Much of the discussion on this topic is filtered by the ideology to which those commenting on the data belong: almost everyone recognises the problem, but for the right the answer lies in the rediscovery of the traditional family and its values, for the left in public nurseries and equal pay for men and women, for many entrepreneurs an immigration policy is needed to make up for the labour shortage, especially skilled labour.

After the peak

The data indicate some certainties, but do not provide all the answers. According to the European Commission's Centre on Population and Migration, the global population will reach its peak in this century, 9.8 billion by 2070.

Peak means it will start to fall afterwards. Since the time of Thomas Robert Malthus's treatises in the late 18^th century, we have become accustomed to think about how to handle a constant increase in population, with the potential for growth and consumption that this entails. But we have never really pondered the possibility that the most dramatic scenario was not only the ageing of our societies, but a drastic and very rapid decrease in the number of human beings.

The total fertility rate for women has fallen below 2.1 in almost all countries, so it is below what is generally considered the replacement rate. If each woman has 2.1 children, the population remains stable. If she has fewer, it shrinks. ‘The falling fertility rate is one of the most significant trends of our time,’ historian Niall Ferguson wrote in an alarmed commentary on Bloomberg.

The last time the world's population shrank was in the 1300s, due to the ‘Black Death’. Now it is not an epidemic that reduces the number of children, but the effect is the same. We are heading, wrote economist Nicholas Eberstadt in Foreign Affairs, ‘towards the age of depopulation’.

In South Korea, an extreme case, the fertility rate is 0.72 children per woman. Roughly speaking this means that, without taking into account the effects of immigration, every generation, so roughly every 25 years, the population shrinks by almost a third. And every year that fertility rate continues to fall, from 0.78 in 2022 to 0.7 in 2024.

Virtually all countries, rich or poor, secular or very religious, see their fertility rates decline. India overtook China as the most populous country in the world in 2024, but it already has fertility rates below 2 per cent, so it has already passed the peak of its expansion and its population is beginning to shrink.

Muslim countries have been more fertile, but even there - where women often have fewer rights and fewer prospects than in Western countries - fertility rates are falling; in Iran they have been below 2 per cent since the turn of the century. Only sub-Saharan Africa continues to expand, but it is a matter of time.

Italy is one of the countries with the lowest fertility rate in the western world, 1.21 children per woman, and therefore one of the oldest, because with few children and older people living longer, the average age is higher.

Few children?

Eleonora Voltolina, a journalist, has long dealt with labour and in particular the treatment of interns. For some years now, she has been working on fertility issues with The Why Wait Agenda initiative. In the supplement ‘La Lettura’ of the Corriere della Sera, she spoke in a debate on fertility in Sardinia. What is so special about that region?

Sardinia is a peculiar region from a demographic point of view, in Italy and actually in the whole of Europe, because it is a region where very few children are born, already the fertility rate, i.e. the number of children per woman, in Italy is very low and progressively lower year after year. In 2023 the national average was 1.2 children per woman, an all-time low, but for many years now it has been below 1 in Sardinia and in 2023 the fertility rate in Sardinia was 0.91 children per woman, so very few indeed.

But the correct question to ask is: do Sardinians have so few children because they want so few children? The answer is no, in reality Sardinians have fewer children than they would like to have for a series of factors that make it difficult, perhaps more difficult in Sardinia than in other places in Italy, to realise their family plans. But do people really want to have too few children? Or is the society we have built designed for fewer children?

The concept of family and especially the dynamics of family building have changed a great deal in recent decades. Women's emancipation has meant that women today can study, work, be economically independent and have a say in their own reproductive choices. Through contraception they can choose when and whether to have children.

But I would not say that our society is no longer child-friendly or discourages the desire to have children, because in fact many people do have this desire. There is in fact the fertility gap, that is, the gap between children wanted and children had. Throughout the western world we would like to have more children than we have. When thinking about demographics, the focus should always be on the choice of individuals to have children and the need for the state to support this choice.

In search of the causes

It is not easy to determine what policies should be adopted because there is no agreement on the causes of this decline in fertility. The many researches in this field do not arrive at unambiguous results, especially on cause-and-effect relationships.

Certainly the extended family in which there are few elders and many children is no longer the norm, and it is difficult for a parental couple with little support to raise more than one or two children. Marriages are declining everywhere, and it seems that less tied families are also less fertile. Afterwards, unwanted pregnancies have plummeted, and this was exactly the purpose of the contraceptive methods spread and the abortion legalisation, i.e. to allow women to have children only when they want them.

Moreover, especially in countries like the United States, parents invest a lot in their children. When children provided unpaid labour to be used in the fields or in the terrible factories of the English industrial revolution, having many was a good investment even for the poorest families. But if, on the other hand, children are invested in a very long period of education, up to university or perhaps a doctorate, it is normal that few can afford to make such an investment in more than one or two children.

Then there is the fact that the entry of women into the world of work and the opening up of new opportunities has made it possible to find other possible options for fulfilment besides motherhood. Marrying and having children is no longer an obligatory path: study and careers for women have also extended their reproductive choices over time, with inevitable effects on fertility, which declines as the years go by.

But all this has been strongly desired by the women themselves. Indeed, a famous 1994 study by economist Lant Pritchett found that the variable with the greatest power on the predictive number of children a woman would have in her lifetime, was the number of children she wanted to have.

In short, perhaps women are having fewer children because - quite simply - they want to have fewer children and not be squeezed into the role of mother throughout the middle phase of their lives. Mind you, this applies in aggregate, although each of us knows a few women to whom this reasoning does not apply. But statistics reveal a kind of collective will, of which individuals may even be unaware.

Depending on which cause is identified as pre-eminent, and which value scheme applies to the issue, the responses in terms of public policy can be very different.

Alessandra Minello, a researcher in Demography at the University of Padua, with Tommaso Nannicini she published for Feltrinelli Genitori alla pari – Equally parents. What have we learnt from studies on birth support policies around Europe? What works and what does not? she asks

As much as we are used to hearing about pronatalist policies, we must be aware that these have little effect on fertility. They may have indirect effects, e.g. if female participation in the labour market increases, fertility will increase even if only slightly, but direct effects are difficult to see. For example, increasing funding for day care centres does not have a direct effect on increasing fertility.

At the moment, acting with a one-size-fits-all policy to increase fertility is no longer effective. We need to act comprehensively by putting families in the most prosperous position possible and see if this then eventually reduces the fertility gap, i.e. the distance between the desired number of children and the number of children realised. But we must also take into account that there is an increasing number of people who simply do not want children.

Is the low birth rate an unforeseen, a problem to be corrected, or is it the somewhat desired and necessary effect of women's gradual entry into the labour market and their gradual, as yet unfinished, journey towards parity in terms of career and remuneration with men?

The low birth rate is a fact. In part it is due to the shrinking cohorts of potential parents, as a consequence of the low birth rate of previous generations. Then there is a falling fertility rate, hence a lower number of children per woman, which we see in Italy but also in other contexts where there are potentially all the resources from an economic and cultural point of view for fertility to be realised instead.

Towards a new balance

There are no easy solutions, not even imagining a spectrum of possible drastic policies ranging from banning abortion - as more and more conservatives in the US are calling for - to letting in more immigrants. If people are having fewer children because they want fewer, it is difficult to convince them to do otherwise.

So there is an understandable temptation to indulge in catastrophic pessimism: perhaps we have built a development model and an idea of progress that leads to extinction? Does the desire to increase consumption combined with the idea of equality between men and women and a liberal approach that favours self-determination produce free, open societies that are doomed to extinction?

Surely we must equip ourselves for the decades ahead, because it will be very complex to manage societies with elderly people over the age of 90 in need of expensive care and assistance paid for by the incomes generated by very few active workers. But we must not make the same mistake as Malthus and imagine that some variables are fixed and immutable. Malthus had not considered the increase in productivity due to technology: Earth today feeds over 8 billion people, 7 billion more than in Malthus' time, thanks to more efficient agriculture.

So even population decline is not inevitable, because contextual variables can change. With fewer people, and fewer children, house prices will plummet in a few years, unapproachable cities such as Milan or London will once again be affordable for young couples; it will not be a problem to find a place in municipal crèches; wages will be higher due to a shortage of workers; employers will not be able to afford to discriminate against new mothers; there will be grandparents and great-grandparents still active for many years ready to provide some unprecedented form of intergenerational family welfare.

The climate crisis will perhaps seem less inevitable as the number of polluters shrinks. And then, perhaps, as in the optimistic ending of certain Hollywood apocalyptic films, more children will be born again than today.

See, Il mistero del calo delle nascite