The Great Emptying: How Collapsing Birth Rates Will Reshape Power, Politics And People

In a small town in southern Italy, a school closed last year. Not because of budget cuts or a scandal or a flood. Because there were no children left to attend it. The mayor posted a photograph on social media: a single classroom, chairs stacked on desks, a clock still ticking on the wall. The image went viral in Italy. But it should have gone viral everywhere, because that empty classroom is the future of the developed world.

Somewhere in Seoul, a maternity ward has been converted into a geriatric unit. In rural Japan, there are now more adult nappies sold than baby nappies. In Spain, there are entire villages where the youngest resident is over sixty. In China, the government that once punished families for having a second child is now begging them to have a third. They are not having even one.

This is not a recession. It is not a cycle. It is not something that will bounce back. What you are about to read is the story of the most consequential change in human civilisation since the Industrial Revolution, and almost nobody in power is willing to talk honestly about where it leads. Because where it leads is uncomfortable for everyone: left, right, rich, poor, East and West alike.

The numbers are clear. The history is unambiguous. The solutions on offer do not work. And the clock is already at zero.

The Scale of the Collapse

For a population to sustain itself, women need to have, on average, 2.1 children. That number is not political. It is arithmetic. One child to replace the mother, one to replace the father, and a fraction to account for those who die before reproducing. Fall below 2.1, and your population shrinks. Fall well below it, and your population does not just shrink. It disappears.

Look at the chart below and ask yourself: how many of these countries have a future?

The speed of this decline is perhaps more alarming than the current levels. In 1960, South Korea had a fertility rate of 6.0 children per woman. Today it is 0.72. China went from 5.76 to 1.02. These are not gradual transitions. They are demographic cliff edges.

Even within Europe, the picture is uniformly bleak. Not a single European country is at replacement level. France, long held up as the continent’s fertility champion thanks to generous family policies, has dropped to 1.68 and falling. The Mediterranean countries are in freefall. Eastern Europe is emptying out through a combination of low births and emigration.

Augustus’s Problem: Why People Stop Having Children

This is not the first time a great civilisation has confronted a fertility crisis. In 18 BC, the Roman Emperor Augustus was so alarmed by the declining birth rate among Roman citizens that he passed the Lex Julia de Maritandis Ordinibus, a sweeping package of marriage and fertility laws. Unmarried citizens were penalised. Those with three or more children received tax breaks and preferential access to public office. Adultery was criminalised. Augustus understood that Rome’s legions, its tax base, and its very identity depended on Romans actually producing the next generation.

The laws failed. Roman citizens continued to have fewer children. The empire increasingly relied on Germanic foederati to fill its military ranks and on slaves to do its work. Within four centuries, those same Germanic peoples would rule what had been Roman territory. The parallel with modern immigration policy is uncomfortably exact.

Why did Romans stop having children? For many of the same reasons that modern Westerners have. The costs rose. The benefits fell. Alternative lifestyles became available. And the culture shifted to prize individual fulfilment over familial duty.

Today, the economics of having children in the modern West are brutal. Since 2000, the three things most essential to raising a child, hospital services, education, and childcare, have all risen dramatically faster than wages.

This is compounded by the sharp rise in the age at first marriage. In England and Wales, the average age at first marriage has risen from 21 for women in the 1960s to over 30 today. For men, it is now 32. Each year of delay reduces the window for having multiple children. A woman who marries at 32 and wants to space children two years apart will struggle to have more than two, even if she wants more.

The separation of sex from procreation, as this site has explored in earlier articles, removed the automatic link between desire and reproduction. Contraception gave women control over their fertility. But it also gave societies a way to stop reproducing without anyone noticing until it was too late. The decision not to have a child is private, invisible, and cumulative. By the time the aggregate effect shows up in the statistics, the damage is done.

The Immigration Fallacy: Why It Makes Things Worse, Not Better

The standard policy response to falling birth rates has been immigration. The argument is straightforward: if your own citizens will not have enough children to sustain the tax base, the workforce, and the pension system, import people from countries that still do. This has been the de facto policy of virtually every Western government for the past three decades.

There are two fundamental problems with this approach. The first is that it does not work for long. The second is that it actively makes the fiscal situation worse.

The Convergence Trap

Immigrants do initially have higher fertility rates than the native population. But this advantage evaporates with remarkable speed. Data from France, which has tracked immigrant fertility more carefully than almost any other country, shows that immigrant fertility converges toward native-born rates within a single generation. Women from the Maghreb who arrived with fertility rates above 4.5 saw their daughters and granddaughters reproduce at rates barely above the French average.

This means immigration is not a solution to demographic decline. It is a treadmill. Each generation of immigrants must be replaced by a new, larger wave, because the previous wave has adopted the same low-fertility behaviour as the native population. The underlying problem, a culture and economy hostile to large families, remains unaddressed.

The Fiscal Drain

The second problem is more politically explosive, and it is one that most Western governments have been reluctant to examine honestly. In many cases, immigration does not generate the net fiscal benefit that proponents claim. In fact, the evidence suggests that for many immigrant groups, the fiscal cost to the host country exceeds the economic value they contribute.

Finland provides some of the most rigorous data available. A 2019 study by Suomen Perusta, using age-standardised figures that account for the younger average age of immigrant populations, found that every single immigrant group represented a net fiscal cost compared to the native Finnish population. Immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa cost the Finnish state approximately €19,500 per person more than they contributed. Even immigrants from Western countries, the most economically integrated group, still represented a net cost of approximately €2,500 per person.

The picture in the United States tells a similar story. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau, analysed by the Center for Immigration Studies, shows that immigrant-headed households use welfare programs at significantly higher rates than native-born households. 52% of legal immigrant households and 59% of illegal-headed households use at least one welfare program, compared to 39% of U.S.-born households. The gap is largest in food assistance (SNAP) and Medicaid.

This does not mean that all immigration is economically negative, or that immigrants do not contribute in ways that are not captured by fiscal statistics. But it does mean that the argument most frequently advanced for mass immigration, that it is necessary to support the welfare state and the tax base, is at best incomplete and at worst the opposite of the truth. If the immigrants arriving cost more than they contribute, then immigration is not plugging the demographic hole. It is making it deeper.

The Gerontocracy: How Demographic Decline Reshapes Politics

A society that stops having children does not just face economic problems. It faces a political transformation. When the old outnumber the young, democracies begin to reflect the interests of the elderly at the expense of the future.

This is already visible in the age profile of political leadership. In the United States, the percentage of Congress members over the age of 70 has tripled since the early 2000s, rising from around 8% to 23%. This is not because older people have suddenly become better politicians. It is because older voters dominate the electorate, and they elect people who look like them and share their priorities.

The consequences ripple outward. Housing policy favours existing homeowners over young renters. Education spending is deprioritised relative to healthcare and pensions. Long-term infrastructure investment, which benefits the young, loses out to short-term transfers that benefit the old. The political incentive structure of an ageing democracy is fundamentally hostile to the future.

Across Europe, this dynamic is playing out through the rise of populist parties that channel demographic anxiety into anti-immigration sentiment. The surge of the AfD in Germany, the collapse of the Conservatives in Britain, and the polarisation of American politics are all partly expressions of an ageing electorate that feels its world disappearing. These voters are not irrational. They are responding to a genuine structural shift. But the political responses on offer, whether from the populist right or the liberal left, are inadequate to the scale of the problem.

The Coming Burden: Who Will Pay?

The most immediate and measurable consequence of the fertility collapse is the old-age dependency ratio: the number of people aged 65 and over for every 100 people of working age. This ratio determines, more than almost any other number, whether pension systems remain solvent, whether healthcare can be funded, and whether economies can grow.

The projections are alarming. Japan, already the oldest large society in human history, will see its dependency ratio reach 70 by 2050, meaning 70 retirees for every 100 working-age adults. The EU will reach 55. China, whose one-child policy accelerated its demographic transition by decades, faces a particularly brutal trajectory: from a dependency ratio of 17 in 2020 to a projected 47 by 2050.

These numbers imply either massive increases in taxation on a shrinking workforce, massive cuts to pension and healthcare benefits for the elderly, massive increases in the retirement age, or some combination of all three. Every option is politically toxic. No democratic government has yet found a way to tell its citizens that the promises made to them, work hard, pay your taxes, and the state will look after you in old age, can no longer be kept.

The Long View: What History Teaches Us

The Roman parallel is instructive but incomplete. Rome’s demographic decline was gradual, unfolding over centuries, and was partly masked by the empire’s sheer territorial scale. The modern fertility collapse is happening at a speed without historical precedent. South Korea went from above-replacement fertility to the lowest rate ever recorded by a nation-state in less than forty years.

A more apt comparison might be the demographic collapses that accompanied civilisational decline in other contexts. The Maya civilisation experienced a rapid depopulation in the ninth century that contributed to the abandonment of their great cities. The Black Death of the fourteenth century killed a third of Europe’s population and fundamentally restructured its economy, its labour relations, and its social hierarchy. In both cases, the demographic shock was the proximate cause of changes that transformed every aspect of society.

The difference is that those collapses were involuntary. Ours is, in a sense, chosen. We have collectively, through millions of individual decisions, decided not to replace ourselves. The question is whether this represents a rational adaptation to modern conditions, a temporary cultural phase that will eventually correct itself, or the early stages of a civilisational decline that future historians will study with the same detachment with which we study Rome.

Your Children Will Live in a Different World. If You Have Any.

Here is an exercise. Think of your parents. Think of how many siblings they had. Now think of how many siblings you have. Now think of how many children you have, or plan to have.

If you are like most people reading this, the number has gone down with each generation. Your grandparents might have had four or five brothers and sisters. Your parents, two or three. You, one or none. Your children, if they exist, will grow up in a world where the friend with a sibling is the exception, not the rule. Where the concept of a cousin is something you explain rather than something you experience. Where the dependency ratio means that their wages will be taxed at rates we would consider confiscatory, to pay for a generation of retirees who outnumber them and who vote.

Every major challenge facing the Western world today, the sustainability of the welfare state, the integration of immigrants, the rise of populist politics, the shift in global power toward Asia, the housing crisis, the crisis of meaning among the young, connects back, in one way or another, to the simple fact that we are not having enough children.

And yet the political discourse treats each of these as a separate problem requiring a separate solution. Immigration policy is debated without reference to fertility. Pension reform is discussed without acknowledging that the worker-to-retiree ratio is collapsing. Housing policy ignores the demographic structure of demand. Education spending is cut to fund elderly care. The connections are there for anyone willing to look, but looking requires confronting a reality that is deeply uncomfortable for both the political left and the political right.

For the left, it requires admitting that mass immigration, far from being a humanitarian good that also happens to be economically beneficial, is in many cases a net fiscal cost that deepens rather than solves the demographic crisis. The data from Finland and the United States is not ambiguous. The treadmill does not work. The hole gets deeper with each turn.

For the right, it requires admitting that market forces alone will not produce enough children, and that the traditional family structures they champion have been hollowed out by the very economic system they defend. You cannot celebrate deregulated housing markets and then wonder why young people cannot afford a home large enough for a family. You cannot applaud the gig economy and then be puzzled that people delay marriage and children.

Augustus tried to legislate his way out of Rome’s fertility crisis. He failed. Modern governments have tried to subsidise their way out with baby bonuses, parental leave, and tax credits. Hungary, which has implemented the most aggressive pro-natalist policies in Europe, has managed to nudge its fertility rate from 1.23 to 1.50. Heroic effort. Still half a child short of survival.

Nobody knows how to reverse a fertility decline once a society has passed below a certain threshold. That is not a political opinion. It is an empirical observation. No country in human history has recovered from a sustained rate below 1.5. The forces that drive the decline, urbanisation, education, contraception, female workforce participation, the cost of housing and childcare, the cultural elevation of individual fulfilment over familial obligation, are not easily reversible. They are, in many cases, things we call progress.

So let us be honest about where we stand. We are living through the opening act of the most profound demographic transformation in human history. It is slower than a war, quieter than a pandemic, and more consequential than either. It will determine which civilisations thrive in the twenty-second century and which are studied as historical curiosities. It will reshape the global balance of power more decisively than any army or technology. And it is already too late to stop it. The children who would have changed the trajectory were never born. That is the thing about demographic decline: by the time you notice it, the decision was made a generation ago.

That Italian classroom is still empty. The clock on the wall is still ticking.

But for whom?