Declining Birthrates Are Breaking The Economy. Can We Fix It In Time?

Forbes

4 hours ago

Fertility rates are in free fall, with no clear solutions having emerged as of yet. A handful of ... More CEOs are up for the challenged.
Look closely and you'll notice it.
The subtle pull of gravity after a long sprint towards the edge, the tiny tremor in our economic step as it fails to find solid ground underneath, the mounting silence where there used to be the noise of new life.
We are on what animators call Coyote Time: the few fleeting seconds between sprinting off the cliff and looking down, when gravity hasn't quite caught up but the fall is inevitable.
The global economy, led by the aging West and now followed by much of East Asia, has sprinted confidently into the abyss of demographic collapse like Wile E. Coyote in pursuit of our very own roadrunner that Emile Durkheim presciently described a century ago as the 'malady of infinite aspiration.'
Birthrates are in freefall, and while we're saying the words out loud more often, we've yet to process what this means for our societies, our businesses, or the very survival of the economic model our current form of civilization depends on.
Toby Ord and others in the longtermist camp have been sounding the alarm for years.
In The Precipice, he outlines a spectrum of existential risks facing humanity, from engineered pandemics to unaligned AI, but undergirding many of these is the quieter collapse of our demographic engine. If there are no people, there is no future to protect.
While longtermism has found its home in academic circles and a handful of venture capital firms thinking centuries ahead, the population crisis hasn't yet pierced the mainstream with the same urgency.
But Ord's insight remains prescient: if humanity fails to invest in the conditions that allow it to continue, reproduction among them, then even the most sophisticated civilisations will eventually be reduced to footnotes in someone else's survival story.
This is the abyss we are levitating over, still in chase of greater affluence regardless of how sternly Galbraith and others have warned us to still our all-consuming hearts.
The demographic cliff will end us, unless we act quickly.
As Cole Napper, VP of Research at Lightcast puts it, 'You can't have an economy without people, and right now, we're losing both.'
According to Lightcast's latest report, the U.S. population is growing four times faster than its labor force. That gap is barely held together by immigration, and increasingly, by duct tape. The prime-age male labor force is eroding particularly fast, lost to disillusionment, systemic failures, substance abuse, and in many cases, sheer hopelessness.
And it's not just an American problem. Japan is decades into its population contraction. China's demographic decline has officially begun. Even the Nordic countries, long viewed as social policy success stories, are struggling to reverse the trend. The demographic future isn't looming. It's here, even if our earlier momentum still keeps us going.
'This isn't hyperbole,' Napper adds.
'It's not that we're all going to die. But your needs are not going to be met in the ways they are today. The expectations we've built into every institution, every business model—they just won't hold any more.'
We have not faced an existential threat with such clear implications for our economy before.
There's no precedent for what happens when an entire economic system built on constant growth finds itself with fewer hands to work, fewer children to teach, fewer buyers for the homes, and fewer taxpayers to sustain the state.
Faced with a future as bleak as this, it's only natural to ask what is driving it, and what could we do about it?
There's no singular villain here.
The decline in birthrates isn't the result of one policy or one cultural shift; it's a slow-motion trainwreck caused by everything, everywhere, all at once.
'We've tried paying people,' Napper says. 'But money doesn't fix this. It's not just an economic decision or a transaction the government or employer can influence with just money. It's personal. People are making very deliberate choices about the kind of life they want, and many are deciding not to replicate the one they've lived.'
In part, we've overoptimized for affluence.
Modern life is a relentless treadmill of degrees, performance reviews, debt, and the promise that things will get better if you just stick it out.
But what if better never comes? What if the very structure of our success makes having children feel like a selfish, impossible luxury?
And yet, some make it all happen.
Dr. Dara Spearman had her twins during residency, a time most physicians would call the peak of professional chaos.
'It was insane,' she says, not with regret, but clarity. 'I was seeing patients, studying, and barely sleeping. There were no policies that accounted for women like me. I just had to make it work.'
She did more than make it work.
Spearman went on to have another child, build a thriving dermatology practice, and become a role model for the kind of life that dares to exist because of work, not in spite of it.
'I didn't have the luxury of waiting for things to be perfect,' she reflects. 'If I had waited until my career said I was 'ready,' I'd probably still be waiting, and my life wouldn't be half of what it is today. '
What sets those like Spearman apart is not that she balanced motherhood and medicine, it's that she refused to treat one as the cost of the other. 'Women are often asked to delay, to sacrifice, to optimize every aspect of life before they consider becoming a parent. But that logic folds in on itself. You wake up one day and realize the thing you were waiting for might never come.'
Now, as the owner of Radiant Dermatology Associates she's doing things differently.
Spearman intentionally built her clinic around flexibility and sustainability, for her patients, yes, but also for her staff. 'I want people who work with me to feel like they can live a life, take time with their families, show up at school plays, go on vacation without guilt. Otherwise, what are we even doing this for?'
She's right.
In the U.S., puppies legally get more time with their mothers before they can be separated than most newborns. In a world where everything demands 110%, parenting often feels like subtraction from a life you've worked hard to build.
And for many, it's not just a question of whether they want to add kids to that equation, it's whether they can afford the tradeoffs.
In a sense, declining fertility rates are only the tip of the iceberg where rising maternal health risks, lack of access to basic reproductive education are what drives the trends underneath.
As usual, where institutions lag, entrepreneurs leap, with many having found productive niches in addressing the underpinnings of the demographic cliff.
It's no surprise, then, that some of the most compelling responses to our demographic dilemma are coming from founders who saw a problem not because they studied it, but because they lived it.
Ayla Barmmer's company, FullWell, was born out of personal frustration and professional observation.
A reproductive health expert and maternal nutritionist by training, she was struck by how disconnected the journey to pregnancy still is from what we know about health and biology.
'We treat conception like a light switch,' she says.
'You flip it on when you're ready and expect everything to work. But that's not how the body works. There's a whole ecosystem that has to be nurtured long before someone takes a pregnancy test.'
Her own path to pregnancy revealed something sobering: even well-informed, resourced women were navigating it blindly.
'I was shocked by how many gaps there still are in basic education. Most OBs don't talk about preconception health. And men? Men don't even get mentioned. But they're half the equation by design.'
Barmmer and her team is building an evidence-based reproductive health company that flips the model by tackling the cohesive whole of the experience instead of offering a point solution.
'We've got apps for hydration and step-counting,' she says, 'but nothing that helps you prepare for the most biologically complex, emotionally taxing, socially transformative experience of your life? That's absurd. We need a new standard where preparing for pregnancy is just as normalized as preparing for a marathon.'
Where Barmmer tackles the front end of the journey, Shaker Rawan is focused on what comes after: the parenting spiral where joy, exhaustion, and panic blur together in real time.
As co-founder of Woddle, Rawan wants to rebuild the village that modern parenthood has lost. 'We expect parents today to carry more weight than any generation before them, with less help, more judgment, and higher stakes,' he says. 'It's a cruel setup that can turn many off from the experience just by witnessing others go through it.'
He's not exaggerating.
In many developed countries, the average number of caregivers per child has dropped drastically in just two generations. What once was a multigenerational web of care is now two exhausted adults, often in nuclear households far from extended family, juggling careers and survival.
'People look at new parents and they don't see inspiration, they see burnout,' Rawan adds.
'They see the stress, the anxiety, sometimes even tragedy. And they think, 'Why would I sign up for that?''
Woddle offers a digital scaffolding: evidence-based resources, mental health support, and community features that connect parents in real time.
But Rawan is adamant that solving this will need more than just high-tech products.
'We can't solve this with gadgets. What people need is permission to not be perfect. They need community, emotional safety, and to be told that it's okay to ask for help. Because the alternative is watching future generations opt out before they even opt in.'
He's also acutely aware of the modern cognitive burden. 'Our parents raised us with Dr. Spock and a pediatrician. Today's parents are drowning in TikTok experts, Reddit forums, and ten thousand parenting philosophies. They're expected to have encyclopedic knowledge and zero margin for error.'
Which brings us to Omri Stivi, who's trying to turn the flood of chaotic information into a navigable system.
His new company, EraBorn, aims to do for fertility and parenting what GPS did for navigation: offer clear, contextual, step-by-step guidance through an overwhelming journey to parenthood . 'Right now, we raise kids with vibes and Google searches,' he says. 'We trust data to decide our ad spend, our workouts, our business models, but not our parenting or fertility journeys?'
Stivi is building a platform draws on clinical research, pediatric consensus, machine learning, large language models and behavioral science to help parents make informed decisions. Instead of replacing parental instinct, he strives to support it.
'We've heard heartbreaking cases of individuals and couples who arrived at a clinic only to be told it was too late-, they would never become parents,' Omri shares. 'We strive to prevent that. Era provides smart, informed navigation and timely decision-making, along with personalized referrals to relevant professionals and resources, before and during pregnancy, so no one misses their window of opportunity.'
'We're not here to tell parents what to do,' Stivi clarifies. 'I'm here to give them the same tools and transparency they expect everywhere else in life. If you can benchmark a company, you should be able to benchmark a fertility protocol, pregnancy plan or feeding schedule.'
He also challenges the cultural assumption that parenting is just 'natural.' 'It's the most complex thing we do as humans. It's also the least supported, least structured, and somehow the least personalized and professionalized. That has to change.'
Like Rawan, he sees this lack of structure as a deterrent for would-be parents. 'If you saw what your friends went through, and all you have is guesswork ahead of you, why would you do it?'
All three of these founders circle the same core insight: parenting doesn't need to be easy. But it should be less opaque, less isolating, and less punishing.
'We built a society that treats children like private decisions instead of public investments,' Barmmer says. 'And now we're surprised people are opting out.'
Whether through better preconception health, richer support networks, or clearer information systems, each of these entrepreneurs is laying a stone on the path back from the cliff. Not because they have all the answers, but because they refuse to accept the current default.
As Rawan puts it: 'We talk about population collapse like it's inevitable. It's not. But we have to make having kids make sense again. Not as sacrifice, but as fulfillment. Not as martyrdom, but as meaning.'
If you're one of those who believes the birthrate panic is overblown, you're right.
Humanity is not going extinct.
Within every country, every culture, there are subgroups having 2.1 or more children per woman. In the U.S., that might be Orthodox Jews or certain Mormon communities. In the Middle East, the Taliban is outpacing the liberal West demographically. In Africa, the birthrate remains high, even if the economies haven't yet caught up.
As Napper puts it: 'All of this is individual decisions, playing out at scale. And it's not distributed evenly. Some groups are growing. Others are vanishing. The future will belong to the ones who choose to build it.'
What's changing is the composition of those who will inherit the Earth.
And maybe that's the part that should give us pause. The future belongs not to the smartest or the richest, but to those who are willing to invest in it through children, communities, and sacrifice.
Demographics do not have to be destiny.
What we do now, how we support families, how we shift work, how we make room for joy and rest and generational care, will determine what kind of civilization makes it through this bottleneck.
The abyss is real. But so is the ledge on the other side.
The question is, will we build a bridge? Or wait until we run out of Coyote Time and fall?