What Will the US Do When Young People Begin to Disappear?
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The U.S. faces a crisis that has yet to make itself widely known: Women are having fewer and fewer children with each passing year. Whereas in 2007 the U.S. averaged 2.12 births per woman, that number has continuously fallen ever since, decreasing in 2023 to reach another record low of 1.62 births per woman. That’s well, well below replacement levels.
The fertility crisis has yet to make a significant impact on the U.S. economy, but according to a report released this week by Pew, we are beginning to see the first effects of the crisis on state budgets.
Those effects obscure the trouble on the horizon because they seem positive. States are having to devote less of their budgets to education and children’s health care, as those costs are declining as fewer children are born.
But the good times are the calm before the storm. Next year, the first cohort of children born in this age of declining fertility will reach adulthood. What will follow soon thereafter will likely be a shrinking tax base as well as limited revenue growth. These problems “will only intensify over the next several years,” says the Pew report.
The report doesn’t say much about how severe these problems will be. But it does give us a taste of the panic that is beginning to hit some state capitols. A budget forecast in Montana released this year warned: “[A]nemic growth among the younger age cohorts in Montana is troublesome for the future of the prime working age population and by extension economic growth.” This will bring reduced income and payroll tax revenues at a time when health care costs for the elderly are increasing.
The Pew report analyzes the decline in fertility rates state by state. Troublingly, recent declines are particularly pronounced among red states that had previously bucked the trend of decline and maintained higher fertility rates, such as Wyoming, Utah, South Dakota, and Idaho. Nationally, the fertility rate in 2023 represented a 10.6 percent decline over the 2011-20 average. That is a formidable decline: It represents six fewer babies born per 1,000 women. And that’s just compared to the average of the most recent decade.
The report offers a number of explanations for this decline: a falling teen fertility rate, a decrease in Hispanic fertility rates, delayed childbearing, the growing costs of raising children, higher educational attainment among women, later marriage ages, student debt, and rising housing costs.
All of these explanations are true, but the real problem is a cultural sickness that stretches across national borders. We know it’s a sickness because its result, if unabated, will be civilization decline.
What caused this sudden cultural sickness that stretches across nations, without regard for their status on women’s “liberation,” their religiosity or lack thereof, entitlements, maternity leave, economic growth, or cost of living?
It is the economic race to hook people on online entertainment. Wikipedia writes of the advent of internet’s role in every aspect of daily life: “The rapid technical advances that would propel the Internet into its place as a social system, which has completely transformed the way humans interact with each other, took place during a relatively short period from around 2005 to 2010.” The fertility decline hit the U.S. in 2008. It has only accelerated as the ubiquity of online entertainment has grown and tech companies have developed entertainment that is more and more entertaining — or, in other words, more effective at distracting people from finding a spouse, alienating them from people in real life, and focusing them on only their own pleasure and entertainment.
Conversely, the birth rate of Amish people in the U.S. who do not use cell phones has actually increased over time — in a substantial way, from a fertility rate of roughly 5.5 children annually per 1,000 women in 2000–2004 to nearly 8 children annually per 1,000 women in 2020–2021. The fertility rate across the whole of the U.S. Amish population has remained steady for decades at about 6 children per woman, and any decline is negligible. This is according to a 2025 study in Demographic Research.
When people are totally sucked into spending an average of seven hours per day on online personal entertainment — a number that has been increasing for years — they are more likely to be constrained in individual, self-imposed bubbles and unable or unwilling to couple up. In fact, the decline in childbearing directly correlates, across borders, with a decline in marriage.
This theory that online entertainment has caused the fertility decline is the one put forward by Alice Evans, a sociologist at King’s College London. “We’re all retreating into this digital solitude,” she told the New York Times’ Ross Douthat this spring. “Effectively,” she said, “the tech is outcompeting personal interactions.” She listed streaming services, sports betting, pornography, social media, and video games as among the online personal entertainment that is causing people to enter into this digital solitude.
If widespread addiction to online entertainment is, in fact, the sickness that is keeping people from getting married and having children, what is the solution? What can Montana, with its “anemic growth,” do about the fact that its fertility rate is falling in accordance with the increased time people are spending on social media, porn, and video games?
The answer to this question will be nothing short of civilizationally defining, given that what lies at the end of lower and lower birth rates is collapse and erasement. Lower state tax revenues will be just the beginning of a state spirally toward nonexistence.
In her interview with Douthat, Evans suggested regulating technology in some way. She mentioned the increasing uptake of phone-free schools, but stated that this is “clearly not a sufficient solution” because “adults are also vulnerable to just getting sucked into all these things.” She also floated the idea of “massive tax incentives” for people who have children.
From our view today, it looks unlikely that vast numbers of people will be able to quit the tech addictions that keep them focused on their own pleasure to the detriment of building a culture and future. It seems more unlikely still that people will act politically to regulate the tech companies in order to keep them out of their lives.
The reality — barring a massive movement to significantly limit modern entertainment — will likely be people scrolling on their phones until they die off, while groups that have limited their technological use take over.
Today is “World Population Day,” a holiday made up by the U.N. to incite fear that we need to make women take up contraception so as to limit the population. In the face of the fertility crisis, the U.N. has simply rebranded the “holiday” as one concerned with ensuring people can “have the children they want.” Meanwhile, their civilizational suicide pact continues unabated.
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