The strange death of the family
by Joel Kotkin, spiked:
The world is sleepwalking towards a depopulation crisis.
Over a decade ago, I led a team of Singapore-based researchers to investigate why families were declining. Back then, we were experiencing a historic shift away from population growth and familial ties, towards individualism. Since then, the post-familial age has entered full swing.
This situation would have been unthinkable in the 1960s, when ‘overpopulation’ was seen as inevitable. In his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich predicted that the number of people on Earth would rocket to unsustainable levels, resulting in global famine.
Yet the disaster Ehrlich predicted has not materialised. In fact, the trend is now reversing. Last year’s global population growth was the smallest since 1950. Far from humans breeding themselves out of existence, today almost half of the world’s people live in countries with fertility rates well below replacement level. This week, the US Census announced the lowest birthrate in American history. Rather than relentlessly continuing to rise, as per Ehrlich’s prophecies, the UN predicts that the world’s population will peak between 2053 and in 2086. By 2100, the rate of growth will have virtually stalled. We are entering demographic territory not seen since the plague-cursed Medieval period.
The decline of families is a global problem. In the US, the number of households with under-18s living in them has declined from 56 per cent in 1970 to 40 per cent in 2020. And over a quarter of all US households were one-person households in 2020, up from just eight per cent in 1940. Similarly in the UK, both birth and marriage rates for women under 30 have hit an all-time low. The story is the same in most Western countries, as well as Japan, China and much of south-east Asia.
Demographic stagnation is arguably a natural result of weakening family ties. These have held human society together and encouraged fecundity from the earliest times. Dismantling them, as we have, has had dire consequences. As Richard Reeves, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, notes: ‘You don’t upend a 12,000-year-old social order without experiencing cultural side effects.’
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