Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Good morning from the Financial Times. It's Tuesday, May 26th, and this is a special edition of your FT News Briefing. Declining birth rates and shrinking populations have become huge topics for politicians all around the world. Today, we're digging into what's contributing to it, the economic consequences of it, and whether we need to stop it.
The fundamental issue here is that when countries have very low fertility rates, you have big problems coming down the track.
I'm Victoria Craig. Let's get into it. Five days after he was sworn in as U.S. vice president in 2025, J.D. Vance spoke at the anti-abortion March for Life rally in the nation's capital.
Let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America.
Chapter 2: What are the reasons behind falling global birth rates?
But he focused less on the topic of abortion and more on the importance of growing a family.
Now it should be easier, easier to raise a family, easier to find a good job, easier to build a home, to raise that family in. The benchmark of national success is not our GDP number or our stock market, but whether people feel that they can raise thriving and healthy families in our country.
Vance is hardly the only politician or even business leader ringing alarm bells about birth rate trends in America. Billionaire Elon Musk has labeled it, quote, the biggest risk to civilization. And while declining birth rates are not a new phenomenon, the trend is accelerating in countries all over the world, from high income to low income ones.
The FT's chief data reporter, John Byrne Murdoch, has been crunching the numbers and talking to experts on this issue. He joins me now to suss it all out. Hi, John.
Hello. Thanks for having me.
Well, it's great to have you. Thanks for being here. So just walk me through some of these numbers to get us started.
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Chapter 3: How have economic factors influenced birth rates?
How significant is this shift?
So one thing to emphasize straight out of the gate here is that birth rates have been declining for decades or even centuries over most of the world. But during the latter part of the last century and this century, they were actually stabilizing in most high and middle income countries worldwide.
But then what is striking is that over the last 15 years or so, that stabilisation has become a decline, which applies in the US, it applies in the UK. The one that I think really jumps out to me is that Mexico, significantly poorer than its northern neighbour, the US, Mexico now has a lower birth rate than America. And that's also true now for Brazil, Tunisia, Sri Lanka.
It's even true for Iran, which is an incredibly different country in terms of both economic development and culture to the countries we usually associate with this.
OK, so when we're talking about this idea of birth rate decline, what exactly does that mean?
So demographers talk about this number, the replacement rate, which is when a society sees women having an average of 2.1 children. That means that without immigration, your population is going to be relatively stable. And the number of countries that are now below that replacement rate That is now two thirds of the world's countries.
And in 66 countries, the average number of children each woman gives birth to is now closer to one than two. Within a small number of cases, the most common number is now zero.
I want to dig into why this is happening because I think politicians sometimes like to boil this down simply to modern society, a change in gender roles, more women, you know, going to university, starting their own careers, becoming more independent. But, John, I wonder how much of this change in demographics is really down to women's decisions.
Yeah.
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