全球生育率下降：数据揭示的真相

As a woman in her 30s in the United States, I'm super familiar with the stereotypical assumptions about the reasons for falling birth rates. It's the feminists, it's career women who don't want kids or who wait until it's too late, etc. etc. But that's not what the data suggests.

The idea of this being about career women and some people talk about the girl boss and that kind of thing. That would make sense if what we were seeing was primarily a decline in births among high-earning and highly educated young women. Whereas what we're primarily looking at here is a decline among those in the bottom half or sort of bottom third [music] of society. So it's young men and women who generally don't have a bachelor's degree, have lower incomes.

These are the group [music] who are having fewer children and perhaps more importantly, as we'll come on to, being less likely to get into a couple at all.

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Welcome to The Gray Area. I'm Christian filling in for Sean Illing. My guest today is John Burn-Murdoch, a columnist and the chief data reporter for the Financial Times. He recently published an article entitled Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once. The piece really set off a big discussion on both the implications and the causes of why so many people are choosing to have kids. I asked him to come on the show to discuss what's driving this trend.

Why birth rates are falling in different societies at the same time and whether we need to do anything about it. Welcome to the show, John.

Thank you so much for having me.

So I'm going to start with a little bit of table setting here. Um noted trillionaire Elon Musk has said that low birth rates are going to end civilization. The US's Medicaid and Medicare administrator, Dr. Oz, declared that the US is under baby. By now, I think we've all heard that the US and the rest of the world is going through a demographic decline. Many countries are under replacement level for fertility. But what does that actually mean?

How do you define that?

Yeah, so the replacement rate is the number is about 2.1 children per woman. And what that is telling us is that if every woman in every couple had an average of 2.1 children per year, it would mean that if nothing else happened to the population, it would pretty much stay at its current size. So, when that number drops below 2.1 and especially significantly below, it means that again, holding everything else constant, population will gradually start to fall.

That seems not ideal to me, at least. But the idea of demographic decline being a problem is actually kind of polarizing, I think. In the US, being too concerned about fertility risks being read as sort of right-wing or pronatalist, um you know, solutions from the left, like increased immigration, are often seen as, well, leftist. Is that true elsewhere, this polarizing nature of the debate?

There are certain elements of it. I think, you know, any conversation which has even a hi