The Great Fertility Collapse (with Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde)

On this episode

About this episode

For the first time in human history, we're not having enough children to keep the world's population from falling. And fertility is collapsing fastest not in rich nations but in places like Colombia, Thailand, and Guatemala, upending decades of economic wisdom. Economist Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde tells EconTalk's Russ Roberts that falling fertility has accelerated sharply over the past decade and defies easy explanation. Declining religiosity, smartphones and social media, soaring housing costs, and changing gender norms are popular, but unconfirmed, theories. Fernandez-Villaverde offers his own speculative answer, that modern life makes a third child costly and childlessness easy, but…