by David Runciman
Article in the London Review of Books, Vol.47, No.21, 20 November 2025
This article, published in the 20 November 2025 edition of the London Review of Books, reviews three books which, based on their titles, are about global depopulation, why the world needs more children, and the human empire on the edge of extinction. As someone who is old enough to have lived through several decades of global political policy in the 20th century, which argued unendingly that global overpopulation would destroy the planet, promoted universal contraceptive use and often coerced contraceptive use as well as sterilisation abuse, and prophesied doom if anyone had more than two children, this book review was completely unexpected.
“Its aim was to clarify that although global population growth is continuing into the 21st century, as predicted, this did not change the longer-term problems coming after that era ended. It gives the following example about Japan, of how and why this is happening: “In 1950, Japan had a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 4, which represents the average number of children a woman might expect to have in her lifetime. Continued over five generations, that would mean a ratio of 256 great-great grandchildren to every 16 great-great grandparents – in other words, each 100-year-old might have 16 direct descendants competing to look after them. Today, Japan’s TFR is approaching 1: one child per woman (or one per couple, half a child each). The pattern continued over five generations means that each solitary infant has as many as 16 great-great-grandparents vying for his or her attention. Within a century, the pyramid of human obligation has been turned on its head…
“What can make depopulation difficult to fathom is the different timescales on which it operates… In 1950 Luxembourg was the only country in the world with a TFR less than 2, which is the magic number above which human populations grow and beneath which they start to shrink… Today roughly half the countries in the world have a below-replacement TFR, including almost all of the richer nations and some of the poorer ones. In 1950 many countries had a TFR of 6 or higher, including South Korea. Today just about nowhere does., In South Korea the TFR is currently 0.75, which if maintained will result in a rapidly disappearing population. Some parts of Korean society have already begun to embrace this future. The ‘4B’ movement, which emerged on Twitter in the late 2010s, advocates for women to say ‘no’ four times over: no to dating, no to sex with men, no to marriage, no to childbirth.
“Yet this dramatic turnaround has happened in a world in which the overall population is rising and will continue to do so for decades to come. That is because even big shifts in population trends take a long time to make a global difference.”
SOURCE: Article in the London Review of Books, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n21/david-runciman/are-we-doomed. Review of the article by Marge Berer.