We’re desperately short of babies.
by Robert Colville, The Times:
The saddest thing is many families can’t afford to have them.
In the Japanese village of Ichinono, just north of Osaka, there is a little boy called Kuranosuke. Kuranosuke is a very special child. He goes about his day — as the Financial Times reported — cherished “by a cooing, tribute-bearing platoon of surrogate grandparents from around the village”. Because he is the first person born there for more than 20 years.
Of all the things we think we know, one of the most deeply embedded is the idea that Britain is a crowded place on a crowded planet. Anxieties about climate change are driven, in part, by a sense that our swarming, teeming species is busy stripping the planet bare.
But, as a blockbuster new study reminds us, our future — especially in the West – looks a lot more like Ichinono.
The study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and published in The Lancet, showed a continuing collapse in global fertility rates. The “replacement rate”, at which our population remains steady, is roughly 2.1 children per woman in developed countries. In Britain fertility is already down to 1.49, and set to fall further. And even that is flattered by higher rates among immigrant families: the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show the number of births to UK-born mothers falling from 540,572 in 2012 to 422,109 in 2022 — down 22 per cent in a decade.
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