🌍About Our Demographic Future

2026/07/08

Demographers have the habit of looking at current data, recognise trends, and then forecast that they will continue forever. But history has the habit of not caring about what a trend suggests and turn everything backwards or upside down on a dime, leaving researchers to scramble for explanations and come up with new predictions.

From these, we get projections that by 2100 the EU’s population will decline by 12% (Si apre in una nuova finestra), growing popular fears that migrants will “outbreed” us, the collapse of the pension system, and even that somehow Europe will eventually become Muslim majority.

What demographers, or the way they present data, or rather how that data is being interpreted seem not to consider is the enormous potential of technological and consequently societal transformation AI, longevity and health research, and automation can and will likely trigger.

Recent History of Demographic Perceptions

Western demographic decline has become a mainstream topic in the past years. Many loudly project that by 2100 Europe and the world will be this and that. I find it is a good way to think about time in the future or past by imagining how they are relative to other times. 

For example, the Rolling Stones was formed in 1962 (Si apre in una nuova finestra), 64 years ago. Only 17 years after World War II, or from our perspective as close to it as we are to the great financial crisis. Its formation was also two decades closer to World War I than it is to today. In fact, the Rolling Stones founding year is as close to today as to the death of Otto von Bismarck, a leader from an entirely different world.

2100 is 74 years in the future. Let’s see how European demographics looked like 74 years in the past, in 1952.

(Si apre in una nuova finestra)

Europe was just recovering from the most devastating war the world has ever seen, which cost the lives of more than 44 million people (Si apre in una nuova finestra) on the continent alone. This wasn’t the only demographic shock of the first half of the 21st century, as just two decades before Europe lost around 15 million people (Si apre in una nuova finestra) and countless more human potential (Si apre in una nuova finestra) in The Great War, as these overwhelmingly young men could never have children.

Interestingly, fears of population decline did not start after the World Wars, but even earlier in the 19th century. As it is often the case in European history, the French were the first to the party. The country’s population started stagnating after the French Revolution around 1800. In the following decades German and British population skyrocketed, which caused understandable geopolitical anxieties in Paris. This played a large part in France losing its near hegemonic status in Europe and eventually pushing it into the Entente Cordiale with the UK.

By the early 1900s, Brits and Germans also started worrying as their own urban birth rates began to dip, fearing they would eventually run out of soldiers and factory workers. Internally they were nervous that the decline was happening in the “elite”, while the lower classes still had a high fertility rate. Externally, just like the French feared the German population boom in the east, Germans anxiously watched the Slavic population boom east of them, and went through the same geopolitical panic the French did in the previous century.

It’s ironic how today Eastern European countries experience the highest population decline on the continent, while Western European charts and pyramids look much more healthy in comparison.

While European elites spent the first decades of the 20th century worrying that their populations were decaying and shrinking, in hindsight they were living through the greatest era of absolute population growth and health improvements in European history. Thanks to the rapid expansion of public sanitation, clean drinking water, and breakthroughs in modern immunology, life expectancy was surging.

(Si apre in una nuova finestra)

This was the atmosphere Europe entered into two World Wars and decimated its own population.

Post-War Europe

After World War II the baby boom caught European demographers completely off guard. Having spent the interwar period worrying about depopulation, the sudden and sustained surge in fertility during the 1950s blew up decades of established demographic theory.

Before the boom, the consensus among European social scientists was that the continent had entered an irreversible demographic decline. In 1944, a landmark study by prominent demographers (Si apre in una nuova finestra) projected that the lifestyle aspirations of the urban, affluent classes were spreading to rural and poorer populations across Europe. They assumed this shift would drive fertility down to unprecedentedly low levels.

Instead, the 1950s brought a birth quake. Demographers initially dismissed this as a temporary post-war glitch, a mere catch-up period for marriages and births delayed by conflict. Interestingly this assumption survived until this day, and most people treat it as the ultimate cause of the whole phenomenon. However, as the high fertility rates sustained deep into the 1950s and early 1960s, the academic community had to come up with new explanations. 

By the early 1960s, mainstream European demography pivoted from depopulation panic to a new, hyper-optimistic dogma. They adjusted their models based on a few core assumptions that later - again - turned out to be entirely wrong. Researchers of the time identified a strong correlation between post-war economic growth and rising birth rates. They presented the theory that fertility was inherently procyclical, meaning that as long as the economy grew, birth rates would remain high.

The baby boom in Europe - especially in Western countries - was driven by a surge in marriage rates, a dropping age of first marriage, and a sharp decline in lifetime childlessness. Demographers assumed this cultural shift toward early, near-universal marriage was a permanent structural feature of the modern European family.

Because their models linked population growth to economic abundance, they presumed the trend would continue for generations. They completely failed to foresee that the very factors driving economic growth, such as the massive expansion of women's higher education and workforce participation, would eventually cause a sharp reversal in fertility.

Just as demographers in the early 1960s finalised their consensus that birth rates would stay permanently elevated due to economic progress, the Second Demographic Transition arrived.

By the mid-1960s and early 1970s, the arrival of the contraceptive pill, changing social values regarding the traditional nuclear family, and structural shifts in the labour market caused European fertility rates to fall below the replacement threshold. The end of the baby boom was ultimately just as unexpected to the demographic establishment as its beginning.

So, in summary demographers went from fearing declining birth rates and demographic collapse for nearly half a decade, and then the baby boom happened, which led them to suppose that the new trend will carry on forever. Western European countries spent the early decades of the 20th century panicking about population decline, and yet two devastating world wars and more than 100 years later all of these countries have a higher population today than back then.

Reality has the habit of laughing in everyone's face and doing whatever it wants, forcing people to come up with new models and explanations why things happened the way they did. Could we be in a similar situation right now? Since by now nearly everyone is aware and worried about demographic decline, I feel the need to present my contrarian argument on it.

My Oversimplified Take on Declining Birth Rates

For many people today it simply does not make sense to raise kids. Sure, if that is someone’s personal aspiration, then that is what they will do. But people are not forced to do it anymore by external circumstances besides societal and family pressures. 

In most of history having kids was not only a desire, but an essential necessity. People needed someone to take care of them after getting old, and children served as a literal retirement fund. If someone didn’t have them, they starved when they could no longer work the fields.

More immediately and crucially, they provided the household with sweet cheap child labour. As early as age 5, a kid could already be made to work on the farm, or whatever profession the family was working in. They directly contributed financially to the family. Later they could help in raising the next kid, the next pair of working hands.

Today the situation couldn’t be more different. The state took over elderly care with the pension system, and kids are more of an investment or burden on many people’s preferred lifestyle than cheap labour that makes economic sense. The modern welfare state socialised the benefit of children while personalising the costs: the parents pay to raise the taxpayers of the future who will then pay everyone’s pensions.

Having kids today is super expensive, and for many it is just not worth it. From a cold economics perspective, for the vast majority of human history children were “producer goods”. By today they turned into “consumer goods”, and for many increasingly into luxury ones. Previously if someone was hesitant to have them they were pushed to it by their economic realities, while today these forces actively discourage them to do so.

As an added pressure, the recent inflation of housing costs largely caused by the financialization of housing (Si apre in una nuova finestra) in major European and Western cities combined with weak initial labour markets for young adults means that achieving the baseline stability required to feel "ready" for children takes a decade longer than it did for previous generations. By that point even the people who wanted several kids often have to settle to have just one or two due to biological factors alone.

Can Things Shift Again?

Many raise the alarms of an increasingly less distant future where AI, robotics and automation are slowly but surely coming for our jobs and personal productivity. States will have to implement UBI - or something similar - to keep people surviving and the economy functioning.

In a world where states have full control of the finances of their population, it is expected that political voices will start to progressively call for the stop of population decline, thus pushing the state more and more to take over the burden of raising a kid, and eventually incentivising having kids.

Similarly, in a world where billions of humans suddenly find themselves without work, endless extra time, and consequently without a purpose, many might look for a sense of meaning in raising a child. Humans need a purpose to live, that is what makes us go forward.

Another futuristic-looking topic that gains more and more traction, and more importantly billions of dollars in capital (Si apre in una nuova finestra) is longevity science. Researchers and adherents of the field believe that eventually death can be avoided by reversing ageing. But even the more conservative voices agree that lifespan can be significantly expanded, and with continuous improvements in medicine and healthcare the healthy years can be widened as well.

The data and our current reality supports their claims.

Let’s get back to The Rolling Stones.

(Si apre in una nuova finestra)

Their members are pushing into their 80s and still touring (although recently cancelled their 2026 tour), and about to release a new studio album in less than 2 days. But we don’t have to go into music to see this trend playing out. There is something we all cannot escape, Donald Trump. He is the opposite of the archetype of a healthy person, and yet at the age of 80 he is still a highly active president of the United States, taking over the position from Joe Biden, who was 82 at the time.

These are all highly unusual, and were unheard of before. Sure, all of these people are the VIPs of the VIPs and they have access to the best healthcare and medicine money can buy. But what is only accessible to them today will most certainly be available for an increasingly larger group of people.

But these are cherry-picked examples, let’s look at the data. Let’s take Italy, a European longevity powerhouse.

(Si apre in una nuova finestra)

The country’s life expectancy increased from 30 in 1870 to 83 in 2020. That is 53 extra years in 150 years, or about an extra 4.24 month of life expectancy every single year.

I hear you educated reader say, hey! That is again cherry-picked data from a high achiever country, counted from a time when 40% of children didn’t live until the age of 5! We already “solved” child mortality, so this rate of increase cannot happen anymore in the future!

First of all, the data is the data, we can only work with what we have. Second of all, you are absolutely right.

Let’s look at Europe as a whole, starting from a year when child mortality was already largely a thing of the past.

(Si apre in una nuova finestra)

The continent’s life expectancy rose from 62.5 in 1950 to 79.5 in 2024. That is 17 extra years in 74 years, or 2.76 extra months per year.

For Europe to reach Italy’s current level, it would take less than 16 years if this trend continues. And why wouldn’t it continue? If Italy, Spain Switzerland, Japan, South Korea and Australia (Si apre in una nuova finestra) can reach similar numbers today, what stops Europe as a whole to catch up in 16 years?

But that’s not all. The maximum age is simultaneously being pushed well over 100. The current record holder is an English lady called Ethel Caterham (Si apre in una nuova finestra), who is 116 years old today.

(Si apre in una nuova finestra)

Similarly, the number of worldwide centenarians is booming and shows no signs of decline.

Summary

The trends are clear. People live longer and healthier lives than ever before. If scientific progress continues to advance - and there is little reason why it wouldn’t, apart from a black swan worldwide catastrophe -, we are yet to find out what is the longest and healthiest a human can live.

Radical life extension alone would change our demographic predictions, and ease previous fears about depopulation and the collapse of the pension system. Add other related breakthroughs in AI, robotics and automation, I believe that in the coming decades overpopulation is more likely to return as a collective societal anxiety than we are to enter a population death loop.

Weekly Map

(Si apre in una nuova finestra)

Recommended Reading: