Since this is primarily a demography blog (despite my thinking that it is also one showcasing my wit and culinary aptitude), I would be remiss to not include a piece on an annual celebration that just took place: World Population Day, on July 11. If you want to see the full list of “days and weeks” that the UN commemorates, check this. Lots of gems, and I learned that World Population Day shares the day with World Horse Day. And if you were now wondering about the venn diagram and how many horses there are in the world, the answer is, around 61 million.
The point of World Population Day is to raise awareness of population issues and their relations to the environment and development. But it is also a time to read hot takes from many people (largely non-demographers, and no I won’t cite them here) about what’s going on (worry about population increases in the past and declines now) and what to do about it. Not that they needed this occasion to mark those op-eds; as I have flagged in previous pieces, everyone seems to have an opinion on fertility decline, some of it so so so bad. So today, I want to zoom out from the drivers of population change (fertility, mortality, migration) we usually do deep dives on, and dip my toes into the decline discourse at the aggregate level.
8 billion and counting
Our global population today is around 8.2 billion (check out this clock!) This is quite something, and we got here through advances in public health, medicine, and agriculture. It took all of human history to reach the first billion around 1805, 121 years to add the second, and by the 1970s we were adding a billion every dozen years. [I was doing my doctorate when we hit 7 billion, and my cohort hosted a party with “7” themed things like 7UP].
Source: Our World in Data (2023)
But the growth rate peaked back in 1964 at about 2.2% and has been falling since (with some brutal historical mortality events like the Great Leap Forward and ensuing famine along the way). Today, our population growth rate is around 0.9%, which is essentially equal to our population growing by ~70 million a year. So the unsatisfying answer to whether the world population is booming or busting, is that it’s both. It depends on where you are standing and your inherent biases honestly (recall the 3 parts we did on timing of population peaks? China, representing countries that have already peaked, Iran representing countries that will peak soon, and Pakistan representing countries that will peak much later). That the global population growth rate is slowing down (but not quite negative), is a reality. But is it a ‘crisis’, as it is being framed by many? Are we all going to fall off a cliff to extinction? Nope.
An aside about how population projections are projected
Vox had a great article last year on the topic for a more generalist audience (the headline also made me chuckle, “the mysterious statisticians shaping how we think about fertility”). Some of the main shops that do projections are the United Nations (which I default to in my Substack), the US Census Bureau, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna. They all use the same methodology, but their assumptions for some aspects are different. Through 2050 they all land within a tenth of a billion of each other (9.6 to 9.7B). But by 2100, the gap is huge (10.2 billion vs 8.8 or 8.2 billion). The reason for this lies in assumptions on whether African fertility follows history or tracks gains in education, and whether already low fertility countries rebound. Projections are hard (and fraught!)
If you want to play along with a really cool tool that lets you change various inputs (fertility, life expectancy, net migration) and see what would happen to the total population as a result, Our World in Data has this and you can do it by country.
While projections are important for many things, specifically within this low fertility discourse I think we are mostly asking the wrong questions. Worrying if the number is ‘too high, too low, or too slow’ (what I call the demographic Goldilocks trap), misses the bigger picture.The more interesting question isn’t how many people there will be. It’s whether people are getting the lives and the families, they actually want.
The fertility gap
Last week, UNFPA released the findings from their Demographic Futures survey: online survey ~109K young adults between ages 18 and 39 across 73 countries! (full disclosure: I served on the expert advisory committee, so read my enthusiasm with that in mind. Also, some caveats as they note: it’s an online panel, weighted but not nationally representative, and it skews educated and urban, especially in lower-income countries.)
Regarding the discourse on WHY-ARE-YOUNG-PEOPLE-NOT-HAVING-ANY-CHILDREN, one indicator from the report is instructive. It is the reported gap between ideal and actual number of children. It’s not completed fertility (and delayed births muddy the comparison), but is a starting point for a global map of aspiration/constraints vs reality among young adults.
The report states:
Overall, across all regions and income groups, the mean number of children reported by respondents aged 35–39 is lower than the mean ideal number of children reported by respondents aged 18–39.
The fertility gap is largest in West and Central Africa, where it reaches 1.91 children among females and 2.19 children among males. Among both sexes, the smallest gaps are observed in Latin America (0.55 among females, 1.09 among males) and Asia and the Pacific (0.69 among females, 1.14 among males).
AHEM: The fertility gap is actually largest in countries with some of the highest fertility rates in the world. This sort of flips the discourse that currently focuses on low fertility countries/regions (remember the piece on South Korea for instance). If people ending up with fewer children than they wanted is the emergency to focus on, it’s worse in West Africa, not in Western Europe.
And in the other direction, an equally under-discussed number: among childless 35–39-year-old women in high-income countries, 36% say their ideal is zero. Which means that a meaningful share of rich-country “childlessness” is chosen, not thwarted. Put those two facts side by side and the panic narrative: falling numbers = frustrated desire = crisis, starts to fall apart.
There’s more interesting stuff in the report, relevant to this decline discourse:
Economic and housing constraints are the top-rated barrier to having children in essentially every region and income group (72% of respondents rate them as important.)
The top-rated *precondition* for parenthood is financial security (88%).
The lowest-rated reasons for having children, everywhere, are government encouragement and contributing to the future workforce. Nobody, it turns out, has a baby for GDP.
One gap, four camps
That single gap gets read four very different ways, with very different ideas about what to do and who should do it. It’s the cleanest way I know to introduce the four camps (maybe you disagree? I certainly could use help on the nomenclature) and, as it turns out, they sort neatly onto two axes: is there a correct number of people? and by what means do you get there — agency or coercion?
Camp 1: Instrumental Pronatalism
For them, the gap is a national emergency and proof of latent demand: people say they want more children than they’re having, therefore the state’s job is to close the gap upward. The Heritage Foundation opened the year with a 168-page successor to Project 2025, ‘Saving America by Saving the Family’, built around incentivizing a specific family form: married, heterosexual, biological, traditionally gendered. The US Vice President has said plainly that he wants more American babies; the President has called himself the fertilization president; a senior health official described American women as “underbabied,” (I could go on - The National Women’s Law Center’s rundown of the movement is super useful.) The policy solutions being offered run from baby bonuses and motherhood medals to transportation funding steered toward high fertility/marriage counties. This camp would likely quibble with the finding that government encouragement and workforce needs rank last among young people’s reasons for having children, everywhere, in every income group. But it isn’t monolithic. The Heritage/Vance traditionalist wing wants babies through marriage and is openly hostile to IVF, while a tech-pronatalist wing (Musk, and Trump) wants more babies by any means. That IVF pivot is where the recent federal energy has gone, and it’s a thread we’ll pick up in Camp 4.
Camp 2: Population Stabilization
This is the camp most often collapsed into the first one, but I think they are distinct enough to be separate. Its flagship publication is After the Spike and the authors argue that global population will peak around 10 billion and then decline exponentially and that this is bad news: for innovation (progress has historically scaled with large, interconnected populations), for equity, and even for the climate, since decarbonization has to happen decades before depopulation could deliver any emissions relief. But their prescription is the opposite of camp 1: they are explicitly anti-coercion, arguing that stabilization can only be achieved with women’s reproductive freedom and a redistribution of caregiving. This camp reads the fertility gap in the same direction as camp 1 (unmet desire for children), but wants to make parenting compatible with the lives people want as the whole program, and family-form moralizing as none of the government’s business. (One caveat worth keeping in view given the anti-coercion framing: critics, including Camp 4 below, note the authors don’t disclose funding tied to Elon Musk.)
Camp 3: Reproductive Justice and Rights
This is the framework articulated by multilaterals like UNFPA, staked out in last year’s State of World Population report, The Real Fertility Crisis , and grounded in the new Demographic Futures Survey. Its starting point is that the crisis is not the birth rate itself but reproductive agency. And that agency runs in both directions at once. Some people are having fewer children than they want (blocked by money, housing, the absence of a partner); others are having more than they want (blocked from contraception, education, or the right to refuse). The question it asks is not whether young people want families but why so many find it hard to build the ones they want. This camp sets no target for the number, up or down; its remedies are conditions: affordability, childcare, gender-equitable leave, reproductive healthcare. Aspirations, in this telling, are relatively stable; it’s the circumstances that need fixing.
Sharing this rights-and-agency space, though in a more openly activist register, are groups like the ARCH Collaborative, who frame pronatalism as an anti-rights wedge and counter it not with a case for fewer people but with a competing pro-family vision: affordability, opportunity, autonomy. ARCH co-founder Varina Winder’s retort to the “underbabied” diagnosis is succinct. Americans, she says, are “underinsured, underemployed, and underpaid.” They too are largely uninterested in whether the number goes up or down; they are interested in who is being conscripted to move it.
Camp 4: Ecological Sustainability
This camp shares Camp 3’s rights-and-agency values but parts ways on the number. Groups like Population Balance argue that pronatalism (the web of patriarchal, religious, nationalist, and economic pressure on women to bear children) is among the most pervasive coercive forces in reproductive life, and that it quietly treats motherhood as a woman’s default setting. Their distinction is ecological: they contend that much of the mainstream conversation about falling birth rates, from the fertility industry to global health bodies promoting IVF, declines to name a world of 8 billion as an ecological problem, reading slower growth as a loss when, in their view, it’s a gain for people and planet. Additionally, a recent piece argues that the “crisis” framing largely serves to keep extracting women’s reproductive labor, and that the policy pivot toward IVF is less about babies than about a multi-billion-dollar fertility industry. One that, they say, trades on conflating low birth rates with infertility, which are not the same thing.
TL;DR: Look at where the camps land on the map above and one thing mainly jumps out: Only the Instrumental Pronatalists sit below the line, in the coercion quadrant; everyone else is on the agency side, differing only on the number. So the fight isn’t really about how; it’s about whether there’s a right number at all.
Baby, we have been here before
This debate is not new. In the ‘90s, the fight was in the other direction. Women in high-fertility countries were having more children than they said they wanted, and the question was whether that reflected constraints like access to family planning, education, or preferences that surveys mismeasured. And here we are again, 30 years later, in the other direction.
What this all reveals is that stated fertility ideals are slippery. They are adaptive (people revise them to match their lives), and are gendered (see the male–female ideal gap above, and then ask whose ideal gets realized and who does the realizing). The fertility gap is a useful indicator, but as a temperature check on agency, not as a target. It tells you that somewhere between intention and outcome, something intervened. It does not tell you what that was. Whether the intervention was a housing market, a husband, a norm, or a changed mind.
Looking forward
Claudia Goldin’s latest paper landed right on cue this week and it reframes the panic as old news. She shows for example, the US has been below replacement almost continuously since the early 1970s, and completed fertility for American women born in 1955 was lower than for those born in 1975. The common drivers across different countries are women’s increased agency reflected in education, employment, and reproductive control. But the mechanisms producing today’s lowest-low fertility have a critical mismatch: women adapted to modern economies faster than men did, and a woman deciding whether to invest in a career and a child needs credible assurance that the father will be, in Goldin’s memorable typology, a dependable “dad” rather than a “dud.” Look at her chart plotting fertility against the gender gap in daily housework and care hours across 22 countries: the countries where men do the least at home (Japan, Korea, Italy) are precisely the lowest-fertility countries; the countries where the gap is smallest (Sweden, Denmark) sit at the top:
Source: Goldin (2026)
Much of the policy prescriptions across some of the camps are the same. Affordability, childcare, fair division of labor. So the real fight is not over what to do; it is over the one thing left standing: whether there is a correct number of people, and whose job it is to aim for it.
Demography cannot answer that question. It can only tell you what it costs, and to whom, when someone in power decides there is.
The Food!
We “made” 6 types of dumplings from around the world! We had khinkali (Georgia), empanadas (Spain/Portugal?), pierogi (Poland), momos (Nepal), xiao long bao (China), and shrimp dumplings (OK, China again). They were all store-bought, but we made the sauces ourselves (some saving grace?). Kimaya accompanied me to 4 different grocery stores: the Russian market, Mexican grocery, the Indian store, and the Chinese supermart, all 5 mins from each other. These are the things I love most about America.
We had a cute little tasting bracket, aptly titled “Winner, Winner, Dumpling Dinner” by Kimaya. Khinkali won! It is basically the perfect dumpling, and I thank the heavens we were introduced to it. Part soup dumpling, part manti. Full perfection.
These articles are all phenomenal - I am learning so much! Also that dumpling dinner is such a fun idea. Thank you for writing and sharing!