Dear reader,
Five years ago when we started Headway, an initiative at The Times that considers the world’s challenges through the lens of progress, I wrote that measurement drives nearly every area of human endeavor. We chart our impact on the climate by measuring the amount of carbon in the air and the steady climb of average temperatures; we watch inflation and G.D.P. to understand the health of the economy.
On subject after subject, when these indicators point the way we want, we call it progress. When they don’t, we often call it a crisis. Usually that’s when the issue starts to make the news.
Today we’re beginning a weekly conversation where we step back and look at the trajectories of some of our most significant indicators. Every week, we’ll explore a different indicator of how the United States is faring, and seek to understand what we can learn from its path. Then we’ll invite you to help us understand it from your vantage point.
Our series begins with a subject that has recently caused Elon Musk, JD Vance and other influential people to sound an alarm: the birthrate.
What happened to the birthrate?
In the U.S., the birthrate is now hovering close to its lowest levels on record: 1.6 births per woman, as of April 2025. At present, the U.N. expects it to pretty much remain there for the rest of the century. That’s below the so-called “replacement rate” of 2.1, the number needed to keep the population stable. A fertility rate below 2.1 implies long-term population decline.
Across the world, as median incomes and education levels have risen, people have had fewer babies. That stubbornly persistent pattern means that birthrates run counter to most of the ways we measure progress.
The Trump administration has floated several proposals to reverse the pattern of decline, influenced in part by a rising “pronatalist” movement on the right.
But the experiences of numerous countries around the world suggest government policy can do very little to make families have more babies, said Joshua Wilde, a research scientist who studies demography and economics at the University of Oxford.
What can we do about it?
The consistency of the global pattern shows how hard these trend lines are to budge. Several nations have preceded the U.S. in confronting birthrate declines, and both traditionalist societies, where contraception is scarce, and liberal democracies, where robust safety nets support parents, have failed to raise fertility.
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich warned about “The Population Bomb,” stoking fears that humankind would not be able to support a global population that was growing exponentially. But at the time, that skyrocketing growth curve had already started to bend. The U.N. currently predicts the world will hit its population peak around 2084, at around 10 billion people. Many nations have already hit their peaks. One major reason the U.S. hasn’t — immigration — has fallen 50 percent over the last year, according to new Census data, making 2025 one of the slowest years for population growth in the nation’s history.
There’s one telling moment when the birthrate leaped up: the Baby Boom. Then, rapidly rising incomes coincided with an increase in the number of kids families were having — contradicting the usual pattern. But that was a one-of-a-kind confluence, Wilde said — a fast-growing economy, with wages rising in particular for industrial jobs held mostly by men. The rare combination of social, cultural, economic and technological factors would be very difficult to replicate, Wilde said, which is why the Baby Boom is considered a blip between periods with lower birthrates.
But lower birthrates don’t necessarily mean the population or economy will shrink, especially in the near-term, as our past high levels of immigration show. The engine of adaptation that enabled us to survive the population bomb could help us weather a future with fewer babies. And the mere fact that the birthrate could fluctuate so unexpectedly within a few years suggests how difficult it is to make long-term population projections, Wilde said. In part, that’s because the birthrate is not a straightforward measure.
What is the birthrate?
Like almost any demographic calculation, estimating birthrates is a matter of complex mathematics.
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Much of the time, “birthrate” is a shorthand for the “total fertility rate.” It’s based on an average of the number of children born to women of childbearing age over the course of a year. Here’s an in-depth look at the T.F.R., how it’s produced and what it tells us.
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Because of the tricky way the birthrate is calculated, though, it’s subject to short-term fluctuations. An economic crisis might cause many families to delay having children (birthrates dipped during the Great Recession), or a global pandemic might coop couples up at home (they rose slightly in the wake of Covid).
What can I read next?
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Immigration was supposed to offset a gradual decline in birthrates, but largely because of policy decisions, the country’s foreign-born population has fallen for the first time in decades.
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In 2013, David Lam commemorated an extraordinary 50 years in demographic history with a paper on “How the World Survived the Population Bomb,” highly worth a read today.
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From 2021: “The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized.”
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The Pew Charitable Trusts has broken declining birthrates down by state.
Your turn
Test your knowledge:
Which of these countries had one of the lowest birthrates in the world in 2025?
Tell us your thoughts: Have falling birthrates factored into your own thinking about having children? How do you think we should approach the nation’s declining birthrates, individually or collectively? Please email your thoughts to [email protected].
In an upcoming edition of this newsletter, we’ll look at an indicator you might consider to be the opposite of the birthrate: infant mortality.
— Matt Thompson
The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.
The post Birthrates Are Down. That Can Be a Sign of Progress appeared first on New York Times.
