate change. But a recent study found lower birth rates will have at best a negligible impact on emissions over the coming decades.Birth rates are often collapsing despite, not because of, people’s desires. Most young men and women still report wanting around two children — even in South Korea where most women now have zero.Instead, there is a “fertility gap” between goals and outcomes, due to frictions and frustrations that have much to do with modern lifestyles — including our homes and, increasingly, our phones.Singles’ night foreverIn previous decades, the world’s fertility rate went down because couples had fewer children. Now the main reason is that there are fewer couples.Had US rates of marriage and cohabitation remained constant over the past decade, the country’s total fertility rate would be higher today than it was 10 years ago.A pioneering study by demographer Stephen Shaw shows that in the US and most high-income countries, the number of children that mothers give birth to is stable or even rising. But the proportion of women who have any children at all has fallen steeply in the past 15 years.The stereotypes often associated with this trend include women putting careers before children, or couples who choose not to have them despite plenty of disposable income.But, across a wide range of countries, the decline in births and coupling is much steeper among those with the least education and lowest incomes. By contrast the share of university graduates forming couples and having children is stable or even rising in some cases. Family formation, it seems, has become K-shaped.Nor has state involvement by rich countries arrested the trend. Since the 1980s, developed countries have tripled real-terms per capita spending on child benefits, subsidised childcare and parental leave while the share of childcare performed by fathers has climbed steadily upwards. Birth rates have declined all the same — from 1.85 to 1.53 per woman.Many people opt happily for a single life without children. But the data shows that across broader society, the number of people finding partners and having children is declining despite intentions. This is notably pronounced among the least well off, and accompanies mounting loneliness and dating frustrations.Home economicsIn several rich countries, including the US and UK, a major barrier to forming families in recent decades has been housing.According to FT analysis, as much as half of those countries’ decline in fertility rates since the 1990s can be explained by falling home ownership and a rise in young adults who live with their parents.In such situations, the absence of long-term housing acts as a barrier to other long-term commitments.But this cannot account for the most recent steep decline or its global breadth.In the Nordic region, for example, fertility has fallen despite economic stability and a rise in the number of young adults living on their own, rather than with parents or flatmates.And even when couples can afford to move into their own place, they are increasingly likely to separate. In several countries, people who move in together are now more likely to split up than to have a child, a sharp reversal of the historical norm.Other economic factors also fall short of being conclusive.The recent demographic slide has occurred in countries hard hit by the global financial crisis as well as those virtually unscathed by it, and in both slow-growing western Europe and the rapidly-growing Middle East and south-east Asia.Many point to young adults’ economic precariousness. But while young people’s earnings peak later than occurred during previous decades and their relative economic standing has declined, these are gradual shifts that do not fit a sudden decline.Another possible factor is the changing relative positions of young men and women. Girls are now far more likely to attend university than boys, and lower-educated young men are now often out-earned by their female counterparts, changing the calculus for settling down with someone. But these too are mostly slow shifts that apply much more to some parts of the world than others.The population threat in your pocketDissatisfied with purely economic explanations, researchers are beginning to point the finger at a new culprit — the digital devices and platforms that play an outsized role in young people’s lives across the world.Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso-Boedo of the University of Cincinnati published a paper last month looking at birth rates through the lens of the rollout of 4G mobile networks in the US and UK.The number of births fell first and fastest in the areas that received high-speed mobile connectivity earliest. The authors argue that smartphones have transformed how young people spend time with one another, sharply reducing in-person socialising and leading to the collapse in their fertility.FT research indicates the same trend has affected other countries.For example, US, British and Australian birth rates for teens and young adults were broadly flat during the early 2000s but began to fall markedly from 2007.The same slide began in France and Poland around 2009, and in Mexico, Morocco and Indonesia around 2012. What had been steady declines in fertility in Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal became precipitous drops between 2013 and 2015.All of these inflection points coincided with the mass adoption of smartphones in local markets — as measured by Google searches for mobile apps.In country after country the birth rate plunged after the introduction of smartphones, no matter what the previous trend was. The younger the age group, the more pronounced the downturn — a mirror image of smartphone usage patterns.Melissa Kearney, professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, says it is “quite plausible that the modern digital media environment has had profound effects on society that have led to a decline in romantic coupling”.Indeed, Hudson and Moscoso-Boedo’s thesis that the key factor is less time spent socialising in person is supported by evidence from dozens of countries. In South Korea young adult in-person socialising has halved in 20 years.“To meet a person you are going to marry requires filtering through a lot of people,” says demographer Lyman Stone. “If you socialise much less, it takes you much longer to find a match if you find one at all.”He adds: “If you spend lots of time socialising with your peers in the real world, your standards [for a potential partner] are anchored in the real world. If you spend your time on Instagram, your standards are anchored to an artificial sense of what is normal.”Social media leaves its markAmong couples, sexual dysfunction is higher for the young adults with the heaviest social media use, notes Finnish demographer Anna Rotkirch.She argues that the time taken up by social media — and the values and lifestyles such platforms project — has also made it harder for young adults to form committed relationships.Stanford University’s Alice Evans adds that the more traditional a culture is in terms of its gender roles, the greater is the impact of smartphones on birth rates.The data bears this out: the Middle East and Latin America show many of the steepest birth-rate falls of the past decade, and a recent study found that social media use is associated with lower fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa. In south Asia, where women’s web access is often more limited, fewer people remain single.Evans describes what she calls “cultural leapfrogging”, adding that “Instagram and TikTok enable young women across the world to bypass traditional authorities . . . raising their expectations for a relationship in a way their male counterparts are often not prepared for”..Read more:.South Korea considers $70K baby bonus to tackle fertility crisis: Tyler Cowen.FT research has also indicated that the emerging ideological divide between young men and women is a smartphone-era phenomenon, concentrated among the non-college-educated. Among this cohort, women have moved leftward, men have not, and coupling and births have cratered.One possibility is that social media intensifies and consolidates people’s reactions to trends such as housing difficulties or the changing economic positions of men and women, making decades-long processes feel like sudden waves, amplifying economic concerns, and creating a persistent sense of insecurity and worry that can act as a prophylactic.Indeed, theories about the impact of new media technologies on relationships and fertility are not new to the smartphone era.In 2001, researchers Robert Hornik and Emile McAnany found that there was a stronger link between falling birth rates and television ownership than between income or education.A decade later a study by Eliana La Ferrara and others found that watching TV soap operas that portray small families led women to have fewer children, and in 2018 Adrienne Lucas and Nicholas Wilson found that owning a television led couples to have less sex.Considering smartphone usage is heavier and more solitary than television viewing, the effects could be much larger.Time for a solutionWhat should be done to contend with trends deeply embedded in modern lifestyles?Governments have to resist the lure of unrealistic solutions — after all, there is no uninventing the smartphone. As Stone says: “If someone has bad eyes, we don’t fix their genes: we give them glasses.”By contrast, there is ample evidence that providing secure and suitable homes to young couples increases their likelihood of starting a family.“Baby bonuses” incentivising couples to have children are another option that may arrest the slide — but only if sufficiently generous.But government resources are limited, economic factors do not alone decide the demographic decline and incentives aimed at helping happy couples to have children may be beside the point when more and more people simply lack partners.The bigger point is that falling birth rates appear to be part of a broader phenomenon of young adult singledom, isolation and deteriorating wellbeing. Given the likely link to technology and social media, the best hope of reversing the trend may be to change our digital habits — whether through cultural shifts or government regulation.Even apart from our diminishing propensity to have children, the task of bringing together a fractured and frustrated generation is the challenge of our times..© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd.

Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once

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