Barry Austin

Related The Fertility Implosion New York Times

Falling Fertility Economist

I worked in Japan for a year as a journalist for TIME in 2006 and ’07, and here’s what I realized: the Japanese do everything first. Camera phones, Zen Buddhism, little fuel-efficient cars, huge public debt, a stagnant economy, the literary acceptance of comic books — what happens first in Japan eventually makes its way to the rest of the world. And that includes declining birthrates. One of the biggest social issues I covered in Japan was the increasingly low marriage rate among young people and the vanishingly small birthrate, which translated to an aging — and eventually shrinking — population. The issue dominated the media, and I wrote about it several times. But the public angst made little difference. Most young Japanese women simply didn’t seem interested in having many children — at least not under the conditions of Japanese society.

Now what began in Japan is happening globally. As David Brooks wrote in his New York Times column yesterday, fertility is on the decline in much of the world, from Iran — 1.7 births per woman — to Russia, where low fertility combined with high death rates mean the population is already shrinking. To Brooks, the world is facing what the writer Phillip Longman has called the gray tsunami — a moment the population over 60 swamps those under 30. And that includes the U.S., which has long had higher birthrates than most developed nations:

But even that is looking fragile. The 2010 census suggested that U.S. population growth is decelerating faster than many expected. Besides, it’s probably wrong to see this as a demographic competition. American living standards will be hurt by an aging and less dynamic world, even if the U.S. does attract young workers. For decades, people took dynamism and economic growth for granted and saw population growth as a problem. Now we’ve gone to the other extreme, and it’s clear that young people are the scarce resource. In the 21st century, the U.S. could be the slowly aging leader of a rapidly aging world.

To Brooks this is a slow-motion disaster. Aging countries will face the burden of caring for large elderly populations without a large resource of young workers to draw on.

But here’s the thing: a Centrum Silver world may have a silver lining for the planet.

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First of all, as Amanda Marcotte points out on Slate, it’s a little hard to separate Brooks’ “concern-trolling” about fertility from the recent political battle over contraception. After all, fertility rates are declining not because people are suddenly having less sex — well, in most countries at least — but because women are exercising the ability to control if and when they become pregnant. And it turns out that once women have the means to control reproduction, they will almost always choose to have fewer children.

From Marcotte: