Can the global economy handle a world with fewer kids?

Consider This from NPR

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🗓️ 2 January 2026

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

Ashley and Nick Evancho say raising their young daughter, Sophia, is one of the most joyous things they've ever done. But the Evanchos also made a decision that's increasingly common for families in the U.S. and around the world: one is enough. The trend is leading to populations that are dramatically older, and beginning to shrink, in many of the world's biggest economies.

Experts say a rapidly aging and gradually shrinking population in the world's wealthiest countries could force sweeping changes in people's lives, causing many to work longer before retirement, making it harder for business owners to find employees and destabilizing eldercare and health insurance programs.

This story is part of NPR's Population Shift series.

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This episode was produced by Paige Waterhouse and Connor Donevan, with audio engineering by Jimmy Keeley. It was edited by Andrea de Leon and Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Spend through NPR's archives, and you'll find a whole bunch of stories that are variations on a theme.
0:06.1	Birth rates in the European Union are so low that the population of the continent is declining.
0:11.8	Japan's birth rate has plummeted. Unless things change, the population soon will start shrinking.
0:16.8	It's a picturesque island in the middle of Casco Bay, a 90-minute boat ride from the coast, and its population is shrinking.
0:23.6	Whether it's a continent or a country or an island off the coast of Maine, lots of places have faced the same question.
0:30.6	What happens when the population goes down?
0:34.9	There are different reasons for the declines.
0:38.2	In China, it was decades of a government-enforced one-child policy.
0:43.0	In 2015, a year before that policy was canceled,
0:46.7	a village Communist Party secretary named Chen Jeru told NPR about how he used to have to be on the lookout for pregnant women.
0:54.4	— — —pong a dog — to put their job job — to get out —
0:59.2	Having a second child wasn't allowed, so we had to work on them and persuade them to have an abortion.
1:04.6	At the time, our work as a village cadre revolved around women's big bellies.
1:09.0	Russia's population started to shrink in the 2010s,
1:12.1	a delayed effect of fewer people choosing to have kids
1:15.1	in the turmoil that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
1:18.8	Guyanae Sufarova put it this way to NPR back then.
1:21.8	The number of potential mothers is not big,
1:26.3	so we can't expect the growth of the number of birth in the future.
1:33.6	For all of these places, an aging, shrinking population means big economic challenges, and
1:40.1	the phenomenon has spread. Consider this.
1:44.9	People around the world are having fewer children.
	...

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