A World Without Babies | The Free Press

When future historians look back on the last half century, I suspect they will pass over war, terror, and populism to settle on infertility as the decisive event of the age. For the first time since the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century, the world’s human population is about to shrink—a process that has already begun in many countries. The correlates to the decline are well known: affluence, urbanization, women’s education, abortion, and easy access to contraceptives. But identifying hard causes is difficult. Gigantic trends touching on the survival of ancient cultures—and even of our species—get entangled with social pressures and moral ideals. At the same time, one must reckon with the secret dreams and expectations of solitary individuals of every class. The result is uncertainty. People stopped having children when life has gotten good. Switzerland is possibly the wealthiest nation on Earth, with a high-trust, homogeneous population ranked near the top of the happiness index

When future historians look back on the last half century, I suspect they will pass over war, terror, and populism to settle on infertility as the decisive event of the age. For the first time since the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century, the world’s human population is about to shrink—a process that has already begun in many countries. The correlates to the decline are well known: affluence, urbanization, women’s education, abortion, and easy access to contraceptives. But identifying hard causes is difficult. Gigantic trends touching on the survival of ancient cultures—and even of our s