Britain is running out of babies

Paul Morland's No One Left

My youngest child leaves primary school today, an emotional time for any parent, and in our case after 12 years of sending children to that happy place. It seems like many moons ago that we were stressing about the exact distance from our flat to the school, checking the council website page that charts how wide the catchment area falls each year.

Primary school places in family-friendly parts of London can be intensely competitive, and landing inside the catchment of one of the more desirable schools can increase a property’s value by up to £40,000. Back in the early 2010s the diameter around our school of choice was shrinking each year as more families moved in to be around People Like Us.

Yet something has changed since. When my children entered primary school just over a decade ago the catchment area was about 0.3 miles in distance – this year it’s close to 0.7, and rising. The school is as highly rated as ever, but our area of north London, once one of the city’s great Nappy Valleys, just doesn’t have as many kids as it used to. And it’s happening across the city, where the number of primary school aged children will drop by 10% within the next four years.

Among the schools to recently announce their closure are the 300-year-old Archbishop Tenison’s in Oval, Randal Cremer primary in Hackney and St Martin-in-the-Fields High School for Girls in Lambeth. This is downstream of the city’s birth rate falling by 17 per cent between 2012 and 2021, the equivalent of 23,225 humans who never came to be. London is running out of children, and those catchment areas are going to grow and grow in the years to come.

While Britain has a new government after 14 years of Conservative rule, few people feel the optimism of 1997. Keir Starmer’s regime will face a number of challenges, including an economy that is nothing like as dynamic as that bequeathed by John Major and Kenneth Clarke to Tony Blair.

But easy as it is to blame the last government for all our woes, the fundamental problem goes much deeper – that the British population is ageing and the impact of this lies at the root of all the other problems facing us in the coming years. This is the argument set out by demographer Paul Morland in his powerful and insightful new book No One Left, which sharply and clearly sets out the future facing us.

Morland is the author of three works on the history and future of global demography, but his latest is more of a call to arms, arguing that falling birth rates present a crisis which needs to be addressed by urgent cultural change.

With a world population of eight billion and rising, it might seem counterintuitive to worry about running out of babies. Indeed, it wasn’t so long ago that people were warning of mass starvation even in the developed world if we did not restrain our fecundity. There are still political activists encouraging us to have fewer children, yet their message seems increasingly hollow as across the world our future resembles not so much Soylent Green as PD James’s The Children of Men, the dystopia set in a Britain of the 2020s in which the streets are eerily silent as the sound of children has disappeared.

Britain’s fertility decline has intensified in recent years, but almost everywhere there has been an acceleration of the downward trend since 2020. Whether this is due to Covid and lockdowns, or to recent economic woes, or if it’s an example of the adage that things collapse slowly and then suddenly, we don’t know. But the impact is going to be enormous.

As well as closing schools, across the world there are signs of economies becoming less orientated towards children, including the closure of baby milk factories. In Japan, over ‘half of all municipalities are designated as depopulated districts’ and more than ‘1.2 million small businesses have owners aged about 70 with no successor.’

This is sad, but the main thrust of the problem is the dependency ratio, the number of people of working age vs those in retirement, and in particular those so old as to need medical care.

As Morland writes, the current financial problems facing Britain are largely downstream of drastically changed demography. In the 1960s, ‘the population of people in their early twenties still outstripped those in their late sixties by 1.6 million, as it did in the mid-1980s. Today, there are just 170,000 more people in their early twenties than in their late sixties. The net inflow into the workforce is therefore down nearly 90 per cent.’

In 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power, she inherited what Morland has called the ‘demographic dividend’, a huge number of twenty-somethings entering the workforce and a relatively small number of pensioners and children to support. Britain was in that sweet spot because, following the sexual revolution and the invention of the pill, the country entered sub-replacement fertility in 1973, a position from which it has never recovered - and so the high-earning Eighties was in some ways dependent on that lack of dependency. Now that same cohort are entering retirement age, and there are far too few younger workers to support them.

The OBR currently estimates that ‘the ageing of the population, and the associated rise in age-related spending, puts steady upward pressure on public spending and would see public debt more than double to over 250 per cent of GDP by 2070 if no further fiscal action is taken.’ This is the overwhelming burden our new government faces.

Britain has only recently joined the club of European countries in which deaths outnumber births, but it is far from being the worst placed. Across a swathe of land from Spain to Singapore, fertility rates are well below replacement level, with no country on the European continent close to the magic figure of 2.1 and most East Asian rates closer to 1. South America has seen a sudden drop in just the past five years, while the United States, that vast open space filled with wealth, opportunity and optimism, and which at the start of the century was seen as demographically strong in comparison to an enfeebled Europe, is enduring the same problem. 

Italy is in particular trouble: in 1950 there were 17 under-tens for every over-80, while today it is one-to-one. The dependency ratio has risen during that period from 15% to 40% and will reach 80% by the end of the century. Long before that, young workers will start fleeing the country rather than shoulder this enormous burden, a problem that will grow worse as wealthy countries scramble to attract a shrinking number of highly productive workers – an arms race that has already notably begun with digital nomad schemes.

The Italian economy has barely grown in two decades, it has among the worst levels of government debt on earth, and things could get worse. It was only the creditworthiness of governments that saved the global economy from total disaster in 2007; if we face another major financial crisis, investors might decide that they do not trust governments with their money because they can no longer afford their debt ratios.

A representative from the ratings agency Moody is quoted as saying: ‘In the past, demographics were a medium to long-term consideration. Now, the future is with us and already hitting sovereign credit profiles’. Another, a senior executive at Fitch, warns that the demography ‘problem is becoming more urgent. We are well into the adverse effects in many countries, and they are only growing’. That is the most chilling aspect of Morland’s message – that, as much as demography is a very predictive science, this is happening now. James’s timeline was pretty accurate.

One of the worst affected countries is Japan, where government debt is now over 200% and the dependency ratio is already 50%. The country has stagnated in recent years, but an ageing country isn’t just a poorer country, it’s also one with fewer innovators and risk-takers. In the 1990s, Japan’s private sector research and development spend was two-thirds of the US; today it is just two-fifths. In the same period patent applications went from double the US level to barely a third. In the two decades to 2018, the number of Japanese students enrolled in science and maths subjects declined by 17 per cent.

But even Japan is being overtaken – or undertaken - by South Korea, which recently broke all records for low fertility. The country now has a TFR of just 0.8, which means that ‘one hundred grandparents will produce 40 children, who will in turn create 16 grandchildren,’ so that in two generations, 84% of the population will disappear. 

As one Twitter wit put it, ‘in 2100, Koreans will be remembered as a quasi-mythical people who emerged from a period of violent division, made TVs 96,000% cheaper and then inexplicably vanished.’

But, Morland observes, Korea’s situation is actually worse than it looks on paper, because years of sex-selective abortion means that women are underrepresented in younger cohorts, and in some parts of Asia there are 125 males born for every 100 females.

Lower fertility is generally linked to modernity, greater wealth, urbanisation, secularisation and female education. South Korean GDP per capita is around the same as Japan’s, the country is very urbanised and some 70% go to university, and there is also a tendency to hypergamy, where women look for more educated men in partners – something found across all cultures.

But Korea also has some added problems, including a culture of excessive competition and overwork which encourages couples to limit the number of children so to invest more heavily in those they have, driving the cycle further. It is also a society with traditional attitudes to gender roles, which can also push fertility down further when women have better alternatives. 

It has also an extreme degree of gender polarisation in politics and a subculture of alarming misogyny among the involuntarily celibate, but then that is another, more basic, driver of low fertility levels - that 43 % of women and 29% of men in Seoul have not had sex in the last year, while in Japan huge numbers of young people are celibate.

China is not far behind, so that by the end of the century the country’s population is set to fall by 45%. It didn’t help that, following the death of Mao – who was pro-fertility, if not exactly pro-life – the People’s Republic embarked on a disastrous one-child policy, a scheme that was as cruel as it was unnecessary, since TFR would almost certainly have fallen sharply anyway.

But sub-replacement fertility is now common almost everywhere outside sub-Saharan Africa, and indeed the worst affected by the coming economic downturn will be poorer countries which will get old before they get rich, such as Thailand and even India, which last year became the world’s most populous country but is seeing sharp fertility drops: in West Bengal, fertility has halved since the 1990s and is now at Japanese levels, well below Britain, while in Calcutta it is just 1 child per woman. 

There are many arguments one might make against trying to raise fertility, which Morland tackles towards the end of the book. One common belief is that high population leads to greater poverty because of scarce resources, yet there is no real correlation between population density and wealth – indeed the opposite – largely because of humanity’s hugely increased ability to feed more people. Today’s eight billion people live far healthier, longer and materially better lives than the one billion who lived 200 years ago: ‘As nineteenth-century American economist Henry George wrote, both chickenhawks and people like chickens, but the more chickenhawks, the fewer chickens there will be, while the more people there are, the more chickens.’

Then there is climate change, which is a particular concern for younger people: some 96% surveyed said that worries about the earth’s future will influence their fertility decisions, among the famous examples being Prince Harry and Meghan, who stopped at two for the sake of the planet. Yet, as Morland says, while climate change is real and bad, most projections suggest that the risks and hardships our children face as a result are unlikely to compare with what our fertile recent ancestors suffered.

The chances of dying from a natural disaster are down 98% since our grandparents’ time, while there has only been one death from air pollution in Britain over the last 20 years. Global mortality from cold exceeds deaths from heat by a factor of ten, and predictions that many island nations would be underwater by now have not come to pass.

Another, more popular, counter-argument is that we can simply make up numbers with immigration. This has two major problems: one, that high immigration is hugely unpopular, drives radical Right politics, and the numbers required for what the UN used to call ‘replacement migration’ are unfathomably large. Morland wrote recently that: ‘To achieve a reasonable old-age dependency ratio and therefore keep the economy growing in a sustainable way, therefore, the rates of immigration into Britain that would be required become completely nonsensical.’

Neither does this solve the problem because migrants also get old, and their childbearing levels tend to converge with the native population. Just between 2006 and 2017, the fertility levels of American women of Latin American origin fell by 37%. 

Besides which, as he says, if climate change is your worry, then immigration also involves raising carbon emissions per person. By the time a Syrian moving to Germany achieves German living standards his carbon emissions will have increased sixfold, and for a Guatemalan in the US by 13 times.

‘Failing to have a child and resolving the resulting labour shortage through immigration is a displacement activity rather than a solution that really reduces emissions,’ he argues.

Britain has tried this method of population maintenance for 25 years now, and still faces the same problem. In his previous book Tomorrow’s People, Morland talked about ‘the trilemma of the three Es: ethnic continuity, economic growth, and egotism’, by which he meant the benefits of a child-free life; comparing how three wealthy countries chose different paths, he noted that Japan was averse to immigration and so suffered economic stagnation, while Britain chose the good life and so sacrificed ethnic continuity - although it ended up with neither. 

A third chose yet another path, and it is this state, much in the news, which alone among wealthy countries has broken the cycle of infertility – Israel. How we ‘get to Israel’ is the key question now facing us.

This is part one of a two-part essay. Part two can be found here.