Fewer people are having babies. Could smartphones be the reason? |
Last weekend the Financial Times published a report on the decline over the past two decades in global birth rates. The report, which breaks down statistically the likely causes of this decline, makes for bracing reading. In more than two-thirds of the world’s 195 countries, the average number of children born to each woman has fallen below the standard so-called “replacement rate” of 2.1. This is not just a reality in the wealthy countries of the West: birth rates over the past 15 years have been in free fall across countries at all levels of economic development, and many developing countries now have lower fertility rates than wealthy ones. Ageing populations drag down standards of living, shrinking workforces, reducing economic productivity and creating structural fiscal tensions.
One important aspect of the data is that there is a large and widening gap between the number of children people would like to have and the number they have. People still, on average across global regions, report an ideal of 2-2½ children. “Birth rates,” writes the report’s author John Burn-Murdoch, “are often collapsing despite, not because of, people’s desires.”
The reasons for this are, as with any trend across multiple regions and over long periods, multifarious and difficult to parse. Some of them are in themselves good things: reduction in child mortality, wider availability of contraception and birth control, the liberation of women from restrictive traditional gender roles and so forth. Others – lack of affordable housing, for instance – are unambiguously bad, and particularly dire in our own country. But economic factors are, as with all others, inconclusive. The demographic slide is occurring both in countries that were hit hard by the global financial crisis and those that were basically untouched,........