I’ve noticed a flurry of vertical video takes on TikTok and the like about how the population decline in the western world is because of the cost of living and the increased inflation over the past few years. It is a prosperity story, and we keep getting it backwards.
The pattern is consistent across history: as societies become more prosperous, birth rates fall. Across the OECD, the total fertility rate has more than halved, from about 3.3 children per woman in 1960 to about 1.5 in 2022. Rising prosperity tends to embed liberal values even in traditionally conservative societies, and liberal values give people genuine agency over their own lives. When people can actually choose whether and when to have children, many of them choose later, fewer, or none.
The numbers are also less alarming than they look. Demographers have written about the “tempo effect” for decades: when a generation collectively delays having children, the annual birth‑rate numbers look like a collapse, even if total family size barely changes. We started panicking when people stopped having babies in their early twenties, but the headlines do not distinguish between “never” and “not yet.”
The other rebuttal to the cost‑of‑living argument is geographical. The countries with the highest birth rates in the world are also among the least prosperous, with far weaker household buying power than the Western millennials supposedly priced out of parenthood. What separates these populations is agency. In much of the developing world, having children remains the default non-choice, shaped by an almost coercive cultural expectation and economic structures where children are also labour and insurance. In the West, it has become a deliberate choice held to a far higher standard, taken more seriously, and made later.
This shift is progress, and a constraint we now have to design around if our societies are to keep thriving.