Foreign Affairs has an interesting article on “The Age of Depopulation: Surviving a World Gone Gray“.
It describes several hypotheses for explaining the reduced fertility rates and falling populations almost all over the world, but emphasizes that women simply voluntarily don’t want to have as many children:
Pritchett determined that there is an almost one-to-one correspondence around the world between national fertility levels and the number of babies women say they want to have. This finding underscored the central role of volition—of human agency—in fertility patterns.
Personally, I wonder if the ecological crisis is a major background psychological cause. To everyone who is paying attention, the unambiguous message from scientists and policy experts is that we are destroying our own civilization and the capacity of the Earth to support us through our selfish and short-sighted determination to turn burning hydrocarbons into dollars. Even when it comes to my own life, I am profoundly afraid that prosperous, open, and advanced societies will cease to exist as the ecological basis for our entire civilization collapses. I think there is a decent chance – if I live until 2060 or so – that the young people in that time will look at photos of the produce sections in our supermarkets and be unwilling to accept that they were ever real: that we had so much bounty, such tremendous gifts from nature, and we squandered it all because we allowed psychopaths to rule us. It’s even worse than that in democratic societies: we demanded that psychopaths rule us, because we are unwilling to accept the truth of our situation.
Having children when you expect the future to be chaos demands an even greater act of faith from prospective parents. I would say that if we do want more children (which is questionable) we need to stop acting as though the future is something which we can and should destroy for the sake of our near-term ease and convenience.
Related:
What are our leaders doing in response to fossil fuels destroying our future? Restricting new bicycle lanes and new wind and solar facilities
Ford doubles down on ‘remove and replace’ when it comes to existing bike lanes