Links in Progress: All the single people
And how China will lose 51 million people in 10 years
In case you missed it, Issue 17 of Works in Progress is out! Check out our newsletter summarising the new issue and everything else we’ve been up to.
‘Links in Progress’ newsletters are semi-regular roundups of interesting stuff that's happening in topics that we care about. In this one, Boom’s Phoebe Arslanagić-Little reviews the most important things happening in the world of pronatalism and family policy. You can opt out of Links in Progress here.
1. China’s population will shrink by 51 million people by 2035, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts predict (clip). That’s more than the population of Canada. 2035 is also the year that China’s main state pension fund is predicted to run out of money.
2. Chinese President Xi Jinping sets out his plan to deal with China’s demographic challenges (in Chinese, here is a summary translation). This comes after a new directive (in Chinese) from China’s State Council outlined 13 policies to make China more family-friendly, including better maternity leave and childcare.
3. Half of US counties have lost population between 2010 and 2020 – because of falling birth rates, rather than changes in net outward migration, this new working paper finds.
4. Official forecasts of what America’s social security will cost are being made on the assumption that US birth rates will increase to 1.9 children per woman by 2040. This would be a return to 2011 fertility levels. The OASDI Trustees Board is the statutory body overseeing the financial integrity of America’s Social Security trust funds.
5. Telenovelas may have helped create a habit of having smaller families in Brazil. Telenovelas – TV soap operas – often depict small families, in part because it makes the plot more manageable for showrunners and writers. This paper found that the more Brazilian women were exposed to telenovelas, the fewer children they had.
6. A feel-good watch for over the holidays. Check out the trailer for JOY – The Birth of IVF, a new film starring Bill Nighy and James Norton, about the scientists who developed IVF.
7. Can lack of access to contraception explain high fertility in sub-Saharan Africa? Perhaps not. This 2024 working paper finds that providing vouchers covering 100% of the cost of contraception to 14,000 households in Burkina Faso for 3 years did not reduce the number of children being born or drive take-up of modern contraceptives.
8. Missing cousins. This paper projects that a 65 year old woman living in South America or the Caribbean in 1950 could have expected to have 56 living relatives in her extended family (great grandparents, grandparents, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and first cousins), but only 18 such relatives in 2095.
9. Farewell to the Highlands – Scotland will start depopulating in under a decade. Scotland’s birth rate is 1.28, closing in on Japan’s 1.2. The Scottish Government’s action plan focuses on how to help rapidly depopulating parts of Scotland cope with the draining of their communities.
10. Better local institutions might make it easier for mothers to balance career and parenthood. A new study looking at European regions finds a one percent improvement in local institutional quality – using the European Quality of Government Index which includes factors like quality of public services – correlates with an eight percent increase in local fertility rates.
11. Are smaller families driving a stronger preference for sons over daughters in India? Northern Indian respondents’ expressed desire for at least one son, particularly an eldest son, increases as hypothetical family size decreases.
12. Is the rise in singles a major factor driving global birth decline? So argues social scientist Alice Evans. In the EU, twenty percent of men aged 25-54 live alone and eleven percent of women. Sweden leads the pack: fifty percent of all Swedish households consist of single people.
13. Finally, a reminder that anti-natalist sentiment is no modern phenomenon. Lyric poet Theognis of Megara writes that it is better never to have been born, in approximately 600BC:
“Not to be born is the best of all things for those who live on earth, and not to gaze on the radiance of the keen-burning sun. Once born, however, it is best to pass with all possible speed through Hades' gates and to lie beneath a great heap of earth.”
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