The Great Depopulation

Why has the number of births declined everywhere, all at once?Some blame technology, particularly smartphones and social media. Others blame a kind of 21st-century weltschmerz—a sadness about the state of the world and our uncertain future in it. A long essay in The New York Times by Anna Louie Sussman, titled “Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All,” argues that today’s generation is too anxious about the future to make the irreversible commitment of having a child.So who is right? Is this about phones and technology, or is it a reflection of modern anxiety about the world? Or, perhaps, both?Birth rates have been declining in developed countries for a long time, as child mortality has declined, as women’s education has increased, as female labor-force participation has soared, as contraception use has proliferated, and as modern notions of feminism have empowered women to take more control over their bodies and their economic futures. And birth rates have continued to decline as smartphone usage has surged, as housing prices have increased, as time spent at home on the internet has grown, and as socialization and coupling have declined.The decline is accelerating faster than almost anybody predicted. As John Burn-Murdoch recently observed in the Financial Times, United Nations demographers predicted that there would be 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023; the real figure came in at 230,000. The total fertility rate has fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman in almost every country in North America, South America, Europe, and southern and eastern Asia.“Only two things are important right now in life: fertility and deep learning,” the University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde said at the conclusion of a recent lecture. “Everything else is noise. Once you start thinking about these, it’s hard to start thinking about anything else.” I recently spoke with Fernández-Villaverde about why the birth