Population growth has been slowing and even reversing in many countries, a trend with far-reaching social implications that looks certain to continue.
Demographers debate exactly when it will happen, but there is a consensus now that in the second half of this century, the global population will start to decline.
Of course, this is something that has happened before. Perhaps the best-known case is the impact of the bubonic plague in the mid-fourteenth century, which is estimated to have reduced the population by between 30 and 60 percent. But humans have always rebounded from the shocks of disease and war in the past.
What is now looming is a novel prospect: sustained population decline under “normal” conditions, when the number of people dying of old age significantly outstrips those being born. This will be new terrain for the human species.
Decline and Dependency
Population decline is already a reality in many countries. Japan is the most widely recognized case: 2024 was the sixteenth consecutive year in which the population shrunk. But Japan is just at the cutting edge of a wider trend: according to the United Nations, sixty-three countries representing 28 percent of the world population are now experiencing population decline.
Moreover, 55 percent of countries now have birth rates lower than 2.1, meaning they are beneath the “replacement rate”: the number required to sustain the national population over the long term without immigration. While most of these countries are in East Asia, Europe, and North America, they also include developing countries like Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Iran, and Bhutan, all of which are well below replacement rate.
Population decline intensifies the challenges posed by rising life expectancy. As people live longer and fewer people are born, there are fewer workers relative to the dependent population. In the European Union, for every elderly person, there are now just three workers.
Twenty years ago, the “old-age dependency ratio” was one to four; forty years ago, it was one to five. For governments seeking to sustain GDP growth while providing all the things the dependent-aged population needs — pensions, schools, health care, and so forth — these demographic trends should be a cause for alarm.
For the Left, coming to grips with population decline requires developing a critical analysis on three levels. First, we need a materialist understanding of why the world is tending toward lower rates of fertility. Second, we need to situate demographic pressures within a broader understanding of political economy to understand what effects this is likely to have on capitalism in the near future. Finally, we need to offer a political program to address the deep challenges posed by a declining and aging population, one that enriches a broader vision for human flourishing.
Demography From Feudalism to Capitalism
To understand why population decline is happening and why now, we first have to grapple with demographic developments under capitalism up to this point. The dominant modernization school in demography describes a relatively straightforward process of development, whereby preindustrial societies had high birth and death rates, generating a stable, slowly rising population comprised of many lives that, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Hobbes, were “brutish and short.”
The industrial revolution brought with it urbanization, at which point the population began to grow sharply. At first, this trend was driven by falling mortality rates, and later by declining fertility rates. When fertility and mortality rates both stabilized at a low level, there was a new demographic equilibrium, with fewer lives lasting longer.
The trouble with this standard demographic transition model is that historians have found a much more complex relationship between development and demography. The facts confound the standard narrative because in Western Europe, where the industrial revolution first took off, rates of fertility tended to be higher in the early phase of industrialization than in preindustrial societies.
Moreover, the highest rates of fertility in this period were not to be found in cities, but rather in rural settings where industrial production was increasingly displacing agrarian labor. It was this fertility increase, not decreasing mortality, that first sparked the population boom of the late eighteenth century.
This points to the reality that demographic changes were set in motion, not by urbanization and industrialization as such, but by proletarianization. The rise of capitalism as the dominant mode of production brought with it what Marxist demographer Wally Seccombe calls a new “fertility regime.” The dynamics of this regime are critical for understanding the reproduction of labor power: the precondition for every mode of production.
Under feudalism, peasants had strong incentives to bear children, because every child represented another pair of hands to work the land and another able body to care for parents in old age. The limitations on childbearing in subsistence economies were related to the ability of peasant households to access sufficient arable land.
Male offspring who were not first in line typically waited until land was available before marrying, as agrarian production was intimately tied to household formation. That could mean women waiting until their mid- to late twenties before procreating. Aware of the danger of having more children than there was land to work, the peasant family aimed to be bountiful without being excessive, although a lack of access to birth control meant that family sizes would typically end up larger than the target number.
As capitalism emerged, many rural households began to prioritize producing commodities for market. In these “proto-industrial” households, as Seccombe dubs them, the need for a plentiful supply of land was massively reduced, and with it any reason to hold off on marriage. Moreover, these independent family producers for the market still had a use for children as a source of labor from an early age. The marriage age fell significantly, women started procreating earlier, and fertility rates rose.
The situation was somewhat different for the “early proletarian” household, typically located in a rural factory town or city. They were subject to a more intensive commodification: shelter could only be acquired through rent, and if they and their children were going to work, they had to find capitalists who would employ them.
These households also had no reason to hold off on marriage, and since wages were so low, income from child labor could make a major contribution to household income. The early proletarian household thus also had high birth rates but high death rates as well, with the disease-ridden slum conditions leading to increased infant mortality. Because of this, the contribution of the early proletarian household to population growth was significant but more limited than the proto-industrial household.
With the new fertility regime of the proto-industrial and early proletarian households established, population growth tripled from 1750 to 1900 in Western Europe. In the period between 1850 to 1870, there were just over five children per family. This figure dropped dramatically thereafter, with just over two per family by the early 1900s. Why did a dramatic drop in fertility rates around the turn of the twentieth century follow in wake of such a rapid rise?
As capitalism matured, workers’ wages rose and the capacity for one (male) wage laborer to meet the financial needs of the whole family grew. Moreover, compulsory schooling and the end of full-time child labor meant that children had started to become an economic cost rather than a benefit for the working-class family. Birth control, although still culturally frowned upon, was increasingly widely adopted, albeit in a haphazard fashion. Women became more assertive with their husbands about the economic risks to the family — not to mention the risks to their own health — that would arise if they continued to procreate into their thirties.
In this “mature capitalist” household, two or three kids sufficed. This was the birth of the “male breadwinner” family structure, a household model widely considered today to be “traditional,” but one that was actually unique to capitalism and had already peaked in Europe by the 1950s.
Late Capitalist Households
The late capitalist household arrived in Europe with the mass entry of women into paid work in the last quarter of the twentieth century. With the women’s liberation movement on the rise, rapid improvements came in access to contraception, abortion rights, sex education, and equal pay. With both couples engaged in wage labor, the focus on child-raising shrunk.
Cultural expectations also shifted as religion declined and social lives became hyper-commodified. With society becoming more individualized and our capacity for conspicuous consumption rising, personally tailored consumption habits (or “cultural preferences”) began to shape the identity of workers as much as, if not more than, familial ties.
When there are so many goods and services to buy, who has the time and money for children? The development of the “neoliberal self” means maximizing all the hours of the day to develop skills, “network,” improve your body at the gym, and build up your social media profile with exotic holiday snaps. Raising children is an obstacle to engaging fully in this “hustle” culture.
Economically, parenting is labor intensive and requires a lot of space, both of which are expensive in advanced capitalist economies. Having children can be actively harmful to one’s career prospects, especially for mothers, who are still expected to spend more time on social reproduction than fathers.
Workers are now encouraged to cultivate their careers as a commodity in its own right and fear taking time out of work will mean being usurped by colleagues for promotions. It is in this context, with children viewed as an expensive luxury that get in the way of our individual “development,” that birth rates have fallen across all social classes, although low-income households continue to have more kids than high-income ones.
Since the 1970s, marriage rates have declined throughout the member-states of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, while the average age at which both men and women get married has risen significantly. A 2019 survey in the United States found that almost two-fifths of people aged between twenty-five and fifty-four were neither married nor living with a partner — a substantial increase from 29 percent in 1990. Partnered men and women were far more likely to be living with a child than their unpartnered counterparts.
The dynamic of declining births in the late capitalist household is not exclusive to Europe or the Global North: in fact, it is largely consistent globally, regardless of political or cultural differences, a reminder of the potent force that globalization has been and remains despite recent challenges. Philip Pilkington has found that the average tipping point for birth rates falling below replacement rate is when per capita incomes reach $20,000. He has argued that this is a law of (late) capitalist development, dubbing it “the Tendency of the Rate of People to Fall.”
Marx argued that there was a contradiction in the capitalist mode of production between labor value — the ultimate source of profitability — and labor-saving technology: as technology becomes ever more important to the production process, it creates a tendency for the rate of profit to fall over time. Pilkington believes that we can identify a “much more profound” contradiction between the demographic structural needs of capitalism as a whole, which requires population growth to sustain perpetual capital accumulation, and the “imperative of work and consumption” for each worker in mature capitalist economies, which generates socioeconomic incentives to not have kids: “It appears that in wealthy societies people increasingly see themselves as workers and consumers first and progenitors second.”
This is analogous to James O’Connor’s concept of the “second contradiction of capital.” For O’Connor, there was a fundamental contradiction between capital’s relentless drive for accumulation and the need of the capitalist system in general to maintain a planet that is ecologically habitable for capital accumulation. Capital itself undermines the ecological conditions for sustaining capitalist production. Similarly, the commodification process ties workers more deeply into capitalist forms of work and living, but in so doing, it reduces the incentives for workers to engage in human reproduction: a process that can never be fully commodified.
We can also think about this at the company level. Parental leave is bad for business. In the short term, a firm must find temporary labor to replace those who are not working, increasing their costs. Over the long term, a working mother who has three children will be out of work for more than a year in total (at a minimum), putting at risk the development of the “human capital” that the company has invested in.
This explains why one in five employers still expect their workers to return to work before the end of their parental leave, while one-third of managers in the UK admit to being reluctant to hire women in case they get pregnant. Yet at the aggregate level, each company ultimately needs workers to engage in human reproduction to sustain their company’s workforce over the long run. Every company just wants it to be the workers of another capitalist firm who take time out from wage labor to do the work of childbearing.
Of course, just like with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, there are always countervailing tendencies. What are the structural fixes that capitalism can come up with to cope with this third contradiction of capital, the tendency of the rate of people to fall?
The Great Reversal
In their 2020 book, The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival, economists Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan identify three possible structural fixes for advanced capitalist economies to the problem of population decline: automation, raising the retirement age, and the use of Africa and India’s abundant supply of labor, whether through immigration or by offshoring of production to Africa and India.
In the case of automation, many capitalists are pinning their hopes for the future on artificial intelligence, but its ability to raise productivity across the board remains as yet unproven. Even if we accept ambitious projections for AI’s impact on jobs and productivity, there is little chance it could offset all of the impacts of population decline, not least because as populations get older, there will be an increasing need for care work, which is one of the hardest jobs to automate. As Goodhart and Pradhan argue, “For every job that automation may or may not make redundant, there is a job that is almost guaranteed to arise in age-related care.”
Ultimately, sustaining GDP will require productivity to rise at the same rate as the fall in the total workforce, or even higher. Consultancy giant McKinsey projects that France and Italy will have to increase productivity threefold between now and 2050 to compensate for the effects of demographic changes; Spain will need to increase it fourfold. With productivity having stagnated since the 2008 financial crisis in Europe, this is likely to be an impossible task.
As for raising the retirement age, this is already happening across advanced economies but slowly and without coming close to matching the increases in life expectancy. Governments have found that trying to raise the pension age is politically lethal, not least because those above the age of sixty represent an increasingly large demographic with high levels of voter turnout. This graying of politics has been dubbed “boomaissance.”
In addition, brain diseases associated with old age such as dementia and Parkinson’s do not directly reduce life expectancy but do make it impossible to continue working. This sets a hard limit on the degree to which improvements in life expectancy can lead to increases in the retirement age.
Immigration from countries with populations that are still growing quickly — most obviously in the near future African countries and India — is likely to represent an important way in which wealthier countries increase the labor supply over the coming years. The UN projects that the population of the United States will continue growing through the end of the century solely because of immigration and will be more than one-third larger (an additional 151 million people) as a result. If the borders were to be shut today, as far-right populists advocate (at least rhetorically), population decline in the US would begin as early as 2035.
Immigration, especially in sectors like health care and social care, is already staving off the worst effects of population decline in many Global North countries. However, in a world where most countries have declining populations, not every state will have the pulling power of the United States when it comes to attracting skilled workers.
We can already see evidence of a hyper-commodified approach to immigration, with migrants and refugees dying as they try to cross the Mediterranean while Global South countries are paid handsomely to send their doctors and nurses to Europe. This ugly division of migrants into categories of useful and disposable for Western capitalism is likely to become more prevalent as labor power becomes increasingly scarce.
The phenomenon of companies with headquarters in the Global North setting up production in low-wage Global South countries with abundant labor is also well-established. China’s integration into global capitalism from 1978 onward more than doubled the global labor supply in the space of thirty years, according to Goodhart and Pradhan, which had the effect of undermining trade union power across the world, putting deflationary pressure on the global economy, and boosting corporate profits. Yet as China’s economy has matured and its own fertility rate has fallen off a cliff — moving in just seven years from a state-enforced one-child policy to contain family size to a declining population — it no longer offers the same abundant cheap labor for global capitalism as it once did.
Could India and/or Africa be the new China, saving capitalism from a labor shortage? Yes and no. Like China, both Africa and India have enormous populations and governments hungry for “inward investment.” But China under Communist Party rule has experienced a level of state control and coordination that neither Africa nor India can replicate.
Moreover, China’s role in the globalization of the 1990s and 2000s was underpinned by unprecedented trade freedoms in the so-called unipolar moment, when US hegemony was unquestioned. With big power conflict back on the agenda and trade barriers rapidly being erected, not least by the United States, the easy movement of capital across borders can no longer be guaranteed.
While all of the structural fixes described above can offset demographic pressure to a limited degree, the problem is one of scale. Italy is projected to lose ten million people over the next twenty-five years: the effect of AI, pension changes, and higher immigration combined will be no match for the weight of such demographic pressure. Even if governments in countries like Italy were somehow able to spark rising fertility rates through pro-natalist policies, it would take several decades to reverse the momentum of population decline, due to the decreasing number of women of child-bearing age.
Fewer People, Greater Conflict
We can therefore safely assume that the effects of population decline will be significant for capitalism, despite countervailing tendencies. In terms of political economy, what are those effects likely to be?
Goodhart and Pradhan convincingly argue that in a world with fewer people, there is likely to be greater conflict. First, as the dependency ratio rises, there will be many more people consuming without producing, which will act as a permanent source of pressure toward higher inflation. In addition, as the workforce shrinks, the labor market will tighten, leading to a revival in trade union strength as the bargaining power of workers grows. Demands for wage raises will be another factor ensuring that the era of permanently low inflation will soon be well behind us.
Some have argued that the inflationary effects of demographic pressure are not so clear, pointing to the fact that Japan has experienced deflationary pressures while undergoing population decline. In general, economists hold up Japan as a case study in why demographic shifts offer no serious cause for concern.
The problem with this line of argument is that Japan cannot be analyzed in isolation. Its population crunch began about two decades before the rest of the world started moving in the same direction, at a time when most countries were still showing robust population growth and China, in particular, was regularly posting double-digit levels of GDP growth. Japanese capital increasingly invested in China to take advantage of its abundant supply of cheap labor, staving off some of its domestic labor market difficulties.
In the context of generalized demographic decline, such an escape hatch for capital will be hard to come by. As Goodhart and Pradhan argue: “Japan evolved the way it did precisely because the rest of the world was overflowing with labour exactly as Japan’s labour supply was ebbing.”
Persistent inflation will come as a shock to a financial system that has been built since 2008 for an era of “debt deflation,” with inflation and interest rates expected to remain at rock-bottom levels. Central banks will want to raise rates to rein in inflation, but governments will be pushing in the other direction to prevent debt defaults and recession. These tensions are likely to see a resurgence in demands for an end to central bank “independence” in the context of renewed financial turmoil.
In this vision of the future, the developments we have seen in the aftermath of the pandemic crisis, with inflation and strikes becoming politically relevant factors once again, will prove to have been the start of a new period in the global system. That period will be one where heightened class conflict and social instability become the norm, as the tailwinds from globalization and the rise of China fizzle out while demographic headwinds start to make themselves felt.
Musk and “Adult Diapers”
There are no easy policy solutions to restore fertility rates to replacement level once they have dropped significantly below the magic number of 2.1. While more generously funded childcare can increase the appeal of having children by making it more affordable, the example of Sweden, which has the most generous parental leave and childcare systems in the world, proves that this is no silver bullet. Sweden’s fertility rate rose in the first decade of this century, leading some to hail its welfare programs as the answer, but since 2010 it has steadily fallen and is now at 1.5, well below replacement rate.
Indeed, out of all advanced economies, there is just one country that has proven it can buck the trend of declining birth rates: Israel. The Zionist state’s fertility rate was at its lowest in 1992, at 2.7, before rising and then steadying at around 2.9, well above replacement rate. A combination of the state’s pro-natalist agenda, exhorting the population to reproduce in a demographic race to outnumber the Palestinians, and the very high birth rates of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community has enabled it to defy the global trend of falling birth rates as income per capita rises. It seems that the only sure defense against population decline is an intensely religious, settler-colonial society.
Zionism may offer inspiration to the eugenicist-influenced sections of the pro-natalist movement in the Global North, whose partisans are concerned specifically about falling birth rates among white people. The growing popularity of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, according to which elites are orchestrating the erasure of whites through immigration, shows us how population decline in the Global North can inspire racist paranoia. These ideas mix with a patriarchal critique that blames the expansion of women’s rights, including access to abortion and contraception, for curtailing fertility. Just consider the popularity of far-right “tradwives” on social media who promote the idea that life was better when a woman’s place was in the home.
Elon Musk has become one of the world’s leading far-right propagandists over the question of population decline. The world’s richest person can regularly be found tweeting the latest statistics on population decline in Japan and South Korea, arguing that “a collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces, by far.” He has talked to Tucker Carlson about the problem of “adult diapers,” meaning you can now “satisfy the limbic instinct but not procreate.” Musk has even put some of his cash into providing his version of pro-natalism an intellectual veneer through the “Population Wellbeing Initiative” at the University of Texas at Austin.
While Musk and other neoconservatives are by far the loudest voices on the issue of population decline, they struggle to come up with anything that looks remotely like a solution. Even if abortion rights in the United States (which are extremely popular with the country’s citizens) were to be successfully curtailed in all fifty states, there is no evidence to suggest it would be a game changer when it comes to fertility rates.
Even if we imagine that a return to a 1950s’ style “male breadwinner” household was politically feasible, the modern capitalist economy would simply collapse overnight without female workers in the formal economy. The most viable solution that is most compatible with capitalism — more immigration — is the very “problem” against which the far right rails most of all.
It would be a mistake to allow Musk and company to dominate the debate about population decline, or to react by wrongly dismissing fears about demographic change as mere mythmaking. The reality is that serious demographic pressures are already here, and in the near future, many countries will face the sort of crisis situation that already exists in Japan. The Left should take the prospect of population decline seriously and seek to address it by offering an inspiring vision for the future of humankind.
Socialist Answers
“Every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population,” Marx wrote in Volume 1 of Capital. But he never went on to explain what these special laws are under capitalism, going no further than a robust critique of wrongheaded notions of looming demographic catastrophe articulated by Thomas Malthus. Subsequent generations of Marxists have tended to channel Marx’s critique of Malthus, but in so doing, they have thrown the demographic baby out with the Malthusian bathwater. As Seccombe wrote back in 1983: “In the process of dismissing Malthus and his successors, Marxists have abandoned the terrain to our enemies.”
Four decades later, the demographic debate has changed enormously, as anxieties about overpopulation have given way to panic about depopulation. Yet Marxists are still largely missing from the action, even though the Marxist tradition can offer serious intellectual and political tools with which to cultivate an alternative to the ideas of our neoliberal and far-right enemies. Here are some starting coordinates for moving into battle.
First of all, the Left should not indulge neo-Malthusian ideas that present a shrinking population as a major boon for the environment. While having fewer people, especially in the Global North, will lower global carbon emissions to a limited degree, it will not be a game changer so long as the imperatives for global production and distribution continue to be based on capital accumulation. That is the real motor of greenhouse gases, not individuals and their consumption habits. Just as geoengineering does not offer a shortcut to the radical structural changes needed to stop ecological disaster, neither does population decline.
Second, the Left should be concerned about what happens to societies with mushrooming dependency ratios. There is a real risk that public services, especially social care, will collapse if there are not enough workers to sustain them. While the rich will always be able to hire private care workers, it is working-class elderly people and their daughters and sons who suffer most from disappearing public services.
Already there is a silent crisis over the lack of government support for families trying to cope with elderly relatives suffering from dementia and other old-age diseases. The Left needs to provide answers to the serious care problems facing elderly people and their loved ones.
Third, the Left should spend less energy on moralistic arguments about immigration and focus more on injecting some realism into the debate. The reality is that countries like Spain and Germany would already be close to a Japanese-level demographic crisis if it were not for the fact that, unlike Japan, millions of migrants have arrived over the past decade and staved off the worst effects of population decline. Without migrant care workers, Britain’s social care system would have already completely collapsed.
Thus far, Global North governments have been able to paper over the contradiction of indulging in anti-immigrant rhetoric while continuing to ensure that there are enough migrant workers in practice to meet the needs of the system. The Left should be offering a more politically penetrative critique of this hypocrisy.
Fourth, in contrast with right-wing forces, the Left can offer a program that could significantly reduce the financial burden of raising children. Key points would include free and publicly run childcare, accessible and affordable public transport, and an end to landlordism with greatly increased public housing. By providing universal basic services that make it affordable to live, everyone, regardless of income, can be free to make their own choices about whether to have kids or not, without worrying about how they will manage it in terms of money and time.
This also means freeing women from the double burden of paid work and unpaid care work that they are often expected to bear by increasing the size and pay of the formal care economy and ensuring an income for all carers. The point is not to incentivize childbearing as such: it is to empower women in particular to be able to decide for themselves whether to have kids, free from both financial and patriarchal constraints. Given that most women in advanced economies do not have as many children as they would like to, it is likely that collectivizing the costs and labor of social reproduction would be a boon for fertility rates, although the case of Sweden suggests that there are no guarantees.
Fifth, it is extremely likely that the world population is going to be smaller half a century from now than it is today, regardless of whatever political changes there are between now and then. This need not be a social disaster as long as the speed of population decline is not too rapid and we compensate for the fact that there are fewer humans by sharing what we have more equally. The distributional struggle gains even greater importance in the context of demographic decline.
Finally, we should ultimately be offering a horizon for child-raising that breaks free from commodified forms of living. The pressure of an individualist, career-oriented life makes many women in particular feel as if having kids is a burden. A more equal society — one where workers do not have to fear career breaks because they work in firms where they have power, and where collective social activity is valued more greatly than conspicuous consumption — may be the only viable route over the long term to sustaining the human population.
A society that provides a supportive environment for family formation would be one where adults do not feel that raising children is something that requires considerable personal sacrifice of their individual goals, instead seeing it as one part of a socially fulfilling life and one contribution to a broader project of intergenerational solidarity. Such a transformation in the social fabric would only be possible by changing material incentives, so that cooperation was of greater value to workers than competition. In other words, the route to a flourishing humankind runs through socialism.