We’re stuck in a 2,000-year-old loop, repeating the same failed solutions with the same failed outcomes.
It’s been an interesting seven days for people who care about birth rates.
First, China’s State Council decreed that the government must offer greater support to families if more children are to be born. China currently has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates, about one birth per woman, well below the 2.1 replacement rate needed to maintain a stable population.
In January, it was announced that the country’s birth rate had fallen for the fourth consecutive year, reaching a record low as the population continues to shrink. The official birth rate fell 17 percent, from 9.54 million to 7.92 million, or 5.63 per 1,000 people, while the population fell by 3.39 million to 1.405 billion. China’s death rate—8.04 per 1,000 people—is the highest it’s been since 1968, in the third year of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which may have killed as many as eight million Chinese.
According to one demographer, Dr. Yi Fuxian, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, births in 2025 were “roughly the same level as in 1738, when China’s population was only about 100 million.”
Reuters reports that, at a meeting held on October 23, the State Council decided “the government should refine policies including those related to marriage, childbirth, child-rearing, and education, and optimize taxation, social security, and housing.”
The goal is to make China a “fertility-friendly society.”
The pledges, Reuters says, are a clear “sign that policymakers are concerned about the strain a shrinking and aging population could put on the country’s social insurance system and overall economic growth, which has been weighed down by weak domestic consumer demand.”
“Population is the foundational condition for economic and social development,” officials proclaimed.
The Chinese government has already attempted to make having children more affordable, introducing a nationwide childcare subsidy system and reducing preschool tuition fees. To make marriage more desirable, it relaxed a law that forced couples to marry in their place of residence. Three-and-a-half decades of anti-child conditioning, the fruits of the one-child policy, which only ended in 2015, have to be undone in the minds of ordinary Chinese. Many still remember the forced abortions and sterilizations.
Then came news that the U.S. is also experiencing a record decline in fertility. The general fertility rate—the number of births over the number of women of childbearing age—fell 1 percent from the previous record low in 2024 to 53.2 births per 1,000 women, or a birth rate of about 1.6 per woman, again well below the replacement rate, although still not as bad as China’s.
The U.S. teen birth rate, ages 15–19, dropped 7 percent. The rate fell 6 percent for women aged 20–24 and 4 percent for women aged 25–29. Only women aged 30 and over experienced an increase in births, and even then it was modest: 3 percent for women 30–34, 2 percent for 35–39, and 1 percent for 40–44.
Third and finally, a new scientific study showed that, far from increasing the birth rate, allowing women to work from home has the opposite effect. Demographers and social scientists have long believed that giving women more time to spend at home instead of being stuck in traffic or working late at the office would give couples more quality time together and reduce their stress—and more kids would naturally follow. Earlier comparative studies of multiple countries found that couples who work from home for at least one day a week have more children over their lifetimes than couples who don’t.
The pandemic, which drove an office exodus on an unprecedented scale, should have sparked a baby boom.
In reality, allowing significant numbers of women to work from home reduced annual birth rates among college-educated women, at the same time as increasing their employment levels and their earnings. Otherwise, the fertility rate didn’t budge an inch.
The study used data from close to 4 million American men and women aged 18 to 50 to reach its conclusions.
“Instead of increasing family size, greater access to remote work lowered birth rates. Between 2021 and 2024, each 15-point step up in a major’s remote-work score reduced annual births among college-educated women by 1.9 percent. The decline was driven entirely by married women, whose annual birth rates fell by about 2 percent, while birth rates for unmarried women and fertility rates for men showed no statistically significant change.
“At the same time, married women in remote-friendly fields stepped up their career commitments. For each 15-point increase in a major’s remote-work score, full-time employment among married women rose by 1.3 percent, and wage income among those with earnings climbed by 2.6 percent. Married women also increased their share of their couples’ combined income and became more likely to out-earn their husbands.”
By comparing pre- and post-pandemic data, the researchers were able to show that the move to full-time employment by women accounted for about half the decline in births. They debunked a number of theories for why remote work should increase the birth rate, including the theory that working from home allows men to share more of the parenting load, making it easier for mothers to have more children. Using housing data, they also showed that space was a key variable. In a house with three bedrooms or fewer, annual birth rates fell by more than 3 percent. In houses with four or more bedrooms, the rate stayed the same.
The implication, backed up by the data, is that sending women back to the office would actually increase birth rates. Fancy that.
Three big data points, all pointing towards the same worrying conclusion: The road to hell, by which I mean an aging, shrinking population, is paved with good intentions. Try as you might, you’re unlikely to make a meaningful difference, and in fact you’ll probably make things worse. That’s not a happy thought if you’re a social planner.
There’s something about fertility we just don’t seem to understand. I’ve been writing about it for years now with a particular focus on lifestyle factors like obesity, lack of exercise, and, in particular, exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals known as endocrine disruptors, which are a ubiquitous part of modern life because of plastics, pesticides, food additives, personal-care products, and industrial pollution.
I made endocrine disruptors the subject of my appearance at the first Natal Conference, held in Austin, Texas, by Kevin Dolan’s EXIT Group, a Mormon fraternity that was formed to create alternative networks and new approaches to some of the West’s most pressing issues, including population decline. Like many religious groups, the Mormons still seem to be good at having children, although not as good as they used to be. Their current birth rate is 2.42, above replacement, but it’s fallen in recent decades and continues to fall. In 1981, it was 3.31.
As a repeat guest at the second conference, in 2025, I was billed as something more like a provocateur or a disruptor, which was fine by me. I forget the exact term that was used, but I was one of the last speakers on the last day, and my speech was intended to stick in people’s minds. The organizers wanted me to say something you weren’t going to hear from any of the economists, social scientists, venture capitalists, podcasters, or “hipster eugenicists” (The Guardian) in attendance, most of whom presented an optimistic vision of a future where having children is made easier and cooler by a range of carefully targeted material interventions.
And so this is what I said.
Although there are material causes of fertility decline, there is clearly something that evades our grasp, something less physical, less tangible but no less real: call it a moral or spiritual thing if you want. Until we get a real sense of it, nothing we try to do will work and, in fact, may prove counterproductive.
There couldn’t be a better example of the failure of conservative pro-natalism, as it’s often called, than Viktor Orban’s Hungary, which for 15 years served as the poster child for an “illiberal” new way of doing politics without mass immigration to maintain the human churn. Despite much-touted measures like the abolition of income tax for Hungarian women with more than four children, Hungary saw only a very modest bounce in birth rates, and nobody can really be sure it wasn’t just the long recovery from the Financial Crash of 2008.
But then, exactly the same thing happened in the first century AD, when the Roman emperor Augustus tried to promote motherhood and penalize men and women for being unmarried. A hundred years after the great emperor’s leges Iuliae, the Roman historian Tacitus would complain of exactly the same problems and look bitterly across the Rhine to the ancient Germans. There, at least, Tacitus remarked, “childlessness has no rewards.”
One of the most daring reformulations of the infertility problem in recent years has come from the once-anonymous internet figure Bronze Age Pervert in his book Bronze Age Mindset. It’s worth quoting the relevant passage in full.
Chimp in state of nature never jerks off, but in captivity he does, what does this mean? In state of nature he’s too busy, to put plainly. He is concerned with mastering space: solving problem of life in and under trees, mastering what tools he can, mastering social relations in the jockeying for power and status. Deprived of this drive to development and self-increase he devolves to pointless masturbation, in captivity, where he senses he is in owned space and therefore the futility of all his efforts and all his actions. The onanism of modern society is connected with its supposed “hyper-sexualization” and its infertility. It’s not really hyper-sexualization, but the devolution of the spirit to the lassitude of a diffuse and weak sexuality.
Don’t be fooled by the apparent ridiculousness of the image or the internet patois. This is deeply profound.
First, what he says is true at the base level. Chimps really do “devolve to pointless masturbation” in captivity. Recent studies have even shown them manufacturing primitive sex toys from rocks, something they’ve never been known to do in the wild. More broadly, we know that confinement has deleterious effects on the health, especially reproductive health, of a wide variety of animals. Pandas, who must be coaxed by zookeepers through a range of ingenious means to have sex, are of course the most famous example of this.
The deeper point, though, is that maybe we’re chimps in a zoo as well. A great big open-air zoo with all sorts of very complicated entertainments and diversions—sportsball, international travel, elections, movies-on-demand, AI chatbots we think are conscious, 4K HD porn, and burgers delivered to your front door by a man on a little bike—but a zoo nonetheless.
The idea that societies can become like zoos or even prisons, and that the modern world may be a uniquely fiendish zoo-prison, isn’t a new one. In fact, most people today have probably felt that claustrophobia and sense of encroaching confinement, the walls closing in, in their daily lives and given voice to it. “I’m trapped”—and maybe you are.
Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, described modern man as uniquely engaged in a series of “surrogate activities” that at best simulate but never match the satisfaction of the real struggles of life. The anthropologist David Graeber said most people now work “bullshit jobs,” but Kaczynski’s point is broader: It’s all bullshit, your job and everything else besides.
Other captive situations and experiments present even more worrying parallels with our present situation. Most notably, there’s the so-called “mouse utopia” experiment, where mice were allowed to breed for generations in a specially constructed environment with complete freedom from want and danger. After a certain number of generations of blissful hedonism, there was an explosion of morbid symptoms. The mouse utopia became mouse hell on earth. The fertility rate collapsed, and the mice began displaying aberrant behaviors that look uncomfortably familiar today. A new class of mice, dubbed “the beautiful ones,” emerged and would spend all their time grooming themselves, losing all interest in anything else, including reproduction. As I type, young men across the Western world are hitting their cheekbones with hammers in an attempt to “looksmaxx” and “mogg” lesser men.
My point isn’t that the modern world must be dismantled brick by brick to the ground, but that we’ve undergone radical changes to the way we live in, human terms, the blink of an eye, and we haven’t taken proper stock of what has changed, why, or the effects those changes have had on human beings as the complex animals we are, the emphasis being as much on our animality as on what separates us and makes us unique from chimps and pandas and mice in a lab. Statements like “Young people don’t have enough money to buy a home” or “Perhaps if women didn’t have to commute to work they’d be less stressed and more inclined to have children” may have some truth to them, but a simple-minded insistence that technical solutions alone can address our predicament just won’t do. The Augustus approach becomes the Orban approach, and things just continue to get worse.
We’re stuck in a 2,000-year-old loop, repeating the same failed solutions with the same failed outcomes. If that doesn’t fit the famous Einsteinian definition of insanity, I’m not sure what does.
The world has been, in Max Weber’s famous phrase, disenchanted, and our only hope, as far as I can see, will be to weave some fresh magic into our lives. I’m sorry I can’t be more precise than that.
Raw Egg Nationalist is Dr. Charles Cornish-Dale, an Oxford- and Cambridge-educated historian and anthropologist. He has a large social media following, is a bestselling author, has appeared on national television, and has influenced debates on health, fitness, politics, and culture. His latest book is 'The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity.'
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/10/28/the-road-to-hell-is-there-really-a-material-solution-to-birth-rate-decline/
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