In Japan, a generation of childless
women is referred to as “bare branches.”
"Peak People"
by Joel Bowman
“As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd
what happens in a world without children’s voices. I was there at the end.”
~ Miriam, from the dystopian movie "Children of Men" (2006)
Osaka, Japan - "This year in Japan, adult diapers will outsell baby diapers. In Germany, the number of young people (aged 15-24) has fallen to a record low. In Denmark, there is a nationwide advertising campaign called “Do it for Denmark,” aimed at (ahem...) “stimulating” the plummeting birth rate there. And in Italy – Catholic, family-friendly Italy – the fertility rate has hit a historic nadir (1.18 children per woman) as the rapidly aging population steps silently into the shadows.
Alas, for human beings who are interested in the future of... well, human beings... the situation is not at all promising. Dire though Italy’s predicament is, it is not even the worst case in Europe. Spain’s fertility rate is 1.12 per woman. Malta’s is 1.06. All told, not a single country in Europe is even at the baseline replacement level, 2.1 children per woman. France tops the list at 1.56 children per woman. The European average is just 1.38.
The numbers are even more stark here, in what may well be called the “Land of the Setting Sun.” From the Asahi Shimbum (December, 2025): "Japan’s 2025 births likely to hit new low in 10-year streak.The number of Japanese children born domestically this year will likely be around 667,542, which underscores the nation’s accelerating decline in this demographic, according to an Asahi Shimbun projection on Dec. 23. This would be the lowest number since statistics became available in 1899, and it is expected to mark a new record low for the 10th consecutive year.
[…]
If the declining birthrate continues, there is a risk it will lead to a decrease in working-age workers, accelerating labor shortages in many fields. The projection comes even as the central government implements a 3.6 trillion yen ($23 billion) annual package to combat the falling birthrate."
If “demography is destiny,” as the French philosopher Auguste Comte is alleged to have said, the destiny of the species here on planet earth is, for want of a better word, grave.
Cradle to Grave: Noticing this phenomenon, data scientist and documentary filmmaker, Stephen Shaw, thought it worth further investigation. If populations really are collapsing across the industrialized world, as the data unequivocally demonstrates, what might this mean for modern welfare states, which rely on ever expanding tax bases to fund Social Security-type retirement programs? What might happen to pension systems, healthcare services, public utilities, without future generations to capitalize and operate them? What might the socio-economic fallout look like when states begin refitting public schools and kindergartens to function as aged care facilities, hospitals...and cemeteries?
Shaw spent four years traveling the world and interviewing hundreds of fertility experts, demographers, sociologists, professors and – of course, importantly – everyday women, both with and without children, to try and understand what is going on. The resulting documentary is called “Birthgap – Childless World.”
According to Shaw’s findings, seventy percent of the world’s population live in a country where the fertility rate is below replacement level. Not a single industrialized country stands in exception. Not one. At 1.00 children per woman, China’s fertility rate is now barely above Italy’s. In nearby South Korea, where marriage rates have fallen by ~40% in the past decade alone, the fertility rate has dropped to just 0.78. And in neighboring Taiwan, designated by the UN as a “super-aged” society, where one in five people is over 60 years of age, the fertility rate has vanished to just 0.72.
Assuming roughly constant fertility and mortality rates, and no meaningful uptick in immigration (and even then, from where?), South Korea’s population is set to halve within a few decades. Taiwan’s even sooner. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that these nations are leading human beings onto the “endangered species” list. And yet, almost nobody notices. Why? Broadly speaking, two factors mask this phenomenon:
1. Decaying vs. declining – At present, extending life expectancies are offsetting much of the visible impact on the planet’s net population which will continue to grow over much of this century. In demographics, this is known as the proverbial “pig in the python,” where the “bulge” of more populous cohorts moves through the system.
2. Africa vs. Other – When it comes to demographic trends, the world is basically divided into Sub-Saharan Africa, where birth rates are well above replacement levels, and the rest of the world, where they are substantially below...and falling, rapidly.
Hard Math: Further compounding the problem for industrialized nations: Math. The lower fertility rates fall, the faster they will further decay (back to the intractable “less children = less future mothers” reality). Shaw further explains exponential decay in his documentary: "Nations with [fertility] rates at one point four children per woman will see their rates decay by one-third per generation, meaning that in two generations, the underlying population will fall by over half and in three generations, by seventy percent.”
What does this mean for the industrialized world? Even in the United States, where immigration has lately been absorbing headlines for other reasons, the fertility rate for all women stands at just 1.64 children per woman. It has been declining steadily since the 2007-08 recession. (A related topic for another time.)
In a note to Bloomberg news, billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller warned about the nation’s un- and underfunded liabilities, writing that spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will have to be cut drastically in the future… if not yesterday. Citing Congressional Budget Office estimates, Druckenmiller wrote that spending on seniors will account for 100% of tax revenue by 2040. And after accounting for future entitlement payments, he estimated the actual US debt burden to be closer to $200 trillion, far more than the official $38 trillion (and change) we keep hearing about in the “news.”
Such is the gloomy arithmetic for an aging population, as nations around the world are fast coming to discover...many for the first time in recorded history. As the Japanese economics professor Noriko Tsuya warns, we are very much in uncharted waters here: “For a society with a sizable population to experience continuous and very rapid population decline, in a prosperous and peaceful time, has never happened before in history. There is no precedent.”
Suicide by Virtue: One might think that, given such dire statistics, Shaw’s investigation would at least garner some interest at our own leading institutes of higher learning, perhaps prompt a polite exchange of ideas, maybe even lead to a spirited debate about what might be causing such a worrying trend. Indeed, Mr. Shaw was invited to showcase his documentary at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.
That was, until the students threw their toys out of the stroller, leveling against Shaw the all-too predictable accusations of “misogyny,” “transphobia,” “homophobia,” and “racism” such as we have come to expect from the unfailingly “tolerant and inclusive” student body. Naturally, the event was canceled less than 48 hours before it was scheduled to begin.
But is it “racist” to notice that Sub-Saharan African nations are producing more children than the Americas, Europe, here in Asia or even Northern Africa? Can facts even be racist? Is it “homophobic” to notice that it takes a male and a female of the human species to produce a child? Is it “misogynistic” to notice that every single human being in recorded history has... dare we even utter the word... a person with a womb mother?
The (one is tempted to say “childish”) response echoed objections against the “Do it for Denmark” and subsequent “Do it for Mom” campaigns, when a British publication not worth naming accused them of carrying “explicit heteronormative and ageist tones” that “reflect a pro-natal and youth-oriented culture.”
Well... yes! Babies do tend to be “pro-natal” and “youth oriented” and, had the authors of unsaid publication bothered to attend a biology class between their intersectionality grievance workshops, they might have learned about the “explicitly heteronormative” activities required to reproduce in the first place. Alas, as with so many important conversations in our modern age, activists would rather shout than listen, protest than participate, cancel than communicate.
Time was when indolent commencement speechwriters used the hackneyed phrase, “the children are our future.” Which leaves one left to wonder: when children are our past, the future may already be behind us."
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