We are now halfway through 2025 and it's time for the monthly birth update. For the overwhelming number of countries that have provided data so far, 2025 will bring yet another significant decline of the birth rate.

Here's the female side of the South Korean age pyramid, in dark blue, overlaid on the male side. For the 25-35 age group, there are approximately 115 men for every 100 women.

Pronatalism is not wierd. It is the sensible position to have in 2024, unless you are completely innumerate or short-sighted. Some are now claiming that low fertility and birthrates are odd thing to worry about. That is nonsense. Worrying about this means you have a grasp of basic arithmetic and understand what numbers mean. The ones who are dismissive show their ignorance of the data and their general unseriousness about the future of the world. The data is what it is, and it points to long run economic and social decline, due to birth rates that are extremely low and headed lower still. The parts of the world that are below replacement fertility account for above 90% of global GDP, and more than 95% of patents and scientific publishing. When @robinhanson warns that progress itself will grind to a halt, when Tyler Cowen warns of an end to economic growth in the world, and when the greatest innovators in tech are trying to sound the alarm, we should listen. Of course fertility collapse will be devastating to economic growth and social health. That should not be controversial. We see places like West Virginia, Detroit and rural Japan that are depopulating. They are deeply depressing, tragic places. That this is now set to unfold almost everywhere is the greatest problem of our age and those not talking about it are too out of touch with the world too lead. We should just ignore those whose response on this crisis is to want to shoot the messengers. If anything, we messengers of pronatalism are being much too timid, and much too polite, given the reality of the data. We are right about what is happening in almost every developed country, the overpopulation worriers are wrong, and those trying to sort this out should simply look at the numbers. They are shocking, and getting worse every year.

How can we raise fertility? Today, I and 3 awesome coauthors have a new paper out at the Journal of Population Economics where we show that a huge part of the story has to be ELITE LEADERSHIP. When one Kartvelian elite decided to change his country, he succeeded.

📉 Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in the Americas: A Quiet Revolution Here are the most recent TFR figures (2023 or 2024) for the 10 most populous countries in the Americas, based on national statistical agencies: 🇺🇸 United States: 1.63 🇧🇷 Brazil: 1.47 🇲🇽 Mexico: 1.60 🇨🇴 Colombia: 1.06 🇦🇷 Argentina: 1.33 🇨🇦 Canada: 1.26 🇵🇪 Peru: 1.80 🇻🇪 Venezuela: 2.00 (low-quality data) 🇨🇱 Chile: 1.03 🇪🇨 Ecuador: 1.79 These 10 countries represent 88% of the population of the Americas. 🌎 Outside the top 10 by population, some striking cases include: 🇨🇷 Costa Rica: 1.12 🇺🇾 Uruguay: 1.19 🇨🇺 Cuba: 1.30 🇩🇴 Dominican Republic: 1.61 🇳🇮 Nicaragua: 1.80 🇵🇾 Paraguay: 1.95 🇸🇷 Suriname: 2.00 🇧🇴 Bolivia: 2.06 Key observations: 1️⃣ Every major country in the Americas is well below the replacement rate of 2.1. In some cases, dramatically so—see 🇨🇱 Chile and 🇨🇴 Colombia. 2️⃣ From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, the Americas are a low-fertility continent. 3️⃣ The few remaining exceptions (🇬🇹 Guatemala, 🇭🇹 Haiti, 🇭🇳 Honduras) barely hover above 2.1—and are falling fast. Note: Haitian data is particularly unreliable. 4️⃣ The major inflection point seems to have occurred around 2014. 5️⃣ The real puzzle isn’t why the U.S. TFR is low, but why it’s still so high compared to the rest. 🔍 A silent demographic shift is underway, and its consequences will be felt across generations.

Not that suitable for having kids it seems. This area has among the lowest TFRs in Europe.

Boasting a population density of more than 36,000/sqkm for its 270,000 inhabitants, Eixample is often showcased for its urbanism. There is one problem though: Its TFR, 0.72 children per woman in 2023, is at the same level as South Korea.

S. Korea spent $200b trying to increase its birthrate. Hungary spends 5% of GDP. Both are failing. Yet the small country of Georgia spiked its birthrate massively without spending a dollar. How? They understood that fertility isn't about money. It's about status.

Here's noncis identification broken down by politics and sex (from my data)

What most people fail to grasp about the low birthrate crisis is the sheer speed of the decline. This chart (NYT) shows how much births dropped in 1 year. Births/woman from 2015 to 2023: 1.78 to 1.14 in Chile 1.79 to 1.45 in UK 2.24 to 1.35 in Argentina 1.24 to 0.72 in S Korea

Pretty interesting: Companies that have adopted AI aren't hiring fewer senior employees, but they have cut back on hiring juniors ones.

Last night Saint Dominic’s in SF welcomed 80 souls into the church, a one day record in its 152 year history

Fertility and Culture: A Deep Dive (Please Share!) Those of us who have been thinking hard about demography understand that civilizational progress has been intertwined with growing population. We know that technological progress and even social justice depend on prosperity. We see Japan’s 30-year stagnation, Europe’s 15-year stagnation, and China’s current troubles and understand that this is the result of low birthrates, a shrinking workforce, and the declining innovation that comes with an aging society. It is obvious to us that a thriving world needs people. We know that all of the predictions in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb were wrong. We know that actually Julian Simon, writing The Ultimate Resource, had the correct view, and won their bet by showing that humanity doesn’t compete for fixed resources but creates more resources through innovation when there are more smart people working together. We think about the fall of Rome, and we know that low birthrates over centuries was central to why Rome declined and fell, and to us it is common sense that if people don’t have enough children to replace themselves then society will eventually start declining. After many years of low fertility and policy efforts to raise births in various countries, many pundits conclude that nothing works Hungary has been trying for years to get people to have more children. It’s most recent TFR figure is 1.52 births per woman. Japan’s fertility for 2022 was 1.26 births per woman after decades of focus. Germany and Sweden have worked for years to develop pro-family policies. Both countries have fertility rates around 1.50, and if the goal is reaching above-replacement fertility, they are not succeeding. Here are some headlines that reflect this sentiment. The tone is always resignation! This is not a solvable problem, we read. Buckle and get ready for decline! Civilization-wise, it’s time to wind down our affairs, because we aren’t coming back. The folks who wrote these articles make sense. If you follow the trendlines, things look very bad. The brilliant pro-natalist couple Malcolm and Simone Collins (@SimoneHCollins), who I got to know well and whose company I enjoyed at the Austin pronatalist conference, spends much of their time thinking about how to re-assemble a remnant of civilization after the inevitable demographic collapse, which they see as inevitable. Professor @robinhanson, a writer, economist, and futurist thinker beyond compare, who I had the pleasure of meeting and whose writing I have admired for many years, has a similar view. Humanity has a few decades of technological progress left, he says, before tech progress ceases and a long winter of stagnancy lasting centuries takes over. My friend @StephenJShaw, who I first got to know during my September visit to Japan and whose BirthGap documentary is a must-watch for every policymaker and ordinary concerned citizen, is likewise grim. One of the top data analysts around, Shaw understands how far along we are on this road of demographic decline because of the awful math of negative compounding. He sees how small the youngest generations are in most developed countries, compared to those that are leaving the workforce. And Shaw does not sugar-coat things. He often tells how no country has ever escaped low fertility. His logic is hard to argue against. With some of the deepest thinkers in the nascent pro-natalism movement having such a dark outlook, am I wrong to have hope? Low fertility is not an accident: Fifty-five years after The Population Bomb was published, anti-natalism is our dominant culture If you are reading this, you have probably known for a long time that low birthrates are a crisis. You assume that because it is obvious to you, others will see too. But we economists, demographers and science writers live in a kind of bubble. So, I looked at the comments sections of some articles on the subject. In the New York Times, a fairly neutral article from 2022 reported a 1% uptick in US births during the pandemic. In response, I counted 3 pro-natal comments and 43 anti-natal comments among the ‘Reader Picks’, along with a handful where I couldn’t find a slant. In a Yahoo News article from 2023 conveying alarm at China’s birth rate collapse, I counted 3 pro-natal comments against 45 anti-natal comments. Comments of Newsweek article were similarly skewed against having children, though by a little less. Here is a random sampling of highly ranked comments at the NYT: Aside from the fact that one commenter can’t tell the difference between millions and billions, and another believes that 3C of warming would wipe out all life on Earth, the conclusion is unmistakable. Overwhelmingly most people still believe overpopulation is our crisis, never mind the data. Japan has been below replacement longer than most people have been alive. Germany has been below replacement for most of the last 100 years. Almost every one of us already lives a country with a fertility rate far below replacement, and more countries join the club every year. Don’t they see? No, they do not. We live in a world with a billion Paul Ehrlichs! Any one of these comments (and the majority of comments in the New York Times and Yahoo News on birthrate articles) could have fit neatly into Ehrlich’s book. Paul Ehrlich’s ideology doesn’t explain Asia, does it? East Asian fertility rates are even lower than in Western countries. Actually, it does. East Asian countries adopted all adopted population control propaganda at around the same time as Ehrlich’s book and still haven’t recovered their previous pro-child cultures. When Ehrlich wrote his book in 1968, global fertility was around 5 births per woman. Now fertility rates globally are falling below replacement, if they haven’t already. But for most of the environmental movement, which has been the loudest voice in the fertility debate, it is as though nothing has changed, and the year is still 1968. Feeling gloomy upon getting out of my bubble and realizing how anti-natal the culture really is, I spoke to a family member who has always embraced environmentalism but ignored the negative messages and is raising two young children. She (age 42) reminded me that in her world, messages of environmental alarm and impending catastrophe have been constant since youth, and she empoathizes with all those comments. So how anti-natal is modern culture? So anti-natal that when @StephenJShaw tried to show his BirthGap documentary at St John’s College, Cambridge last May, protesters shut down the event. Apparently even a movie talking about the low birthrate crisis too offensive to even be allowed! Religion and fertility, a fresh look Back in 2011, long before global fertility collapse was getting the attention it is getting today, Eric Kaufmann (@epkaufm) published Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-first Century. Because birthrates were low among everyone but religious people, he said, the religious would be the last ones standing. His thesis is looking pretty solid. In 2024, there are virtually no countries in the world, and no groups within countries, that have above-replacement fertility which are not religious. And if you look at fertility by church attendance, things look pretty stark, in America and around the world. But then, remember that New York Times comment section! Almost all anti-natal! Religious groups have higher fertility almost by default, just by presenting an alternative to a modern culture that (via zealous environmentalism) is against having children. Naturally the groups that maintain highest fertility (the aforementioned Amish, Ultra-orthodox Jews etc.) are the ones that maintain greatest separation from broader society. But it’s not that those groups are weirdly pro-child. It is that the broader culture is weirdly anti-child. No wonder such diverse nations as Korea and Chile, Finland and Thailand, all have very low fertility. We live in a strange time when the default global culture, or a big chunk of it, is just against having children. Obviously, the comment sections or the New York Times and Yahoo News don’t reflect all of culture. But they reflect a big slice of it. Simone and Malcolm Collins calls this the urban monoculture. The views of Paul Ehrlich, that humanity is a scourge on an otherwise pristine planet, have become the views of vast numbers of young people in most countries. We have to pause and reflect how bizarre this is. In almost every culture in the world until recently, motherhood was extolled, and children were seen as a blessing. The outlier in a historical sense aren’t churches that celebrate babies, but our modern culture that doesn’t. Perhaps for some the answer is to flee to the countryside, join a pro-natal religious sect if they will have you, do your best to avoid contact with the outside world and hope your descendants manage to do the same, forever. Or how about we call out the society’s crazy anti-natalism and overturn that destructive ideology before it brings down tech progress, social progress and everything that we love? The Occam’s Razor Answer There are many causes of low fertility and @MoreBirths has been intensively focused on identifying all of those causes and how they can be addressed. Housing and urbanization, long schooling, OB-Gyn care, gender relations, excessive focus on work and too-high parenting expectations are a few of the many factors @MoreBirths discusses. But what if we are ignoring the simplest answer of all? If there is an ideology that says there are too many people and they are wrecking the planet; and if a huge share of young people -- even a majority in many places -- believe having children is bad, then low birthrates will be the outcome. Let’s look at some several examples, present and historical, of higher-birthrate cultures and how simple pro-natalism is explains things. Israel The Rosetta-stone for understanding fertility, Israel is wealthy, educated (with women having more education than men on average), dense and urban, technologically advanced and incredibly expensive. A description that also fits South Korea nicely. And yet Israel’s fertility (close to 3 births per woman) is 4x that of South Korea (0.72 in 2023)! What explains the difference? The thing that has the most explanatory power is simply pro-natal belief, intensely held. On the last day of 2023, I was fortunate to be a guest in the home of a well-known rabbi in Maryland. The rabbi had just passed on and had been buried in Israel, home to a majority of his ~150(!) descendants. As I talked with two of his grandchildren, my perspective was amply confirmed; this family, more than maybe any other I had met, believed in the value of having children. His granddaughter, a young mother herself, was building support network for other mothers in the first few months after childbirth. Mongolia Mongolia (known historically as Outer Mongolia) has a TFR of almost 3 births per woman. Meanwhile the adjacent part of China that includes Inner Mongolia has a fertility rate similar to South Korea. What explains this vast difference? Culture of course. But more exactly, pro-natal belief. While the areas under Chinese rule were controlled by China’s population control propaganda and laws, Mongolia was in the Soviet Sphere. And the over the seven decades of Soviet alignment, celebration of motherhood and having children was constant. To this day having children is considered the patriotic duty of Mongolian women. Mothers who have six children are awarded the "Order of Glorious Motherhood" and those who have four get the "Order of Glorious Motherhood, second class". It is no mystery why Mongolian women have a lot of children. That’s the culture Mongolia has developed, over many years. America to 1900 From the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to 1900, America exploded from 2.5 million to 76 million people, in what may be the fastest sustained population growth in world history. Around 1800, American women averaged 7 children each. Why is that? Puritan and Protestant beliefs encouraged large families. Children were seen as a blessing from God. Pro-natal beliefs? Yep, and America experienced several waves of Great Awakenings in this part of its history. Victorian England Family sizes in Victorian England were quite large. Queen Victoria had nine children. Charles Darwin had ten. Neither was especially religious, but they were products of their culture, and we know that Victorian culture was intentionally very pro-natal. How? A big clue is the Besant and Bradlaugh Trial of 1877, where two people were prosecuted for spreading knowledge of birth control. Trying to avoid having children was very bad in Victorian England. Not something that would happen today, but it shows what culture was like then. We can contrast the pro-natal attitudes of Victorian England with the comparatively opposite attitudes of 1800s France (due to French secularization after the French Revolution). Confirming this vast difference in natal beliefs in the 1800s, England saw its population quadruple while France barely grew at all. Summary Birthrates are collapsing around the world. Is modern life fundamentally incompatible with having children? Of course not. The problem is our global culture, permeated by thirty years of alarmist warnings on climate change and the environment, makes us unsure if kids are even good to have any more. There is a saying that fish don’t know they are in water. We’ve hardly noticed that we have slipped into a world that is anti-natal. But anyone who could visit from an earlier era would be shocked. “Wait, you guys think babies are bad? Who the heck thinks that? No wonder you guys have a problem!” Of course, there are some parts of the world that struggle to provide for children. It is reasonable to sometimes judge that conditions aren’t right to have children. But that isn’t the issue here. It isn’t those who are poor, struggling to survive, who are wondering if people should exist at all. This is, as they say, a rich world problem. This idea that society should simply stop having children is not just another viewpoint. It is an ideology that is misanthropic, sociopathic and destructive, and it threatens to pull down economies and civilizations. If we want to save the world from collapsing fertility the first step is that societies must orient clearly and confidently to back to the normal view that humanity is precious, and children are treasures. The idea of overpopulation seemed rational in the 1960s, but it is incredibly damaging now, with birthrates at their lowest in history almost everywhere. Please share, and follow @MoreBirths for more on solving our greatest crisis!

Birth table, USA edition. Soon we will know how closely the TFR and the Trump vote is correlated this time.

God's revenge

“Property tax carveouts overwhelmingly tax young families to subsidize everyone else.” @lymanstoneky @FamStudies ifstudies.org/blog/cutting-p…

Poland recorded just 126,500 births in the first half of 2024, a massive decline of 9.3% compared to 2023 (the largest decline in Europe in fact). This suggests a Polish TFR of 1.1 kids per woman this year.

Miriam Cates: Britain needs more babies, and the time to start doing something about it is now conservativehome.com/2025/04…

Something deeply misanthropic about these people

🚨JD VANCE: "Let me put it very simply. I want more babies in the United States of America."

Marriages in China fell by 20% in 2024, meaning births will plummet in 2025, with predictions that 7.4-7.9 million will be officially announced. My June 2024 article predicted that official births in 2024 would be 9.6 million, almost identical to official figure of 9.54 million.rfa.org/mandarin/pinglun/yif…

I met my wife when we were 23. Knew we’d get married after the first date. Got married 6 months later. I lived in a car for most of our engagement. We had roughly zero dollars, definitely a negative net worth. 13 years and 4 kids later by far the smartest thing I’ve ever done.

“Immigration, particularly at levels large enough to make a demographic difference, is not a solution to demographic decline but instead its accelerant.” An important analysis of the data by the political scientist @darelmass compactmag.com/article/mass-…

The only thing I can think of that would have even a slight chance of working -- other than returning society to preindustrial standards of living -- is to cut off old-age health and pension benefits to childless people. (I expect China to try this soon.)

🌎👨‍👩‍👦 South American fertility rates are in a serious & sustained decline & it’s not just Brazil. Colombia likely to have a TFR of ~1.5 this year, Uruguay sub 1.3, Chile sub 1.3, Argentina ~1.5, Brazil ~1.55, & Peru well below replacement (they were still above in late 2010s!).

Poland just became a $1 trillion economy without open borders, without giving up religion, and without tearing down its traditions. What did Poland do that the West won’t? (a thread) 🧵👇

New birth update. I added a bunch of countries that don't publish monthly/quarterly/semestral birth numbers but have annual figures nevertheless.

Speaking as someone who's been a pro-natalist since I was assigned an "overpopulation" project in high school in 1997 and realized where we were actually heading, a problem for pro-natalism is that it is inherently quite weird.

Not a good sign: Global patent filing change has been anemic since COVID.

TFR for last 10 years in municipalities where calvinist SGP party in Netherlands won >15% in elections 2023 vs largest cities in country. There is drop in all places but those places with higher share of calvinists (Bible belt) are still pretty decent.

I think the best marriage advice we ever got was to not wait to start having children. You never know if you will be able to have children, even if you try. The odds you can’t only go up with time. You’ll never be younger, and you’re going to need every bit of strength and energy to make it through the sleepless nights. Your parents and grandparents will never be younger. The sooner you start, the more likely they will be able to help and get to know your kids. Not one of my grandparents ever met mine. And the sooner you start, the more likely you are to get to meet your own grand (and great-grand) children. Nothing’s guaranteed! You’ll never be ‘ready’ for children. Being able to ‘afford’ children is a total myth and unhelpful mindset. Kids are not luxury goods. But you can always get by with ingenuity, determination, a faithful spouse, and some help from your friends.

Amish Population 2024 (2023): 🐉An Amish Year of the Dragon🐉 • Pop: 400,900 (384,290) • Pop Growth: +16,620 (+10,670) • Growth Rate: +4.52% (+2.85%) • Districts/Congregations: 3,038 (2,914) • USA: 394,720 (378,190) • CAD: 6,190 (6,100) • Bolivia: 95 (90)

In the Netherlands, income is increasingly positively associated with fertility - especially for men, but also for women. The result is driven by a higher chance of having at least one child (first births) (Note that the below is measured over all men 18-50 and all women 18-45)

I’m sharing my slide deck on the demographic future of humanity, 🔗 Slides: sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slide… prepared for the keynote address I will give tomorrow to the 7th EBRD and CEPR Research Symposium on “The Economics of Demographic Change”: 🔗 Symposium: ebrd.com/home/news-and-event… Here are a few key ideas I’ll be discussing tomorrow, some of which even economists tracking population trends may not fully appreciate: 1️⃣ Fertility is falling everywhere: rich and poor countries alike, booming and stagnating economies, secular and religious societies. The decline is happening far faster than anyone anticipated, even me, ten years ago! 2️⃣ For example, Colombia’s fertility rate is 1.06, Iran’s is 1.44, and Turkey’s is 1.48, all of which are below the U.S. 3️⃣ The decline accelerated around 2014, well before the COVID pandemic. 4️⃣ As a result, humanity’s fertility is likely already below the replacement rate. 5️⃣ Many assume the replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman. That’s true for rich, advanced economies. But not for emerging economies, where selective abortion and higher young female mortality push the replacement rate higher. Thus, for humanity, the replacement rate is closer to 2.2. 6️⃣ The 2024 UN World Population Prospects are riddled with data and forecasts that, frankly, make little sense to my coauthor Patrick Norrick (at @AEI) and me. 7️⃣ Most of the differences in economic growth among advanced economies over the past 35 years can be attributed to demographic factors. Once adjusted for this, Japan’s economic performance is roughly on par with the U.S. (See my paper with Gustavo Ventura, @King_ofSweden, and Wen Yao, The Wealth of Working Nations): 🔗sciencedirect.com/science/ar… There are many other ideas (I could talk about this for hours!), but here’s the punchline: the world’s fertility crisis is worse than you thought, even after considering you already thought it was bad.

Elevating the Status of Motherhood Solves Low Birthrates: The Extraordinary Case of Mongolia For 68 years, Mongolian leaders have given the Order of Maternal Glory to mothers. This raised the status of motherhood and helped forge a remarkably pronatal culture. 🧵, please share!

Each new generation is hitting the traditional adult milestones at a later age than the last. [Link below.]

Very happy to help launch @commonplc magazine with a long-form treatment of remote work and fertility Covid helped more white-collar workers start families. Can we preserve the best of that optionality while recognizing the potential downsides of widespread WFH?

Two-thirds of romantic partners were friends first. A recent meta-analysis (N = 1,897) shows that the friends-to-lovers pathway is not just common, it’s preferred, especially among university students. 👩‍🤝‍👨 ➡️ ❤️ researchgate.net/publication…

This is scary and beautif Detailed TFR map of the world 2024 *this is largely correct but not math precise with many calculated guesses in areas where detailed info was limited

Sexless America: Young Adults Are Having Less Sex ifstudies.org/blog/sexless-a… @lymanstoneky

The ISSP survey on family matters was released today, allowing us to take a look at how many children for a family is considered ideal by respondents. With a few exceptions, people aged 18-44 desire more children than the replacement level.

Number of births in 2023. The top 20 countries. Note that Yemen, for example, has more births than Russia (1.3), Japan, Germany, or UK (all at about 0.7 million). India's fertility rate is falling, but it has huge demographic momentum.

The kind of benefit that helps the most families is a child tax credit, not subsidized childcare. More than half of mothers of kids under 5 want to stay home at least part time to raise their children, a new @FamStudies report finds.

19. These three regions make up 50% of world GDP

The way things are arranged is killing our future, and we need to change them, immediately.

Using @BirthGauge's data, I made this map of the TFR development between 2015 and 2025 in the countries where data is available. Few studied region are spared. Macao🇲🇴-57% Argentina🇦🇷-49% Thailand🇹🇭/Philippines🇵🇭-44% Ukraine🇺🇦-43% Bolivia🇧🇴/China🇨🇳-42% Tunisia🇹🇳-40% Egypt🇪🇬-39%

Having a family will make most women happier and more fulfilled than not. Delaying marriage and kids for a career is your choice, but it comes with a price — you should weigh it carefully. The marriage pool for quality men shrinks significantly when you get into your 30s. It becomes more difficult to have children when you get into your 30s. You might be able to have it all, but not at the same time—plan accordingly. Quality men pay for dinner, open doors, ask you on the first date, and pursue marriage. You have a better chance of attracting quality men if you are a quality woman. Having lots of sexual partners, abortions, and expecting a compliant male will not help your prospects. Sorry if that's controversial for a man to say. Just telling you the truth!

Excessive Immigration Hurts Birthrates When migration overwhelms the housing supply, fertility plummets Housing costs are a big barrier to having kids in the US and other countries. Where immigration exceeds the ability to add housing, young people are priced out. The building industry can’t keep up Immigration can bring a lot of benefits, but there are also costs, and housing shortages are often one of them. Housing limitations are a big reason why excessively high immigration rates are not feasible. The housing stock of a country increases gradually, but immigration can overwhelm housing suddenly. @ElonMusk explained the problem back in January: Housing shortages related to very high immigration are already occurring in the United States. Even though US fertility has been below replacement for 50 years, there aren't enough houses for families that want them. House Affordability is a Causal Factor for Birthrates The relationship between housing affordability and fertility rates has been well established in numerous studies. This can easily be seen among US states. Where homes are more affordable in relation to incomes, fertility is higher. When homes are too expensive, young people are often stuck living with their parents. As demographer Lyman Stone showed in a study across many countries for the Institute of Family Studies, when young couples live with their parents, they tend to have far fewer children. For fertility, it is crucial for young people to start living independently early in adulthood, but this is very hard to do when there is a housing shortage. The Case of Canada Canada offers a cautionary tale of what happens when immigration overwhelms the housing supply. No country in the world has higher net-migration per capita than Canada. Meanwhile, fertility in Canada has plummeted to just 1.25 births per woman in 2023, meaning Canada has by far the lowest fertility among Anglosphere countries and one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Why is fertility in Canada suddenly so low? The lack of sufficient housing is surely a big reason. Home prices have tripled just since 2000, and housing has become the top political issue in Canada, pushing a generation of young people to the right. Making matters worse, much of the housing being built in Canada is small apartments in high-rise towers. These are generally anti-natal. Canada really needs more of the single-family homes most sought after by people wanting children. The supply of those is much harder to increase. While falling fertility in Canada has multiple causes, the immigration-driven housing crisis is a big one. Canada is an extreme case, but this effect is seen in other countries too. In New Zealand, which has the second highest per-capita migration rates, fertility fell from 2.0 to 1.5 since 2015. In the UK, it fell from 1.77 to 1.43 over the same time period. In these cases too, immigration-led housing shortages seem to be a major part of the story. What about East Asia What about East Asian countries like Korea, China and Japan? They have very little immigration and yet have extremely low birthrates. Don't they undermine this argument? First, low fertility has multiple drivers. A range of factors have an impact including cultural ones, and it is a mistake to distill birthrates down to just one cause. But second, within-country migration is massive in these countries, contributing to a similar housing dynamic locally. Even though Korea, China and Japan are all depopulating and have low international immigration, they have extremely high rates of migration from rural areas to a few fashionable cities. The result is similar: young adults are priced out of housing and end up living with their parents, or else they live in tiny apartments. Fertility is exceptionally low in cities like Seoul, Shanghai and Tokyo, compared to the respective countries as a whole. Everyone can’t live in the same place When everyone tries to move to the same places, whether within countries or across borders, it is negative for birthrates by creating both crowding and local housing shortages. From a fertility perspective, geographic dispersion is much more pro-natal. One of the great challenges for solving the global fertility crisis is figuring out how to have economic dynamism that is geographically spread out across many regions and countries. Networked communication can help. The economic benefits of migration will be short-lived if birthrates are so low. Please share this and follow @MoreBirths for more on the low fertility crisis and its solutions.