The Apocalyptic Decline in Birth Rates
In today’s newsletter, Jon Lee Anderson’s personal experiences with U.S.A.I.D. But, first, a new story from Gideon Lewis-Kraus digs into how nobody is having children anymore. Plus:
If current trends hold, each generation in Korea will be a third the size of the previous one. Every hundred contemporary Koreans of childbearing age will produce, in total, about twelve grandchildren.Illustration by Javier Jaén
The End of Children
Birth rates are crashing around the world. Should we be worried?
What will the end of humanity look like? We may soon find out. Declining fertility rates have become a near-universal phenomenon; in the U.S., the rate has dropped roughly twenty per cent in the past two decades. Right-wing activists view depopulation as a threat greater than climate change, a stance that the left often calls scaremongering in service of their assault on reproductive rights. But is there cause for alarm?
For a piece in this week’s issue, Gideon Lewis-Kraus travels to South Korea, which has the lowest birth rate of any nation in the world and possibly the lowest in recorded history, to see what the future might hold for other countries on the downward slope in baby making. There, he notes, “Portents of desolation are everywhere.” About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes; a rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary; on offer at an after-school program is an apparatus for playing Ping-Pong alone. “The end of the world is usually dramatized as convulsive and feverish,” he writes, “but population loss is an apocalypse on an installment plan.”
Read the story »
The Briefing Room
Laborers in El Salvador receive food allotments as part of a program sponsored by U.S.A.I.D., in 1983.Photograph by Robert Nickelsberg / Getty
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“Look, I totally get it. But it’s been two days now—maybe it’s time to get out of the bath?”
Cartoon by Habiba Nabisubi
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P.S. Tina Brown, who edited The New Yorker in the nineties, reflects on her time at the helm, in honor of the magazine’s hundredth birthday. “It exuded an urbane adrenaline and visual flair,” she writes. “I was intoxicated by its high standards.”
Erin Neil contributed to this edition.
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