A Japanese company will stop making diapers for babies and shift production to adult diapers, reports the BBC. Adult diapers have been a larger and growing market for a decade.
The birth rate has fallen to 1.26 for the average woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. As a result, Japan now has one of the world's oldest populations: 11.6 percent are 14 and young while 29 percent are 65 or older.
In South Korea, the number of births per woman is projected to fall from .72 children per woman to .68 this year.
Technology could help reverse the global fertility collapse, argues James Pethokoukis on Faster, Please.
Pro-natal policies such as subsidized child care and child allowances aren't likely to reverse the "Mother of All Demographic Trends," he writes. But higher productivity driven by AI could reduce work hours, allowing for more leisure and family time.
What if tech-driven economic growth makes us so much richer that we simply choose to work less? Maybe a lot less. With all that extra time and all those extra resources, maybe we would choose to devote more of both to having more kids. As it is, the rich seems to be having more kids than the poor. What if we all were far wealthier than even the top 1 percent are today?
According to a study in The Lancet, 76 percent of countries will have shrinking populations by 2050, 97 percent by 2100. That will "reconfigure the global economy" and "necessitate reorganizing societies," said Natalia Bhattacharjee, co-author of the study.
There will be fewer people to support elders, and "an entirely different societal vibe," writes Pethokoukis, the father of seven. He quotes The Children of Men which imagines a future of mass infertility in which no children have been born for 18 years. (The book by P.D. James was released as a movie.) “As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd what happens in a world without children's voices.”
One group in our society is having babies: The birth rate is much higher for religious believers than for secular people, notes Pethokoukis. If there is no overall value shift toward children, then a higher percentage of the population will come from religious families.
I became a grandmother in December. My husband welcomed his fifth grandchild this week. Our family is doing its part.