As nations prosper (when citizens earn over $5,000 a year on average), their birth rates fall below replacement rate. Other elements of development, such as gender equality, education, and technology, also have a strong association with declining birth rates.
Fertility rates are falling much faster than dominant social narratives imply. For example, at its current fertility rate (0.78), there will be 5.9 great grandchildren for every South Korean alive today (the average fertility rate in the developed world is currently 1.56). Even regions that have historically supplemented collapsing birth rates in nations like the U.S. are themselves undergoing fertility collapse, with South America, Central America, and the Caribbean collectively falling below repopulation rate in 2019.
What are your goals?
The goal of the Pronatalist Foundation is to find a way for prosperity, gender equality, education, and technology to coexist with stable populations.
Population Ecology
If we view social ecosystems like ecological ecosystems, prosperity, gender equality, access to education, and technology (P.G.E.T.)—all welcome developments—act like pollutants that sterilize the social ecosystems in which they emerge (by lowering their birth rates to unsustainable levels). Because we would like to maintain and grow P.G.E.T, we must foster a diverse array of cultures that can survive despite the presence of these new environmental conditions.
Just as an ecologist's goal is not to maximize the number of any given species, the Pronatalist Foundation's goal is not a forever expanding human population. Rather, our goal is to help a maximally diverse array of cultures pass through the filter created by P.G.E.T. in order to protect and preserve the pluralistic cultural ecologies that have allowed our species to thrive.
Social Experimentation
If existing social structures can't motivate people to have kids, we must build new ones. To this end, we work with a variety of groups experimenting with new forms of communities, new ways of developing and reinforcing cultures, and novel approaches to education.
Reproductive Technology
In the last 50 years, average human sperm concentrations dropped by 51.6%, and total sperm counts dropped by 62.3%, similar declines in biological fertility can be seen wherever one looks.
We research potential drivers behind this problem while developing solutions and expanding access to them.
Policy Research
Most "obvious" pronatalist policy interventions, ranging from cash handouts to banned abortions and state-subsidized childcare, seem largely ineffective at combating fertility collapse. We work to find non-coercive policy interventions that genuinely and significantly impact fertility rates.
A Brief Overview of the Situation
This document contains both an overview of fertility collapse as well as its long term consequences and sources for the extent of the crisis. For more detailed analysis, see our recent book.