Y'all know the global fertility rate is just real bad. No good news there for a long time.
We're all rightly concerned about the fertility rate, i.e., the rate at which the average woman is having children. That's a data point everyone can readily understand (and be freaked out by).
Yet as Nicholas Eberstadt explains at AEI, the total number of births is itself extremely alarming — to the point that we're approaching legitimate medieval levels of birth throughout much of the world:
Steep and prolonged fertility decline means that peak birth levels for most of the world's countries took place in the past — often well in the past. And for a growing number of countries, birth totals today now approximate levels witnessed literally centuries ago — in some cases, even before the Industrial Era.
It's true: We're approaching total births that we honestly haven't seen since the preindustrial age.
The fact that "peak birth levels" for much of the globe "took place in the past" should be instantly alarming to us — it shows that the crisis we're facing isn't something happening in the distant future but rather something confronting us now, in the present day.
As UN data show, peak births for countries that are currently facing sub-population replacement levels appear to have occurred roughly three decades ago, in the early 1990s:
Yet by some metrics the real decline extends even further back. As Eberstadt writes, "the overwhelming majority of humanity nowadays is celebrating birth totals first experienced 85 years earlier" even though there were just far fewer humans around back then.
In other words, with a global population of about 8.3 billion, our births have declined to the rates they were nearly a century ago, when there were only about 2.3 billion people on the planet.
Some particularly horrifying data points:
Japan's 2024 birth level was "significantly lower than the corresponding total for 1873 — over 150 years earlier;"
France "reported 639,000 births in 2023 — barely two thirds as many as in 1806" (which, as Eberstadt notes, was "the year Napoleon won the Battle of Jena");
Italy's 380,000 births in 2023, meanwhile, "was not only less than a third of the 1922 level, under Mussolini, a century earlier," but "was also less than half the total for 1862, over 160 years beforehand."
Really not good, in other words!
And as Eberstadt writes, the data have only gotten worse over just the last few years:
China's 2025 birth totals look like early Qing Dynasty levels; Japan's take us back to the first half of the Tokugawa shogunate.
In France, birth levels like today's would have been witnessed under Henri IV: roughly around the time of the Jamestown Colony in America.
As for Italy: today's birth levels may take us back to Leonardo and the Medicis.
"And remember," Eberstadt warns, "fertility levels around the world are still falling."
I don't think we want to see what the global order is going to look like if our modern 21st century civilization declines to population levels more suited to Jamestown.
Things looking real grim out there.
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