Bye Bye Baby

Bye-Bye, Baby

NEARLY half of all people now livein countries where women, on average, give birth to fewer than 2.1 babies — the number generally required to replace both parents — over their lifetimes. This is true in Melbourne and Moscow, São Paulo and Seoul, Tehran and Tokyo. It is not limited to the West, or to rich countries; it is happening in places as diverse as Armenia, Bhutan, El Salvador, Poland and Qatar.

At just over two births per woman (down from nearly four in 1957 at the peak of the baby boom), the United States is more fertile than most other rich countries, like Germany and Japan. In large, emerging economies where labor is still relatively cheap — places like Brazil, Russia, Iran, much of southern India — fertility rates have steadily fallen since the 1980s. The working-age population in China, an economic miracle over the last 35 years, may have peaked in 2012, fueling planners’ fears that China will grow old before it gets rich.

Very high national fertility rates have not disappeared, but they are now mostly concentrated in a single region: sub-Saharan Africa. Last year, all five countries with estimated total fertility rates (the average number of births per woman) at six or higher — Niger, Mali, Somalia, Uganda and Burkina Faso — were there. So were nearly all of the 18 countries with fertility rates of five or more (the exceptions were Afghanistan and East Timor).

Sub-Saharan Africa also makes up a substantial portion of countries with estimated fertility rates between three and four: Notable exceptions include Iraq, Jordan, the Philippines and Guatemala. Fertility rates just under three were reported in countries like Pakistan, Egypt, Haiti, Honduras and Bolivia.

THIS is news to many people, and also a source of alarm, even hysteria — mostly in the West. In his book, “What to Expect When No One’s Expecting,” Jonathan V. Last, a senior writer at The Weekly Standard, described a “coming demographic disaster” from “America’s baby bust.”Steven Philip Kramer, a professor at the National Defense University, says rich countries with low fertility should adopt “pronatalist” policies to close“the baby gap” and arrest a spiral of ever fewer workers supporting ever more retirees. Even the usually sober Economist recently warned about“the vanishing Japanese.”

These dark prophecies have a long history, and they are as misguided as they are unoriginal. Theodore Roosevelt warned of Anglo-Saxon “race suicide” and, during the Depression, books like “Twilight of Parenthood” (1934) caught the Western public’s imagination. After the powerful (and largely unanticipated) baby boom in the West, the chorus of calamity resumed. Dire Malthusian projections of mass starvation resulting from population growth outstripping the food supply — fear-mongering briefly revived after the end of the baby boom by Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 book, “The Population Bomb” — were discredited. But the march of fear continued, with evocatively titled books like “The Birth Dearth” (1987) and “The Empty Cradle” (2004).

Why do commentators, like Chicken Little, treat this worldwide trend as a disaster, even collective suicide? It could be because declines in fertility rates stir anxieties about power: national, military and economic, as well as sexual. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian classic “The Handmaid’s Tale,”and the Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film “Children of Men,”based on the P. D. James novel, are among the more artful expressions of this anxiety.

In reality, slower population growth creates enormous possibilities for human flourishing. In an era of irreversible climate change and the lingering threat from nuclear weapons, it is simply not the case that population equals power, as so many leaders have believed throughout history. Lower fertility isn’t entirely a function of rising prosperity and secularism; it is nearly universal.

The new hand-wringing stems from a gross misunderstanding of the glacial nature of population change.