The world is running out of children, but there's a path forward

Birthrates are cratering worldwide among many developing countries, which lead to potentially devastating consequences.

Seth D. Kaplan, an expert on fragile societies and states, is a lecturer at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time (Little, Brown Spark 2023); and a member of the Board of Advisers for the Prohuman Foundation.

This kind of high fertility community — and the culture of neighborliness it engenders — used to be the norm everywhere. But today, my neighborhood just north of Washington, D.C., stands out as highly countercultural — an island of fertility in an ever-widening sea of infertility sweeping the world. This natalism isn’t a product of happenstance. It’s largely the result of countercultural norms that governments concerned about low birthrates have the power to foster.