In November 2022, the world’s population reached 8 billion people. At the same time, two thirds of people on the planet already lived in places where fertility rates had fallen below the so-called “replacement level” of 2.1 births per woman. 

The big demographic transition — the shift from higher to lower mortality and fertility — is happening everywhere, but in some parts of the world it has set in earlier than in others.

This explains why there can be, simultaneously, concerns about both “too many” people and “too few” people.   

Anxieties about “too few” people are particularly widespread in Eastern Europe, where low fertility rates go hand-in-hand with high levels of outmigration. Population numbers have been shrinking as a result, in some cases by more than 25 per cent since the early 1990s.

Just as high fertility rates are often seen as catastrophic for the planet, alarmists see impending doom and civilizational collapse in the low fertility rates now common across most high and middle-income countries.