The most alarming thing about the fertility crisis isn’t the lack of babies

Earlier this month, I went for a day’s diving in Thailand. Obviously, it is the time spent beneath the waves that draws me to this beautiful pastime, but over the years I have also enjoyed meeting many different people from around the world while bouncing along in boats to the dive sites. My “buddy” this time was a chatty 35-year-old nurse practitioner from Texas and at one point our discussion turned to her thoughts on finding a partner. She admitted to ambivalence – liking the idea of sharing her life with a man, yet equally reluctant to compromise on a contented lifestyle she had built with her dog and successful career if he turned out to be a drudge or slob. Her words, reflecting hesitancy over forming relationships, captured the roots of a crisis reshaping our world as fertility rates tumble and societies age fast. She was on holiday from the United States, which has just released data showing its birth rate at another record low, down almost a quarter in two decades, with women now averaging fewer than 1.6 children. Her family came from China, the other global superpower, which has far lower fertility rates. I am from a nation with birth rates also at a record low of 1.39 per woman. We were talking in Thailand, which has a fertility rate of 0.9 – less than half the level needed to keep a population stable – yet has seen life expectancy surge 25 years over my lifetime. Soon Britain, China, Thailand and the US – like many other places – will be “super-aged societies” with one in five citizens aged over 65. In more than two-thirds of nations, the average number of children born to each woman has fallen below the 2.1 “replacement rate” needed for population stability. The Lancet warns that by the end of this century, only six countries will have rates high enough to sustain populations. Fast-growing Poland is one of the most extreme cases, with birth rates falling by almost half since the end of Communism. Even India – which resorted to the horrors of forced sterilisation half a century ago and whose prime minister was still warning of a population “explosion” seven years ago – has slid beneath this critical marker.Clearly we are in the midst of a revolutionary change for humanity with immense societal implications. It impacts potentially on almost everything from the use of artificial intelligence, economics and the environment through to education, healthcare and even the politics of immigration. Now a new book by Camilla Cavendish – the crossbench peer, The Financial Times columnist and former head of Downing Street’s policy unit – puts this issue into sharp perspective by claiming “only the Black Death in the 14th century is comparable to what is happening now” in terms of plunging populations. Cavendish – whose last book was on our ageing world – blames a variety of factors for this baby bust, including declining sperm counts, lack of affordable housing, less dating, smartphones, female empowerment, workplace insecurities, the atomisation of modern society. She deserves credit for trying to force this issue up the agenda while shredding pro-natalist arguments that fuse misogyny with anti-feminism. As she pointed out on Radio 4’s Today programme, men suffer too in a crisis that leaves them often “involuntarily childless”, struggling to find well-paid, secure work and then rejected by successful women. “The biggest single reason people give for not hav­ing kids – other than not want­ing them, which is fine – is that they can’t find someone to have those chil­dren with,” said Cavendish. “That’s partly about leav­ing it later and grow­ing up later, but it’s a romance fam­ine we’re see­ing across all coun­tries.” I investigated these issues recently in South Korea, the most powerful example of this decline in global birth rates, where sales of prams for dogs now outsell those for babies. It has spent £200bn over two decades trying to avert this existential crisis. When I visited, it was the start of the school year, and the number of children entering education in the capital had fallen eight per cent on the previous year – just like we see shrinking primary school rolls in London. Talking to younger generations, many of their concerns felt eerily familiar: inadequate housing, costly childcare, job insecurities, body-image pressures, even the gender divisions being stoked on social media and exploited by both “manosphere” influencers and populist politicians. Yes, some of these problems are especially acute in South Korea, which evolved with such amazing speed from war-torn poverty into a global powerhouse. It has grim levels of online sleaze along with some of the developed world’s biggest disparities in pay, childcare and share of domestic duties. The Nobel-winning Harvard economist Claudia Goldin last year pointed to data showing its female citizens spend almost three more hours per day on household chores than men, arguing this is a key factor in the low birth rates. I found that many Korean women shy away from calling themselves feminists in such an environment, since it is seen as threatening and extremist to many men. There is also a tragic loneliness epidemic leading to high rates of suicide for teenagers and young adults. And there may, of course, be benefits if our planet has fewer destructive human beings after the first decline in population since the bubonic plague. Some experts suggest that smaller populations do not necessarily shrink economies since they force firms to innovate. Perhaps they signify some people making positive choices, wanting to avoid traditional family life. Yet studies suggest most young people still want relationships and about two children. So this spiralling global fertility crisis should be seen as a flashing sign warning about societal corrosion since it exposes the growing intensity of pressure on younger generations, failures of technology to improve the human condition and sad fears of living in a world that offers declining opportunity for happiness, love and security. As President John F. Kennedy said: “Children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future.”