The baby bust is global. Nobody fully knows why

A new Sky News film on collapsing fertility rates sets the scene for one of LIFI26’s biggest conversations.

For the first time in human history, the global population is on course to decline by the end of this century. That is the starting point of a new film from Sky News, in which Sky’s economics and data editor Ed Conway sits down with the Financial Times’ chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch to work out what is going on.

The short answer is that nobody entirely knows. The longer answer is stranger and more interesting.

Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere, in rich and poor countries alike, and faster than the experts predicted. In more than two-thirds of the world’s countries, the average number of children per woman has dropped below the replacement rate of 2.1. Burn-Murdoch’s reporting includes one particularly startling miss: five years ago the UN forecast 350,000 births in South Korea for 2023. The real figure was 230,000. Even France, long held up as Europe’s fertility success story, is now seeing steep declines.

The film picks through the suspects. Unaffordable housing is one, with some research suggesting falling home ownership explains as much as half the fertility decline in certain rich countries since the 1990s. Smartphones and social isolation are another, with birth rates in country after country starting to slide markedly from the late 2000s, just as high-speed mobile connectivity arrived. Even car seats get a mention, as one of the small, compounding costs and frictions that modern parenthood stacks up.

Perhaps the most telling finding is what Burn-Murdoch calls the fertility gap. Most young people, in most countries, still say they want around two children. In South Korea, where most women now have none, the stated desire has not vanished. What has changed is everything in between: coupling up is declining, life is more expensive, and the runway to feeling ready keeps getting longer. People are not choosing childlessness so much as running out of road.

Not everyone buys every explanation. Critics have pointed out that fertility was falling long before the iPhone, and that correlation is not causation. Which is rather the point: this is a genuinely open question, with enormous consequences for economies, care systems and how societies function, and it deserves proper debate rather than a viral graph.

That debate is coming to Leeds this October. Are kids still part of the plan? at LIFI26 brings together Dr SJ Beard, Yousra Samir Imran and Betty Mukherjee, hosted by Laura Hamilton, to unpick the forces reshaping modern parenthood, from economics and technology to fertility science and personal choice.

The data says the world is having fewer children. The conversation about why, and what it means, is only just getting started.

Are kids still part of the plan? takes place on Saturday 10 October, 2pm to 3.30pm, in the Courtyard Theatre at Leeds Playhouse. Tickets are on sale now.