We're in a ‘global fertility crisis'. Does this woman have a solution?

Times

10 hours ago

Worrying about the decline in fertility used to be a fringe issue: the reserve of religious leaders, tweedy conservatives and cranky pronatalists. No longer. Last week the United Nations issued a report declaring a 'global fertility crisis'. According to Natalia Kanem, head of the UN Population Fund, which published the report, the world has 'begun an unprecedented decline in fertility rates'.
The figures are stark, the consequences potentially grave. In 1950s Britain, for example, the average woman had 2.2 children. Now that figure is 1.44. We are not replacing ourselves. The question is why? The will to procreate is our most primal evolutionary urge, but something is dulling it. What's going on?
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The UN report cites many of the usual suspects: lack of childcare and job security, housing costs, fears about the future. One in five people surveyed in 14 countries said fears about climate change, war and pandemics held them back from reproducing. Thirty-nine per cent pointed to financial constraints.
But what if there is something else going on too? One woman with a different answer is Alice Evans, a senior lecturer in the social science of development at King's College London. Evans, a brusque yet charming 38-year-old from Sevenoaks, Kent, has spent much of her professional life travelling round the world, speaking to people from Zambia to the Americas about children: why they want them, why they don't, and what is stopping them from having the family they might want.
Evans acknowledges that the factors highlighted by the UN all play a role in the fertility crisis. Yet, she argues, none fully explain why this is happening everywhere, all at once — in countries with vastly different living standards, gender norms, parental leave policies and working practices.
Could it be, Evans suggests, that we are spending so much time on the internet that we've stopped falling in love, stopped reproducing? Are we entertaining ourselves into oblivion?
At first, this might seem outlandish. But dig into the data and it becomes surprisingly persuasive.
'Looking around the world, we see one really big change which coincides with the fall in fertility,' Evans says. Over the past 15 years or so, smartphones have become ubiquitous, and we have seen the rise of an astonishing array of online entertainment — from online sports gambling to pornography to television streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu.
'It's really only some parts of sub-Saharan Africa that have replacement fertility, which means that each woman would have over two kids in her lifetime,' Evans explains. 'In every other population in the world, we'd expect a contraction of the young working-age population.' What's so different about sub-Saharan Africa? Few people have smartphones.
Evans fears that 'hyperengaging media' may be outcompeting the real-world interactions that lead to babies. We spend more time on screens and consequently more time alone. 'Young men in their twenties in the UK are spending as much time alone as men in their sixties and seventies,' she says. In today's Deliveroo and Netflix economy, we socialise less, meet fewer people, and are less likely to find the person with whom we want to have children. Dating apps are struggling to fill the gap.
'Looking both at marriage and cohabiting,' Evans says, 'both of those indicators are down. They are plummeting in Hong Kong, South Korea, across Southeast Asia, across South America.'
She's just returned from Costa Rica, where the average age of marriage is 38 for men and 35 for women. In America, up to 55 per cent of under-34s have been estimated to be single. 'We know that half aren't even in a rush to get into a relationship, they aren't bothered about it,' she says.
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That fewer people feel rushed into relationships can, of course, be seen as a good thing: a sign of empowerment and freedom, particularly for women. But it's also the case that across the developed world, about a third of men say they are lonely.
There is something of a vicious cycle at play too. As we socialise less, we become less charming, less interesting, less confident. 'If I spend every night scrolling or watching Bridgerton, then I'm not necessarily finessing my social skills,' Evans says. 'Maybe I don't have the confidence to just go up to a group of guys, or maybe I don't have a ready group of people to go out with.'
Men and women also experience the internet in different ways. Social media algorithms show them different news, different opinions, amplifying the gender divide. It means that across many western countries, the political and cultural gap between young women (who tend to be on the left) and young men (on the right) is growing. Data from Gallup last year showed that American women are 30 percentage points more liberal than American men.
In this country, many point to the exorbitant cost of childcare as an inhibiting factor for starting a family. Yet Sweden, with its abundant parental leave and universal childcare, has a birthrate very slightly lower than the UK's.
Housing is expensive in many places, yes. But if housing was the major friction, Evans argues, 'we might expect young people to do the cheaper thing and live communally. Across Europe we've seen a massive increase in young men living by themselves.'
Evans argues that declining fertility is a threat to our way of life. Without massive migration or some sort of boost from technology such as artificial intelligence, our working-age population will go into decline, our tax base will shrink, our welfare bill will balloon and our towns and villages will begin to resemble parts of rural Italy or Spain, which have begun to empty out.
'If you want to maintain our current standard of living and if you want to maintain economic growth, this is something we should take extremely seriously,' she says. It may also change our political leanings, with religious conservatives having more children than liberal progressives. Even the steps required to tackle climate change will be difficult without a large working population to pay the bill.
So what can we do about it? There is no fix-all cure, Evans says. She herself has no children. She was born with Rokitansky syndrome, which means that she has no womb and only one ovary. For a small group of women, including her, improvements in IVF and other fertility technologies could be very important.
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More broadly, Evans suggests that if we want to see birthrates increase, and maintain our current standards of living, the government might consider providing serious tax incentives for those who have children.
More youth clubs and more community groups might help, she suggests, as would making our culture more family-friendly. Evans would love to see more (and better) rom coms made, with plots celebrating finding love and having a family.
She also suggests that we need a serious conversation about tech, and how we make it work for us. 'We need to tackle all these issues at once,' she says. 'No one policy, no one sledgehammer is going to fix everything.'
In the midst of all this worrying news, however, there is one thing to celebrate. On Friday Evans married her partner, Usama Polani, a macroeconomist. Now, it's over to the rest of us to pair off.