Thailand has 63 million people. But Thais have stopped having kids. The average woman there has 0.8 children over the course of her lifetime, one of the world’s lowest fertility rates. University of Pennsylvania demographer Jesús Fernández-Villaverde estimates that at that rate Thailand will have close to 2 million people in 200 years. He admits that this is a “crazy” forecast, and it’s crazy in a way.
Of course, in two centuries, the world will look very different — humans might find a way to significantly extend their lifespans, and artificial intelligence might alter what it means to be human. So, it would be understandable if people shrug their shoulders at Thailand’s tragic decline. But for Thais, it will mean the slow disappearance of their culture and the reimagining of what it means to be a nation. Much of the country’s housing stock will be empty. Towns will vanish. Hospitals, schools and businesses will close en masse.
But what’s happening in Thailand is happening across the globe, albeit not so dramatically. More than two-thirds of the world’s countries have fallen below the replacement rate — the rate at which a population sustains itself without immigration, which is 2.1 children per woman. This includes countries you normally wouldn’t expect, such as Mexico and Iran, which now have lower fertility rates than the United States. East Asia is the worst hit, with South Korea, Japan and China already shrinking in population.
Once countries start falling below replacement rate, they rarely recover — something about the 2.1 threshold seems elusive once it’s lost. Declines in population are not unprecedented. What is unprecedented is that this time it will be due to natural causes, not some external event like disease, war or famine. Why this is bad is well-documented — fewer people means less dynamic economies, sluggish growth and stretched welfare systems. But on the human level, it might be even worse. Being married with children is a strong predictor of happiness, for men and women alike. A society with fewer couples and fewer kids is a society that is more atomized, alienated, and, well, sad.
Contrary to popular belief, at least in Western nations, mothers aren’t necessarily having fewer children compared with a decade or two ago. It’s that fewer women are becoming mothers in the first place. Despite the growing attention paid to the topic, analysts are struggling to figure out why more women are having zero children. The bad news is that there isn’t a smoking gun. There are a variety of culprits. Lack of affordable housing, fear of the future and the rise of smartphones all play a role. Some factors are obvious enough — if people are struggling to find love, it means they marry later or at lower rates, and most people still have children after they get married, not before. A fertility-rate crisis is a marriage crisis — and a marriage crisis is a dating crisis.
Historically, houses of worship have been a way for like-minded young people to partner up. Religious communities set expectations around the importance of marriage and building a family. As a prophetic saying in the Islamic tradition goes, marriage is half of religion. Could religion be part of the solution?
The catch is that even religiously conservative societies cannot fully escape the forces of secularization and modernization. People — and particularly women — in what were once “traditional” societies reconfigured their needs and priorities. The cultural power of the West helped set new standards around educational attainment and female entry into the workplace. Early marriage was no longer the default. Much of this was good, but good things come at a cost. One novel study of genealogy trees concludes that secularization, through the spread of enlightenment values and the waning influence of the Catholic Church, accounts for France’s early fall in fertility rates dating to the 1760s, a century before the rest of Europe.
But the mechanism remains fuzzy. What is it about “modern” or secular values that leads people to have fewer kids? And why does the mass adoption of smartphones correlate to significant drops in fertility across countries and cultures? Perhaps the two are related. Demographer Lyman Stone, in a recent essay, argues that the spread of “selfish norms” has been made possible by digital technology. Being alone has been made easier and more entertaining than it has ever been. Where you would once run out of things to do by yourself, now unlimited stimulation is offered to everyone with a phone in the comfort of their own room.
This leads to a fundamentally different orientation to one’s environment. In practice, this means less socializing, hanging out and partying. Instead of eating with friends, people order DoorDash at home. Younger generations — despite a slight, recent uptick — go to church at much lower rates than their older counterparts. It’s not that people are “bowling alone” — it doesn’t even occur to them to bowl. Then this same digital technology, through ubiquitous social media platforms, reinforces these new selfish norms across the globe. As Stone writes: “Never before in the history of humankind has so radical an experiment in social isolation ever been conducted on such a scale, and the effects on fertility are and will continue to be profound.”
If people spend more time alone, this makes it harder to find a partner. Loneliness is also associated with higher levels of depression and anxiety. Mental illness, in turn, is a strong predictor of lower fertility. If you don’t have hope in the future, you’re less likely to do the things that might prolong your future through offspring.
Religion is one of the tried and trusted ways to help individuals become less me-centered and more other-centered — as well as happier. This isn’t necessarily due to any particular theology; it’s more a result of the faithful having a sense of transcendence and being socially embedded in institutions that value community and family. As evangelical theologian Matthew Kaemingk and I document in our forthcoming book “Can Religion Save Democracy?” religious Americans volunteer, give and participate in civic life at higher rates than the nonreligious. It is little surprise, then, that religious Americans also have significantly higher fertility rates than the nonreligious.
Religious communities do something that no government program has been able to replicate: They create the social conditions for family formation. They provide networks of support for parents and, perhaps most importantly, offer a framework in which the sacrifices that children demand are not experienced as mere costs but as expressions of life’s deeper purpose. If the fertility gap between the religious and the less religious continues to widen, then societies, by the sheer force of reproductive logic, will become more religious. In the U.S., however, this effect has been offset by the fact that more people leave their religions than join new ones.
In short, there is no obvious solution. Reversing the fertility collapse will require a series of seemingly isolated actions that form a greater whole. What may also be needed is a faith in human ingenuity. As Thailand begins meeting its potential oblivion, the hope is that enough of its people will realize what is at stake and self-correct. Governments may have little choice but to pay people larger and larger sums of money to have children, which does seem to work if the numbers are generous enough.
Some estimates show that the global population won’t start shrinking until the 2050s at the earliest. America, because of its ability to make new Americans through immigration, might be immune for the foreseeable future. But populist backlash against migrants calls this unsung advantage into question. For now, there are still a lot of people. We are debating something that hasn’t happened yet. But when it does happen, falling fertility will become the defining issue of our time. In some ways, it already is. As Fernández-Villaverde put it, perhaps with only a hint of exaggeration, “this is really the only thing that matters.”
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