Die Fruchtbarkeitsraten – die die durchschnittliche Anzahl der Kinder pro Frau messen – sind weltweit gesunken. Seit 1950 haben sich die Geburtenraten weltweit halbiert, von fast 5 Kindern pro Frau auf 2,2.
Infolgedessen hat sich das globale Bevölkerungswachstum dramatisch verlangsamt, und es wird erwartet, dass die Bevölkerung vieler Länder bis zum Ende des Jahrhunderts zurückgehen wird.
Dies liegt daran, dass die Geburtenraten in vielen Ländern unter das „Ersatzniveau“ gesunken sind. Dies ist die Ebene, auf der sich eine Population von einer Generation zur nächsten erneuert. Sie wird im Allgemeinen als eine Rate von 2,1 Kindern pro Frau definiert.
Die Karte zeigt, welche Länder im Jahr 2025 Fruchtbarkeitsraten über und unter diesem Niveau hatten. Dies basiert auf Prognosen der UN World Population Prospects.
Von ourworldindata
16 Kommentare
**Data source:** [UN World Population Prospects](https://population.un.org/wpp/downloads)
**Tools used:** initial plotting with OWID-Grapher; finishing in Figma
Why don’t we just move people from the aquamarine areas to the orange areas? Are they stupid?
Poor billionaires, where will they get their workers from?!
Nothing is going to get fixed until they stop calling it fertility rates (fair enough when there was no reliabke contraception) and start calling it birth rate. When we could choose how many children to have, we finally learned that less was more.
Correlation with Islamic majority countries .. ?
I know this is bad for the economy, and that elderly rely on a large pool of young people to keep society going, but I can’t help but feel a lower world population could be good for a lot of things like pollution and excessive resource extraction.
sure but won’t the infant mortality rates in these areas impact this? seems incomplete.
There is no single driver to this demographic collapse, as this is happening in rich and poor countries alike. It is happening in countries with massive social-welfare safety nets and subsidies and in countries with none of those. It is happening in secular countries and in highly religious countries alike. It is happening in countries with harsh working conditions and in countries that provide generous vacations and strict laws against overtime work.
Income inequality does not seem like a good explanation either. Brazil ranks #178 on the equality index, Chile ranks at #174. They both have the same fertility rate as Switzerland and Australia, which rank at #22 and #23 respectively on the income equality scale. Also, Jamaica, Thailand, Mauritius, and the United Arab Emirates have lower fertility rates than Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands or Canada.
Does not seem to be a cost of living issue either, as e[ven families making north of $700K/year are having fewer children.](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F5wy659956rsc1.png)
Scandinavian countries, countries like Singapore, Japan and South Korea have invested massive amounts of money trying to revert birthrates declines with not much to show for it. Singapore for example virtually guarantees affordable housing for all of its citizens, plus free schooling, affordable medical care, etc… and still has one of the lowest birthrates in the planet. No country has yet figured out how to reverse the trend, but many are trying.
This is not an issue with capitalism either. Non-market economies like Cuba and North Korea are facing the same crisis.
[Cuba to Women: Please Have More Babies](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/cuba-women-please-have-more-babies-n236406)
[Video Shows Kim Jong Un Crying Over North Korea’s Lack of Babies](https://www.newsweek.com/north-korea-kim-jong-un-cries-while-urging-mothers-have-more-children-1849871)
Also, the issue here is no wanting more people on Earth to sustain „infinite growth“. It is not that we need to be 10 billion, 20 billion people in order to prosper. We don’t. Maybe we would be fine if we reverted back to say…3 billion people globally. The problem we are facing is the pace of the decline. When birthrates fall off a cliff, as we are seeing now, you end up with a massively large old population that needs to be supported by an ever declining young population. We don’t know how to run a society with more retirees than working people, or with more sickly people than healthy ones. In the entire history of humanity, this scenario has never happened.
[Video: Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell“ Germany is Over](https://youtu.be/n-gYFcVx-8Y?si=iu9VynALaYaUr4XC)
[Video: Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell „South Korea is Over“](https://youtu.be/Ufmu1WD2TSk?si=xuQg4wL0BJ21RAYS)
This implies that the sole reason to have children is to replace a population, when in reality pretty much nobody is thinking about that as the main reason to have them. At an extremely basic level, plenty of families in Africa and Asia have children either due to cultural issues around women’s rights, lack of access to contraception or because a larger family guarantees a larger agricultural workforce for smallholders and for elderly family members later in life. This is always a safer option for many families up to the point of extreme famine, which is much less widespread than assumed. In places where high child mortality is a current reality or a generational memory, six children might mean five or even four at least get to adulthood. It has changed quickly but this was a common problem into the twentieth century for many of the places that now have low birthrates.
Crazy how penis size affects fertility rates if you overlay both maps.
https://preview.redd.it/2uesn3wsbozg1.png?width=998&format=png&auto=webp&s=4c78a76f709f869dfe999452c2da8df3b4994a23
If AI automation is as good as the companies are saying it will be do we need it to be above replacement level?
Yves Smith had a [thing](https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/05/the-fertility-panic-is-a-racist-sexist-tool-to-push-more-austerity.html) about this yesterday. We also had another [chart](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1p6tjd7/total_fertility_rates_by_country/) about this recently. In the linked comment I pointed out that UN data is bad or just flat out fabricated. I would like to know what you think of this chart? My spin is that this type of chart with the over/under on replacement is not adequately explaining the dramatic difference between 0.8 and 1.8. Both are bad but 0.8 is apocalyptic. The Yves Smith thing above kind of trivializes the problem.
I have a tangent that maybe needs a separate post. This issue of population decline is distressing to policy makes (maybe not to most young people). One solution that is being discussed in the halls of power is turning back the clock on aging. This is David Sinclair talking about life extension:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMYoiHSYgWw
He plans to empty out the nursing homes and put old people to work (doing what exactly?). Combined with [other trends](https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/05/understanding-the-rise-in-ceo-age.html) in society this would lock in the current economic and social system for generations. The boomers would be in charge of the world for another hundred years.
Sinclair has an impeccable pedigree but it is important to realize that he is selling pills and the actual on the ground track record of those pills hasn’t worked out yet. Even so it is a useful thought exercise to game out what the world would look like in 50 or 100 years.
Now juxtapose child mortality rates
The only reason people are obsessed with this is because its all about making money.
Investors don’t like shrinking markets.
Don’t worry guys I got this
Whats going on in tunisia?