There Is No Demographic Crisis. Only a Crisis of Care

Bloomberg

18-07-2025

Illustration: Uli Knörzer for Bloomberg
There Is No Demographic Crisis. Only a Crisis of Care
The world's population is expected to start shrinking this century. Political demographer Jennifer Sciubba says that's no reason to panic.
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Is the trajectory of the world's population a threat to humanity?
For decades, the dominant worry about the number of people on Earth was that there would soon be too many for available resources. And indeed, numbers are still growing, with the expectation that we will get to 10 billion people in around 50 years' time.
Published in 1968, The Population Boom helped ignite widespread alarm about the threat of overpopulation.
But a new shift has become apparent. Birth rates are not only declining in richer, industrialized nations such as Japan, South Korea and the United States, but across the globe, from Mexico to Brazil, Nigeria, Morocco, India and Indonesia. Could we soon have too few people? Might Elon Musk be right when he says that a 'collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces'?
We turned to political demographer Jennifer Sciubba for some expert answers, including — unexpectedly — why her skills have been needed at the Pentagon. She's the author of 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World.
Published in 1968, The Population Boom helped ignite widespread alarm about the threat of overpopulation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Might I start with what seems like a contradiction in two different things I've heard you say?
Sure.
One is that you're not an alarmist about population change. But you also say that there's 'a shift towards pervasive and permanent low fertility, population aging and eventual depopulation.' That sounds to me like a cause for alarm.
You've latched onto one of the most interesting things about being in this field of population science. It's not so much the numbers themselves but how people feel about them.
There are some people I could give that same second statement to, and they'd say, Thank goodness or Not fast enough. Others are panicked and say, This is the worst thing that could happen to humanity. As a political scientist, I'm always tracking the response to the data. And I think my job is to contextualize and interpret, so that people know what they're supposed to do with that information. 1
1 Sciubba gets straight into the psychology of how we see population in a way I find intriguing. I too absorbed the prevailing worry about overpopulation throughout my adolescence and adulthood, which is why the pivot towards depopulation concerns has taken me by surprise.
So perhaps I've revealed more about myself than I intended by saying that I hear 'depopulation' and it feels like a cause for alarm! Although I should clarify: Depopulation does not mean there's no one left. It means a substantial reduction?
It does. And we're not anywhere close to that at a planetary level. We're not yet at peak population, so we still are going to add somewhere between 1 billion and 2 billion more people. I might not see peak population in my lifetime. My kids, however, certainly will. 2 [At] the national level in the United States, 40% of our counties are shrinking. Overall the interesting thing is: This will become the norm. And decades ago that would have been the exception.
2 The latest UN projection is that the world's population will peak in the mid 2080s, at around 10.3 billion people, and then gradually decline.
But is it also correct that something really fundamental has changed in projections within the last decade? We used to hear that it was not very likely that the global population would start shrinking this century.
I track it so closely [that] it feels like it's been a little bit longer, but we're certainly hearing it more in the media.
What changed is the idea that there was something exceptional about the decline in fertility rates, that it was mainly going to characterize higher-income countries. We now know that is not the case.
The Global Population May Start Shrinking in the 2080s
When the fertility rate fall below about 2, population falls.
Source: UN Population Division
The people who have been talking about this vociferously in recent years are people like Elon Musk 3 and JD Vance. Musk said, 'The birth rate is very low in almost every country. Unless that changes, civilization will disappear.' These are apocalyptic terms, but do the pro-natalists have a point that others need to wake up to?
3 Musk, who has at least 12 children himself, has said he is 'doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis.' In 2023 Bloomberg revealed Musk had made a $10 million donation to support a new Population Wellbeing Initiative at UT Austin.
They're not the only ones who have made that point, they're just the ones with the loudest microphones lately.
There are a few fundamental changes that made people wake up to this. One is when we hit 8 billion people in 2022 and you start to see the media around that. Not long after, China begins to depopulate, which is astounding because this is a country where people were obsessed for decades with how rapidly they were growing. The one-child policy was put in place in large part to slow that growth.
Then India surpasses China as the most populous country. All these things hit in succession, and it made people wake up to the fact that we have seen a big shift in our birth patterns around the world.
A billboard for China's 'one-child' policy in the Guangxi region in 2007 reads: 'Have less children, have a better life.'
Photographer: GOH CHAI HIN/AFP/Getty Images
Crowds waiting for the train in Mumbai. India surpassed China as the world's most populous nation in 2023.
Photographer: Bhushan Koyande/Why?
Now you've hit the long question. For so many reasons. If you have to have me boil it down to one, it has to do with preferences and norms.
Which is largely a good thing, right? It means that women — I'm not loading this on women, but they're the ones giving birth — in many parts of the world can now say, I'm going to choose how big my family is, if I have children at all.
Yes. And men and women are choosing fewer. And so when you really start to look at this, expense is a theme. Children are very expensive. 4
4 The link between cost and shifting preferences is important, as this Bloomberg Opinion piece from 2024 underlines. Rather than people simply wanting fewer children, Kathryn Anne Edwards writes, 'what's more likely is that families want to have children and more of them but are thwarted by circumstances.'
I'm speaking to you from the UK. A lot of people have a real worry about projections for the population, which is 69 million now and projected to hit 72 million around 2032. People worry about pressure on public services. People say it's a small island. Would you say the bigger problem is down the road, and that worry about an increasing population in the immediate future is misplaced?
We can't say that it's misplaced because that's what we feel and experience, right? We run into the same thing in the US. Part of what we do at PRB [Population Reference Bureau] is help municipalities make demographic projections so they can understand what the needs of the community will be.
But as one of our demographers says, she'll sit in a room with people and say, You have an acute housing shortage for 30 years and then it completely drops off. Now what do you do with that as a planner? So I think where there is cause for alarm is in not having the tools that we need to understand how to deal with the immediate and near-future being so different from what's on the other side.
Which has very serious implications, doesn't it? Your housing development, is it going to deliver a return for decades? You're left wondering what the return on that investment is by the end of the century. 5
5 Simulations by OECD researchers project that housing prices will ease over the next few decades in countries with shrinking populations.
Yes — infrastructure, schools, all of that. When the medium term sees such a shift, it's hard to wrap your brain around that. And the other challenge is that all of our assumptions about the way the world works, theories we were taught about economic growth or development, they were formed in a time where we just assumed the population would continue growing. We all need to sit together and say, Wow, what if all of our underlying assumptions are upended? What does that mean for how we understand the world? What does that mean for how we understand the good life, or prioritize wellbeing over GDP growth rates?
Those assumptions come into perceptions of other countries too, don't they? I was intrigued to discover that you used to work at the Pentagon when the US was engaged in two very significant wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What was a demographer doing at the Pentagon?
This was a time when the Pentagon was turning to social scientists to say Perhaps things aren't going quite as the planners had thought they would, in terms of regime changes, and peace, and conflict. And so there was a real effort to understand some of the underlying dynamics in the society that might be driving some of these governance outcomes. One of the areas was demography.
We know that countries in the world that have very young age structures — so lots of young people and fewer older people — tend to be the countries that have higher incidences of civil conflict. 6 They are less likely to be democratic. It's just a way to paint a fuller picture of the world. And I think that's the best part of being a political demographer, is it does lead you to ask different questions about the world, to look at a different lens.
6 Political violence is more common in countries with a higher share of 15- to 24-year-olds, a UN review found in 2012. But that risk is lower where young people have access to education and employment.
And did you come to conclusions about Iraq and Afghanistan that fed into policy?
Yes. I don't think it's necessarily things that people wouldn't guess. However, there are some pieces about Russia and China that are a little different.
What did the US not understand about the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan?
This is a time in history when there were assumptions about being able to export democracy. And to me, the biggest thing that a demographic lens did was show that would not be a very smooth path. And indeed it has not been.
Why does that lens help show that it's not a smooth path?
The cohorts of young people are so large that it becomes incredibly challenging to create jobs for them. They might be closed out of the political system because of the regime type. When they come of age, they can't vote, et cetera. This leads to a lower opportunity cost of engaging in armed conflict, and there's a lot more chance for coups, for example. The research really shows that.
On Russia, was there a perception that the shrinking Russian population meant Russia was not going to be what it is today? That its threat or its capacity to act in an aggressive way would naturally be diminished?
Yes, there was. The assumption [was] that demography is destiny, which I always work to counter because the same demographic trend in two different places can show up quite differently.
With Russia there was a desirability bias. And there continues to be among a lot of people, that what they hoped to see happen would happen. Russia's been shrinking by half a million people a year, life expectancy for men was really low — below 60 because of high alcoholism rates — and the fertility rate was low as well. 7
7 I found this statistic shocking. In the early 1980s, life expectancy for Russian men was around 65. An anti-alcohol campaign initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev contributed to some improvement, but the Soviet Union's collapse affected public-health messaging. By 1994, men's life expectancy was down to 57.
And so there was, on the part of some people, a desire to see that as a sign of a weaker adversary. But they forget the context. Who has power in society? How are these institutions structured? What does that leader want?
Those things really matter, and they matter with China as well.
Let's turn to individual societies and governments. There's an obvious thing, that if you're trying to run a welfare state, you need enough people earning and paying into that welfare state for those who are older to be able to draw money out of it. What do you think are the lessons from your work for the design of government policy?
An important question, because there are so many countries that don't yet have a welfare state but that are rapidly aging. I hope that they're looking at ways to institute sustainable systems that can follow them along that demographic transition through time.
The least sustainable way to set up these institutions is to have people be incentivized to exit the labor market early, with decades to go before the end of their lives, because this becomes very expensive. 8
8 Brazil is one country that was weighed down by the cost of people retiring in their 50s. Under former President Jair Bolsonaro, changes were finally made in 2019 to what had been one of the world's most generous pension systems. 'It took three presidents, four finance ministers, and countless setbacks,' Bloomberg reported.
But they have made that change in Japan, haven't they? More people are now retiring after age 70?
There's a difference between what an official retirement age is and what the effective retirement age is. In some cultures, and at some times, people are able to exit the labor market earlier than the official retirement age through other schemes.
In Japan, yes — the effective retirement age has gotten closer to 70. But this is also a country where there's still quite a few barriers to people being able to work longer, and that's present in every society.
The good news is you don't necessarily have to have some sweeping reform at the national level to change this; you can start to break it down into little pieces that are politically much easier. Is there still discrimination on the books, or can you get rid of that through legal pathways? You can start to work with companies to say: Would you benefit from being able to bring people back as consultants or part-time? I'm optimistic that if we don't try to do some national-level reform to raise the retirement age — which people don't like — and break it down into other pieces, we could see real changes. 9
9 This is interesting. Raising the retirement age is politically explosive (just ask France, China and Russia), but Sciubba is suggesting that removing other labor-market barriers could keep older people in the workforce. In her book, she notes that workers in Japan 'fought for the right to continue working in old age' and won the 'removal of mandatory retirement and age discrimination.'
There's another way to look at this, which is pro-immigration — that there are countries in the world where fertility rates are still high. Many of them are very poor. They are places people want to move from.
Yes. However we have to be careful to not assume that the pool is infinite. When I talk to audiences, once they understand that fertility rates have changed, they say, We can just open the doors to more immigrants. But not everyone who wants to move will actually move.
There are a lot of things I think I might want to do in life. I might want to take up sewing again, but I'm not actually going to do it. You don't want to look at the percentages of people who want to emigrate and use that in order to project who might be in this pool. Most people — 96% — don't move.
'There's so many people who are left behind in our depopulating world. It's clear to me that numbers are not the problem.'
And politically — in most of the countries people would be interested in moving to — the mood is very much against immigration these days.
So I was talking supply and you're talking demand. Add those two together, and it definitely paints the picture that there's not this infinite pool of people. And with so many countries depopulating, if they do turn to immigration, which is a perfectly viable solution to add workers, they're now competing with each other over talent.
How do you feel about pro-natalist arguments?
10 A good challenge. Pro-natalism can be defined as simply the belief that having children is good, but its use in political rhetoric and policy has been controversial. In Communist Romania, for example, women who didn't have children were called 'deserters.' Today, leaders who espouse pro-natalism are often also against immigration. 'We do not need numbers, but Hungarian children,' Hungarian President Viktor Orban said in 2019. 'In our minds, immigration means surrender.'
We will get into actual pro-natalist policies, but when you hear people like JD Vance saying, 'I want more babies in the United States,' or President Trump saying, 'You can call me the fertilization president.' What do you think when you hear those statements?
I think the same thing about both pro- and anti-natalists' framing, which is that it's the wrong framing to get what you're after.
For example, you mentioned the welfare state earlier. A pay-as-you-go retirement system. When that's broken, is it because of population or is it because it wasn't a great institution for long-term sustainability in the context of shifting demographics? Is it that you have a population problem or you have a labor problem? It's fascinating to see how countries will go from thinking they have too many people [to] Wait a minute, there are too few people and we're not growing at all and we want to solve that.
If we shift our focus to different metrics like wellbeing — Are these people thriving? Are they happy? Is there a strong sense of community? Is this the country that we wanted to build together? — different framings can get us a lot further.
'I think having policy makers who are really flexible and nimble in their thinking is really important. It can be quite tough to do that though, when politicians are chasing the next election.'
The pro-natalists often get people's backs up if they think You're putting me back into this patriarchal model. Women having more babies need to be at home more. Reproductive rights are under assault anyway, in so many American states.
Some policies that might be labeled pro-natalist, we could label them differently and perception might change across the political spectrum.
For example, why is childcare considered pro-natalist these days? Even a decade ago people might have assumed that was more on the political left. It's begun to be framed in this very polarizing way, which is a real shame because it didn't have to be.
A lot of these issues are things that I think the political right and left could agree on, like investing in families. Of course, who is a 'family' then? This gets into your political polarization as well. But you can try to keep it at, How do we support people to live their best lives? How do we keep choice in the mix? It doesn't have to be quite so polarizing.
Policies in places like South Korea, which are overtly about encouraging people to have more children — is there any evidence that they work? 11
11 'Baby bonuses' are among the ways South Korea has been trying to raise its birth rate, which is the lowest in the world.
There's a large variety of these kinds of incentives.
If the goal is a population target, then the answer is no. We do not see a sustained rise in fertility based on these types of financial incentives. Sometimes we see a short-term spike like Oh, I was gonna have a baby sometime in the next five years, and while this is on offer, let me go ahead and do this now.
But if we change our measure of success and instead say, Did that make it easier for people to support their families? Then maybe the answer is yes, this is successful. But we haven't really been measuring success that way.
So in our last few minutes... Design a country for us.
[Jennifer laughs.]
Design a system. Because it seems clear that there's a high likelihood that the global population will start shrinking this century. What is the system that works in that reality?
Well, of course the answer is we don't know because we've never seen this before. But little pieces that I pick up on throughout my research and career are things like strong communities. Incredibly important, because not only do they help support people with younger kids, they also help support you throughout this demographic transition, so the older people can get the kind of care that they need.
So care is a really important theme. And where does care happen? It happens locally. I think having policy makers who are really flexible and nimble in their thinking is really important. It can be quite tough to do that though, when politicians are chasing the next election.
'We talk about 'population' and there's no 'people' in it. We could be talking about anything, the population of squirrels.'
Can I just understand what you mean by care? You've chosen this as your number one policy objective. You mean childcare, health care and elder care? All easily available at a local level?
Absolutely. Because we talk about 'population' and there's no 'people' in it. We could be talking about anything, the population of squirrels. But we're really talking about people, and how we go through our lives is experienced locally. Having people cared for is what's going to give us that wellbeing. I think that's the whole point.
Cradle-to-grave is a really interesting dimension to this. Amid this focus on birth rates, you're saying that we must think about what we need at the end of our lives, as well?
Right. Just having babies, creating more people, doesn't really get you to whatever it is you think you need.
It's usually economic growth that people are interested in. Will these be productive citizens who have the exact skills that you think that they need? Maybe not. And so you want the biggest numbers possible. There's so many people who are left behind in our depopulating world. It's clear to me that numbers are not the problem.
And it's easier to have slogans about having more babies than to think hard about what people want in old age. Few of us really want to think about what being old will be like.
Absolutely. And that is a big barrier to seeing us move ahead. What does it look like to flourish as an older society? We don't have images of that. There's so much negativity and there's so much fear. There's fear because this overall demographic shift is unknown and we're usually afraid of what we don't know.
Our only metric for understanding population aging is our individual aging. And the reward for aging is death, [which] becomes very scary to people. So there's not a lot of room in our psyche to see what could possibly be good about this coming world.
Mishal Husain is Editor at Large for Bloomberg Weekend.